Why Are People Getting Poop Transplants?

Curiosity Weekly

Warner Bros. Discovery

Science

4.6 • 963 Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2026

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It might sound like a wacky treatment, but recently, the fecal microbiota transplant has emerged as an effective way to help reshape our gut microbiomes. There are a lot of ideas on how to use this emerging therapy, so to help us sort through the misinformation, we are joined by author and general surgeon, Dr. James Kinross. Before that, Sam digs into a bizarre question: why do humans have chins? And later, a new study reveals how heroic beavers are when it comes to combatting climate change.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What's up, everyone? Sam here. You know the saying that if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Okay, well, here's a similar one. If a podcast hits the airwaves but doesn't get rated or reviewed, does it make an impact? While you ponder that over, be sure to let us know what you think of the show on your favorite podcast app and send it along to your
0:20.9	friends it really helps us out behind the scenes thanks poop stool feces excrement whatever you call it
0:34.1	it often falls under the umbrella term of human waste.
0:40.6	But what if this stuff we just flush away isn't meant to be wasted?
0:42.7	What if it's actually useful?
0:45.5	Let me introduce you to the fecal transplant,
0:51.2	a buzzy treatment for certain infections that may even have the ability to treat other inflammatory conditions too.
0:54.7	To shed some light on what we can expect from this unique treatment,
1:00.5	I'll chat with Dr. James Kinross, author of the book Dark Matter, the new science of the gut microbiome.
1:05.5	Before then, I'll look into a question that you didn't know you wanted to know the answer to. Trust me.
1:12.0	Why the humans have chins? Then, we'll explore a new study about the effects of fever dams on climate change.
1:19.5	I'm Dr. Samantha Amin and welcome to Curiosity Weekly. Let's get started. Would you believe it if I told you the human chin has been a defining feature of our species? It's true. No other animals have
1:26.1	chins like us, not even our closest primate relatives,
1:29.1	the chimpanzee. Though they have a lower jaw, technically monkeys don't have chins either.
1:34.6	Their jaw bones slopes down and back from their teeth. But humans, ours, is this bony,
1:40.4	forward protrusion. But why exactly do we have one? Is it a functional adaptation for chewing,
1:46.3	a signal for finding a mate, or simply an evolutionary accident? A study published in Plus One
1:52.1	offers a compelling new answer, that the human chin is likely a spandrel, an evolutionary
1:57.3	byproduct rather than a direct adaptation. Researchers compared measurements of the skulls of 532 adult hominoid specimens, including
2:06.4	chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans to determine why us humans have chins.
2:12.7	They looked into three possible explanations.
2:15.7	The first idea was that the chin appeared purely by random chance over millions of years.
	...

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