Summary
The human gut is shaped by environmental factors, producing distinct microbial communities. Indigenous individuals practicing traditional lifestyles often harbor more diverse microbiota, with taxa often absent in industrialized people. However, little engagement has occurred with American Indian communities in North America who experienced forced relocation and dietary programs during colonization. Here, shotgun metagenomics profiled the gut microbiome of people from a Northern Plains tribe (NPT) reservation in comparison to 12 global populations engaged in traditional, agrarian, or industrialized lifestyles. Analysis of the 532 samples revealed that the NPT microbiota exhibited greater bacterial and archaeal diversity than industrialized populations but reduced diversity compared to global traditional and agrarian populations. Relative to the general United States population, NPT microbiomes encoded more virulence factor and microbial defense genes and fewer CAZyme-encoding genes. These findings suggest that the NPT gut microbiome is in transition between lifestyles associated with global Indigenous and industrialized populations.

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Here, we profiled the gut microbiome of individuals from a Northern Plains tribe (NPT) reservation community. Comparison to 12 different global populations found that NPT individuals had a distinct microbial signature from other traditional, agrarian, and industrialized populations. NPT individuals harbored more microbial taxa than industrialized populations, with a greater representation of more rare phyla and species, but less diverse and fewer taxa than traditional and agrarian populations. Many classical “pathobionts” were more prevalent among NPT microbiota when compared to the United States (US) general population, despite individuals being healthy adults. Yet, the US general population microbiome encoded higher frequencies of CAZymes, which are typically associated with Indigenous populations, than in NPT microbiomes. This contributes to a unique NPT microbiome relative to non-Indigenous people in the US, which may limit generalizations of “healthy” and “diseased” microbiomes determined for majority of populations to other groups in the same geographic region and provides additional insight into microbial resilience in the gut despite the influence of industrialization.

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This work was built on a decades-long relationship between the authors and the participating community. Importantly, the corresponding author was invited to initiate this work at the request of entities within the community and performed all sample collection, sample processing, and data analysis in partnership with individuals on site, including training individuals from our partner community in approaches used here.

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Discussion
The gut microbiota of humans is influenced by multiple factors of host physiology, lifestyle, and the environment.52,53,54,55 People in the NPT are uniquely situated through their continued practice of traditional lifeways combined with the adoption of certain aspects of large-scale agrarian and industrialized life that distinguishes them from the broader US population and over half of the global population that reside primarily in urban settings and engage exclusively in industrialized lifestyles. Taxonomic profiling revealed bacterial and archaeal compositions of NPT people reside between populations with industrialized and non-industrialized lifestyles. In general, the NPT population had less diverse gut microbiota than traditional and agrarian populations. Yet, the NPT microbiota were composed of more taxa and greater microbial diversity than the surrounding US general population and other industrialized populations for some taxonomical comparisons. Greater microbial diversity compared to the US general population did not necessarily result in a detectable level of more gene diversity. Microbes found in the US general population encoded higher numbers of CAZymes relative to NPT individuals but had a reduced abundance of defense mechanisms for viral and microbial competitors. Thus, the gut microbiota identified in NPT people are distinct from that in the other global populations analyzed here and may result from a combination of environmental and lifestyle factors that are common to reservation communities in North America.

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It is unclear what factors are leading to this mosaic state, but we speculate that patterns of colonization that affect dietary patterns, environmental exposures, and place-based cultural practices likely play a role.19,35,58 For example, harvesting traditional foods like prairie turnips and fish is still practiced by many individuals, but agricultural and processed foods sold in gas stations, grocery stores, and through federal food programs dominate the diets of many individuals.59
Compared to industrialized populations, we observed a higher prevalence of classical pathogens and pathobionts among the gut microbiota of NPT individuals. It is important to note that definitions of pathogenic potential for many microbes are centered within industrialized contexts that often fail to acknowledge that the absence of these species may negatively impact health.

