The bottom line:
When you flush the toilet, there is an invisible aerosolized plume that spews any pathogen residing in the bowl into the air. While it is theoretically possible to become infected, more so when someone with a highly contagious disease has previously used the toilet, it is unlikely in most cases.
The study evaluates the effectiveness of the Brief Observation of Social Communication Change (BOSCC) as a standardized measure for assessing social communication skills across different intervention models for children with autism. Findings suggest that BOSCC can effectively measure changes in broad social communication abilities, allowing for better comparison across various intervention studies.
The site, known as Karahan Tepe, features stone structures aligned with celestial events like solstices and equinoxes, suggesting its use as a solar calendar.
How do you think this technique could change our understanding of neurological disorders and personalized medicine? What ethical considerations should we keep in mind as this research progresses?
What do you think are the biggest challenges and potential breakthroughs in using CRISPR for epigenetic editing? Could this approach revolutionize treatment for other genetic disorders as well?
This study found that the microbiome composition varies based on the time of sampling. How do you think this variability might affect the reproducibility of microbiome research? What are some practical ways researchers could standardize sampling times to improve consistency across different studies?
The food available to the microbiome varies during the day, according to the feeding schedule and to the kind of food that is provided to the mice.
Because the generation time of the bacteria is very short, e.g. fractions of an hour, it is normal for the quantities of each kind of bacteria to vary during the day, following the fluctuations in the concentrations of various nutrients in the intestine.
For a constant microbiome composition, one would have to feed the mice with exactly the same food at the same hours each day, and sample the microbiome also at fixed hours that are the same each day.
This was obvious to any statistician working in the area, as the same thing happens with gene expression in virtually any tissue. There are also seasonality effects in gene expression, and even in microbiomes: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aan4834
Accounting for these covariates is important. But with larger sample sizes, they might cancel out anyway. IMHO, larger studies will be reproducible. There are other much more serious technical issues.
