It's Nice to Think of Ourselves as Moving Colonies

An article in the New York Times talks about the fact that at any given moment, there are 1 million bacteria in the crook of your elbow. With the Human Microbiome Project underway, scientists are sequencing -- and learning -- about the hoards of beneficial bacteria that live in people.

In Science's early edition, Wash U's Ruth Ley looked at 60 species in the first-ever comparison of bacterial gut communities across mammals. "Her analysis found that these communities have co-evolved with their hosts and their members are strongly influenced by both diet and evolutionary history," says this post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.