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In conclusion, the NPT have a distinct microbial signature in the gut compared to global traditional, agrarian, and industrialized populations that suggests a transitional state between a non-industrialized and industrialized state. Associations between environmental exposures common to reservation communities in the Northern Plains and specific gene signatures suggest that microbiota of Indigenous people may be substantially shaped by their surroundings that could also promote greater microbial diversity. Lastly, we would like to highlight the importance of working alongside of community members in production of biological datasets to address questions of interest and importance in the partner community. Strong ethical research relationships improve the contextualized understanding of results through discussion and reinforce data sovereignty.

The post Plains tribe’s gut genes are half indigenous, half industrialized. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

In more detail, from the Wikimedia Commons page where I found it:

Numerous emission nebulae in the constellation Cygnus seen by the Northern Sky Narrowband Survey. In this false color image, doubly ionized oxygen ([OIII] at 500.7 nm) is mapped to red, ionized hydrogen (Hα at 656.3 nm) is mapped to green and singly ionized sulfur ([SII] at 671.7 nm and 673.0 nm) is mapped to blue. The brightest stars are added to visualize the regions contaminated by strong continuum light. (Aside from that, the image does not contain continuum light.)
The field of view is 40° × 28°. Equatorial center coordinates are RA=20h40m and DEC=40°. North is up.

The yellow regions are HII regions ionized by young stars recently formed within giant molecular clouds. Most of the bluish and reddish filaments spreading across the image are supernova remnants.

User Tk833 (that is, the Northern Sky Narrowband Survey) can be proud of making this Featured Picture, which will be highlighted as the site’s Picture of the Day for 31 July 2027, when and if we get there.

I mean, if anything, this picture does show that some stars just blow up….

The post Science Art: Cygnus region in emission lines, 2025 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

Between around 600 BCE and 850 CE, a civilization known as the Aquiry transformed swaths of southwestern Amazonia, carving enigmatic geometric earthworks into the landscape.

Now, a new LIDAR survey suggests that civilization was even larger than archaeologists imagined, hinting at a people that built as many as 30,000 earthworks and had a peak population of up to 3 million people around 200 CE.

For archaeo-anthropologist Martti Pärssinen of the University of Helsinki, the realization was transformative.

“I first experienced such a moment in 2002, when I flew with Alceu Ranzi and Sanna Saunaluoma over the monumental geometric earthworks and observed ancient roads connecting the sites in the state of Acre, Brazil, a region that had long been regarded as pristine rainforest,” Pärssinen told ScienceAlert.

“It completely transformed my understanding and made me realize how mistaken earlier assumptions had been.

“More recently, I felt something similar when I came to understand that there may actually be up to ten times more of these earthworks in the region than I had previously imagined.”

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The researchers surveyed 4,497 square kilometers (1,736 square miles) of rainforest by flying a series of long, roughly 450-kilometer (280-mile) transects over the region.

Their entire dataset yielded 432 earthworks – 396 of which were previously unknown.

“What surprised us most was the extraordinarily large number of geoglyphs and other earthworks found within an area representing less than 3 percent of Greater Amazonia,” Pärssinen said.

“The scale of the archaeological record suggests that many other regions across Amazonia may have been far more densely populated and intensively modified than previously assumed.”

By extrapolating their results, combined with existing surveys, the researchers estimated that, at its peak, the Aquiry civilization may have covered an area as large as 183,000 square kilometers.

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It would have been a dramatically different place than the wilderness we see today – a forest threaded with clearings where people lived, farmed, celebrated, and gathered.

“At the center of many of these clearings would stand large geometric earthworks connected by broad and narrow roads,” Pärssinen told ScienceAlert when asked what the landscape might have looked like around 200 CE.

The post The Amazon jungle swallowed ancient earthworks and roads. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

This illustration, showing different areas of the heart muscle, was done in 2006 as part of a series of heart illustrations for Yale’s med school by Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator, with C. Carl Jaffe, MD, cardiologist. I found it in the Lynch collection on Wikimedia Commons.

The post Science Art: Heart apical two-chamber view myocardial regions, by Patrick Lynch first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on “World’s biggest whale graveyard found in Indian Ocean off Australia”, ABC News (Australia), 10 June 2026, as used in the post “Whale graveyard reveals unknown prehistoric species”.

