WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

Dinosaurs loom large in our imaginations not just because they were in fact enormous, but also they are so ridiculously old. There has always been a big, impenetrable curtain separating us from prehistoric life. Sure, we have some ancient bones, but those had long since turned to stone. Any actual tissue, the stuff of flesh-and-blood creatures, is irrevocably lost, lasting only a few tens of thousands of years in most cases. Maybe a few stray organic molecules could persist for a few million if, say, they were frozen deep within primeval ice.

So, needless to say, it came as something of a shock when Mary Schweitzer discovered that she had some 68-million-year-old dinosaur tissue on her hands.

The find was and is controversial.

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Just the other day, I was feeling lucky because I haven't gotten a cold or flu this winter. Maybe all that hand washing and hand sanitizing was paying off.  Maybe, maybe not? It turns out that this year's flu season is just off to a late start. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control recently reported that this year's flu season is one of the latest in the past 30 years.

Even though the flu hasn't been making big headlines this year, there is still good reason to remain vigilant in fighting the disease. The influenza virus can mutate rather easily, and just recently a new strain of the H3N2 swine flu was found in a small outbreak in Iowa. The constant mutation of viruses keeps researchers guessing as to which strain is best to use when developing a vaccine.

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Microbes are by far the most abundant life form on the planet. The numbers are so big, they’re almost comical: maybe five million trillion trillion bacteria on earth, and that’s conservative. And yet we know shockingly little about who’s living where, and what they do.

So, big deal, right? We’ve gotten along this far without a phone book for the hordes of germs in almost every nook and cranny on the globe. But consider some of the very practical things bacteria do for us. They break down stuff in the soil, without which we couldn’t grow crops. They are a carbon spigot, releasing or trapping greenhouse gasses that contribute to climate change. They even eat oil spills.

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The human brain is full of wonder, mystery, perhaps even spirit. But it’s also a machine. And so even though it might sound far-fetched to suggest that a device can beam happiness into someone’s head, for some people living with depression that is the truth.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation, the subject of the latest installment of Clever Apes, works by sending an intense, focused magnetic field about an inch deep into someone’s forehead. The field comes in pulses – about 3,000 per session. The pulses activate a neural network on the surface of the brain, which in turn sends signals deep inside that stimulate brain structures in charge of your mood. The result, for about half the people who use it, is real relief from major depression.

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Often in science, a new insight doesn’t fit in with the old patterns. That means something, of course, is wrong – either the fresh idea, or everything we thought we knew leading up to it. In the latest installment of Clever Apes, we consider two of these curveballs. One has already rewritten the solar system's history. The other seemed, for a while, like it might mean the universe is either left-handed, or shaped like a small doughnut.

For starters, many of us learned in school that the solar system formed by a nice, orderly process. Tiny things gently coalesced into bigger objects, settling into this pleasant little arrangement of planets and moons. But now, scientists think it was probably a bloodbath, with would-be planets snuffed out in cataclysmic collisions.

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So we just finished explaining how the gut is our second brain. How to top that? How about this: Your gut is its own planet.

The human intestine hosts an entire civilization of microorganisms – about 100 trillion by most estimates. That’s many times more than there are cells in your body. You may think you’re the center of your own universe, but in a sense you’re just a walking ecosystem for this teeming population of bugs.

The good news is, most of them are beneficial to us. Our intestinal flora help us digest food, excrete waste and even train our immune system. That is kind of old news, but only recently have scientists begun to uncover just how central a role our microscopic gut workforce plays in our overall health.

Here is one surprising connection – or rather, hypothesized connection: The gut flora may have a hand in breast cancer risk. Dr.

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In researching the human gut over the last few weeks, I’ve learned at least 10 things that have blown my mind. Here is one: Your intestines are your second brain.

The gut has its own nervous system – called the enteric nervous system – that is highly sophisticated and can basically think for itself. Columbia University neuroscientist Michael Gershon, who coined the phrase with his 1999 book The Second Brain, says the gut can function just fine in a decapitated person.

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