Dysbiosis: from fiction to function

The fiction of function

What is the function of the human hand? What are the functions of our fingers? One could give a very incomplete list of functions of the hand: holding cups, swatting mosquitoes, etc., and similarly for fingers: wrapping around things, pressing on things, holding rings, etc. This clearly is a pointless exercise—incomplete in the extreme—yet it is essentially the goal of many function representat...

Microbiota and Allergy: From Dysbiosis to Probiotics

Humanoid Robots - From Fiction to Reality?

Humanoid robots have been fascinating people ever since the invention of robots. They are the embodiment of artificial intelligence. While in science fiction, human-like robots act autonomously in complex human-populated environments, in reality, the capabilities of humanoid robots are quite limited. This article reviews the history of humanoid robots, discusses the state-of-the-art and specula...

Learning facts from fiction

People s knowledge about the world comes from many sources, including fictional ones such as movies and novels. In three experiments, we investigated how people learn and integrate information from fictional sources with their general world knowledge. Subjects read a series of short stories that contained information about the real world. After a short delay, all participants took a general kno...

Vaginal Dysbiosis from an Evolutionary Perspective

Evolutionary approaches are powerful tools for understanding human disorders. The composition of vaginal microbiome is important for reproductive success and has not yet been characterized in the contexts of social structure and vaginal pathology in non-human primates (NHPs). We investigated vaginal size, vulvovaginal pathology and the presence of the main human subtypes of Lactobacillus spp./ ...