ABSTRACT:
This was a strange one.
I had it virtually done as last month’s deadline rolled around. Drums were first, then a chord progression, an idea for how the words would work, but … the more “good” things I did to it — getting a good bass line recorded cleanly, re-doing vocals, experimenting with vocal harmonizer effects in a very intentional way — the less I liked it. The chord progression was basically the same as “Creep” (I can’t remember the name of the cadence, but I remember it having one; Radiohead just puts it on an an endless loop), but it kept sounding chipper and not right for a song about the eerie majesty of an undersea graveyard for creatures with immense bodies as big as… well, OK, “cathedrals” is probably overstating it, but big enough to go inside, at any rate. The synthetic vocal harmonies just weren’t harmonic enough. The lead vox were too warbly to be proper leads, but too proper to really shoegaze into reverb blankets like an undersea song should be. Dynamics weren’t being very dynamic either.

And then for whatever reason I started listening to some old Camper Van Beethoven, one of my favorite bands from my misspent youth. And on their self-titled third album (or maybe fourth, depending on how you want to count), they did a couple of songs that were just other, earlier songs played backwards. And then I heard a couple other things online — not looking for this sort of thing, just looking and listening around — that were doing the same sort of thing in different genres and with different moods, and yeah, OK, message received. The world wants psychedelia with its prehistoric whale graveyard. Got it, chief.

Sliced up the musical backing into verse/chorus/outro sections, reversed each chunk individually, did a little more mixing, cross-fading, bringing up the right-way-around organ track, playing with some backwards vocals, and yeah, This feels like entering an alien world and finding massive remains of ancient creatures collected there, fossilizing in the dark and the pressure.

Part of what held this up is that I’ve been, for more than two months, trying to learn a penitential cover in a mode that does not come naturally to me. There are changing time signatures. Musicianship. But I’m still at it.

LYRICS:

The sun never shines
The sea is our vault
How heavy our sky
How precious our salt

How flesh leaves the bones
How gardens take bloom
How mountains descend
How crowded the tombs

In cathedrals
Of collapsing carrion…
Collapsing carrion

Where giants break down
We take this and eat
The valleys resound
Giving thanks for the meat

Future fossils of whales
Fall like brittle stars
Like the bones grow stones
Reading 500 bars

In cathedrals
Of collapsing carrion…
Collapsing carrion

In cathedrals
Of collapsing carrion…
Collapsing carrion

In the Dordrecht Deep
Where the methane seeps
At their final sleep
So many sleeping cathedrals
So many sleeping cathedrals
So many sleeping cathedrals

The post SONG: Sleeping Cathedrals first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

Researchers had long believed the mission was somewhere in Washington County, west of Marianna, but its exact location had remained unknown.

“There was a Spanish mission here in 1674, 1675,” historian Dale Cox said, per MyPanhandle.

“Researchers have always known that it was somewhere west of Marianna, but no one ever really knew where.”

According to Cox, the find grew out of an archaeological effort sponsored by a nonprofit with which he is affiliated to find a Civil War battlefield. During the process, Spanish artifacts were discovered.

“And since there are no other recorded Spanish settlements in this entire stretch of West Florida between about Marianna and Pensacola, you know, we knew we had found the lost mission,” he added.

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“We would love to find the traces of the chapel, which was, of course, the central structure of a mission,” Cox said, per MyPanhandle. “We have found artifacts from both cultures, from Spanish and from Native Americans. So we would really like to find that chapel so we can be, you know, at the center of the mission community.”

Cox said the team hopes some of the artifacts recovered in the next excavation can eventually be shown in local museums.

The post Looking for Civil War relics, finding a Spanish mission first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

A new study offers one of clearest answers yet. In mice modeling chronic stress, activity dropped in two brain regions governing emotional resilience. By way of a large nerve to the digestive track, the change wiped out a beneficial bacterial strain key to a healthy microbiome.

Without those microbes, the gut produced less of a crucial molecule that helps cells clear damaged proteins and other molecular junk. These effects impacted the bone marrow, where stem cells generate oxygen-carrying blood cells and components of the immune system. Over time, these stem cells dwindled, leaving signs of premature immune aging in stressed mice.

“One surprising finding of our study was that suppression of only two specific brain regions was sufficient to produce many of the hematopoietic [blood stem cell] defects caused by psychological stress,” study author Linjia Jiang at Sun Yat-sen University said in a press release.

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To trace how chronic stress ages the body, the team tested four mouse models. Some experienced mild nerve injury. Others faced subtle disruptions to their daily routines, such as lights switching on earlier than expected or their home cages gently rocking at unpredictable times.

The changes put the mice on edge based on established behavioral tests. Mapping brain activity, the team zeroed in on two regions that consistently quieted. One, the medial prefrontal cortex, orchestrates executive control, or the ability to keep ideas in mind while reaching towards a goal. The other, the periaqueductal grey, coordinates attention to potential threats.

As activity decreased in both regions, blood stem cells struggled to divide and replenish immune cells. Inflammation and other toxic pathways flared up, and the cells developed molecular signatures similar to those seen in much older animals. Silencing either brain region with genetic tools reproduced many of the same symptoms, suggesting neural changes are a cause, not just a correlation.

But how was the brain communicating with the bone marrow? The answer lay in the gut microbiome.

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Spermidine levels plummeted in stressed mice due to the loss of Lactobacillus reuteri, a beneficial strain of bacteria in the gut ecosystem that supports spermidine production. Stress-related nerve signals from the brain depleted these microbes, which caused spermidine levels to collapse and leaves blood stem cells unable to maintain themselves.

In another test, transplanting gut microbes from a stressed mouse into a happy-go-lucky mouse triggered early blood stem cell aging in the recipient—even though it didn’t experience stress itself.

The post Stress literally goes from your brain to your gut to your bones. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

As the instructions say, “INTERESTED in a gadget to take to a party? How about something for the classroom? Studying experimental psychology? Want to see what else can be done with electronics? Then here is an interesting answer. A simple circuit consisting of one tube, three batteries, four resistors, and one potentiometer that will convert a v.t.v.m. into a lie detector.”

I think a “v.t.v.m.” is a voltmeter or multimeter, but it’s never really explained in the text. If you’re reading Popular Electronics in 1955, I think it’s just something you know.

I’m also not exactly sure who that is in the bow tie with the pocket protector and electrodes taped to his fingers, but the acknowledgements say: “The original plans for the lie detector were suggested by Joseph A. Fiederer. Additional construction and photographs by Edwin T. Kephart.”

It occurs to me that this might even be the article that gave the first Scientologists the idea for the e-meter. Just replace taped electrodes with cans.

The post Science Art: Build Your Own Lie Detector, 1955 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

Yaghi was unavailable to speak to Nature for this story. However, in an interview with Scientific American last month, he said that the current state of US science is “not so encouraging because of the cutting back on grants” as well as the drop in support from US science agencies. He also voiced concerns that US researchers were not embracing what he sees as an “artificial-intelligence revolution”. Researchers need to engage with AI models, he said, “as a matter of survival of the advanced research system in the US”.

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Born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugees, Yaghi moved to the United States at the age of 15 and lived there until he moved to China earlier this year. He is best known for developing metal–organic framework (MOF) compounds — highly porous materials with vast internal surface areas that make them capable of storing gases and serving as catalysts for chemical reactions, among other functions. Chemists have created more than 100,000 types of MOF, with an eye towards putting them to use in a range of commercial applications, including harvesting water from the air and delivering drugs into the body.

Yaghi — who became a faculty member at the University of California (UC), Berkeley in 2012 — has earned a slew of awards for his contributions to materials science, including the Albert Einstein World Award of Science and a share of both the Wolf Prize in Chemistry and, last year, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He has also founded or co-founded several US companies, including Atoco in Irvine, California, which is developing materials that can be used for water-vapour harvesting and carbon capture, and WaHa in Fremont, California, which has created a device that turns “humidity into pure water while cutting energy costs for climate control”, according to the company’s website.

The post Nobel-winning chemist, tech founder leaves US for China. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

C. bipunctatus, formally known as the two-spotted flower beetle is a soft-winged flower beetle that mostly eats aphids and spider mites, so gardeners should be glad to find them around. They do occasionally snack on pollen, but not enough so you’d notice, buddy.

The post Science Art: Collops bipunctatus, U, Back, SD, Pennington County, 2013 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.