From Birth, Our Microbes Become As Personal As A Fingerprint

We may not see them, but we need them.

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Look in the mirror, and you won't see your microbiome. But it's there with you from the day you are born. Over time, those bacteria, viruses, and fungi multiply until they outnumber your own cells 10 to one.

As babies, the microbes may teach our immune systems how to fight off bad bugs that make us sick and ignore things that aren't a threat.

We get our first dose of microbes from our mothers, both in the birth canal and in breast milk. Family members tend to have similar microbiomes.

"The mother's microbiome has actually poised itself over nine months to basically become the prime source of microbes to the infant," says Lita Proctor, director of the Human Microbiome Project at the National Institutes of Health.

“ The mother's microbiome has actually poised itself over nine months to ... become the prime source of microbes to the infant.

- Lita Proctor, National Institutes of Health

But ultimately each person's microbiome seems to be unique, perhaps as personal as a fingerprint.

As the microbes colonize our bodies, they pick specialized real estate. The mouth, with all those moist nooks and crannies, is home to one of the most diverse habitats, like the Amazon jungle.

Wet places like our armpits are lush, too. But they have different microbes than those in the mouth.

The armpit microbes feast on nutrients in sweat, Proctor says, and produces antimicrobial compounds to protect the skin against harmful microbes.

Other body parts are like the Sahara Desert to your microbes. That forearm skin, for example, is dry — very dry. But even that driest habitat is brimming with microbes.

Feet have oily parts and dry parts, and those wet parts that the foot fungus just loves.

But the biggest habitat is the gut. It hosts the most complex and diverse group of microbes. Everything that microbes are doing elsewhere in the body, they're doing in the gut, in spades.

Diverse as these habitats are, the microbes on the various body parts communicate with each other and with our cells. Scientists have started eavesdropping on those conversations, and have started testing them as possible treatments for diseases like Crohn's, multiple sclerosis, and asthma.

This research is all really new. No one knows for sure what most of our microbes are doing. But many scientists now think that if we're going to remain healthy, we have to maintain the health and well-being of the ecosystems for our microbes.

NPR has been exploring the world of the microbiome. To read and hear our series, click here.

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Topsy wants to become the Google of Twitter search

Searching through Twitter’s archive of tweets can be frustrating—they are sorted on the site by Twitter’s own algorithms, and older tweets tend to get buried. Google? Forget it. Topsy, an analytics company, wants to do it better.

The San Francisco-based company announced Wednesday that it has indexed Twitter’s complete archive of public tweets dating back to 2006, giving users simple tools to search through it.

President Barack Obama’s first tweet? According to Topsy, it was posted six years ago and read: “Thinking we’re only one signature away from ending the war in Iraq.”

People can use the tools for free at Topsy.com. The site offers more advanced paid tools that can be used, for instance, if marketers want to track the effectiveness of an advertising campaign.

Topsy is not new to this game. The company was founded in 2007, already offering tools for finding and analyzing data from the public social Web across millions of websites. Before Wednesday’s announcement, the site indexed Twitter tweets as far back as 2010.

The company describes its service as a way for marketers, agencies and consumers to extract meaningful signals from the social media noise.

But by indexing Twitter’s complete archive, Topsy is hoping to make it easier for the average person to find social data like tweets, links, photos and videos across the Web.

Known as “social search,” it’s an area that has been difficult for the major players like Facebook and Google to crack.

Facebook’s goal is to “make the world more open and connected,” but searching for content from outside the site is difficult when members use different privacy settings to share things only with certain people. The social network is trying to make a better search tool for users with Graph Search.

Google previously offered a way to search for information from people on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other sites through its Real-Time Search tool, but the feature was discontinued in 2011.

Microsoft is trying to do more with social search through its Bing search engine. The site incorporates data from outside social networks such as Facebook and Twitter into how it displays search results involving people. But Bing still occupies a much smaller slice of the overall search pie compared to Google.

The Library of Congress is also trying to archive all of America’s tweets.

Some of Topsy’s competitors include DataSift and Gnip.

Being able to easily analyze users’ activity on Twitter is also becoming increasingly important as the site aims to boost revenues with a possible IPO looming. Last month Twitter said it would be tracking users’ tweets to measure marketers’ sales in physical stores.

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How Do Experiences Become Memories?

“ All of us roughly know what memory is — sort of the storage of the past, such as we have it. It's the storage of what we know. It's the storage of our personal experiences. It's a very big deal.

- Daniel Kahneman

Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode Memory Games.

About Daniel Kahneman's TEDTalk

Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman goes through a series of examples of things we might remember, from vacations to colonoscopies. He explains how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently.

About Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman is an elder statesman in the field of behavioral economics. In the mid-1970s, with his collaborator Amos Tversky, he was among the first academics to pick apart exactly why we make "wrong" decisions.

Their work treated economics not as a perfect or self-correcting machine, but as a system prey to quirks of human perception. The field of behavioral economics was born. Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Memorial prize in 2002 for his work with Tversky, who died before the award was bestowed.

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Chrome challenges Firefox, may become No. 2 browser

Mozilla's Firefox browser has lost more than 11 percent of its user share in the last two months, giving Google's Chrome another shot at replacing it as the world's No. 2 browser, according to new data.

Statistics from Web measurement company Net Applications illustrated a rapid decline in Firefox and a corresponding upswing in Chrome during June and July.

At the end of July, Firefox owned a 18.3 percent share of all desktop browsers, down 2.3 percentage points in just two months, a decline of about 11 percent. Meanwhile, Chrome's user share stood at 17.8 percent, up 2 points since May and its highest mark since October 2012.

The half-percentage-point gap between Firefox and Chrome was the smallest since May 2012, when it appeared certain that the latter would overtake Firefox to become the No. 2 browser behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

In fact, Net Applications for a few hours in early June 2012 reported Chrome ahead of Firefox, but retracted the claim after revised numbers showed Chrome trailed Firefox by just one-tenth of a percentage point.

That was Chrome's moment in the spotlight: Starting in June 2012, Google's browser began shedding share, falling to a low of 15.7 percent in May 2013. Firefox fared slightly better, but has also lost share in the last 12 months.

Most of the losses posted by Firefox and Chrome have gone to a resurgent Internet Explorer (IE). In the past year, IE has climbed 2.7 points to a 56.6 percent share, an impressive 4.7 points above its all-time low in December 2011.

Analysts have credited IE's comeback to IE9 and IE10, the popular 2011 and 2012 editions, and the widespread adoption of Windows 7, which can run both those browsers.

If Firefox and Chrome continue the trends they've set in the last 90 days, Chrome will bypass Firefox this month; the longer-range 12-month trend would delay that until April 2014.

When mobile browsers are combined with those on the desktop, Google has already stolen second place from Mozilla.

According to Net Applications, about 12.4 percent of all users reached the Internet in July from a mobile browser, the highest percentage since February. Google's browsers—Chrome on desktops and mobile devices, and the stock Android browser on smartphones—accounted for a combined share of 18.7 percent. Mozilla, which has no measurable share on mobile—though it offers Firefox on Android—owned 16.1 percent of the overall browser market.

Another Web measurement firm, Ireland's StatCounter, long ago called Chrome the winner over not only Firefox, but also IE. For July, StatCounter pegged Chrome with a 43.1percent share, with IE and Firefox far behind at 24.5 percent and 20.1 percent, respectively.

Unlike Net Applications, which calculates browser user share by tracking unique visitors, StatCounter measures page views. The two methodologies have generated increasingly-divergent figures for IE and Chrome. StatCounter's data, however, may indicate that Chrome users browse the Web more often or for longer periods than those who rely on IE or Firefox.

Chrome's in hot pursuit of Firefox for the No. 2 spot in browser user share. In July it closed to within half a percentage point of Firefox, the narrowest gap in over a year. (Data: Net Applications.)

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news.
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5 ways your smartphone's ‘smarts’ have become more important than the ‘phone’

It’s been headline news this week that smartphones outsold feature phones for the first time. Huzzah!

My first thought was, “They still sell non-smartphones?” My second thought was “Why do we even still call it a ‘phone’?” I mean, a PC is basically an evolution of a calculator, but we don’t get excited about whether or not PCs outsell calculators, and we don’t call PCs “supercalculators.”

If you think about it, making and receiving voice calls is one of the more minor functions of a smartphone. Sure, the devices we use today evolved from a basic mobile phone, and they’ve gotten “smarter” with new features and capabilities and a seemingly endless array of apps. But the term “smartphone” is a bit of a misnomer that doesn’t accurately describe what the device is.

It’s a personal communication and entertainment device (PCED). It’s a mobile pocket computer (MPC). It’s a personal digital assistant (PDA)—much more so than the devices that originally claimed that title. It’s an invaluable tool that enables business professionals to stay connected and be productive from virtually anywhere and at any time.

The “phone” part of “smartphone” doesn’t even scratch the surface of what the device is capable of. Here are five things a typical smartphone is used for more frequently than making or receiving voice calls:

  Smartphones have made standalone GPSs virtually obsolete.

One of the greatest things about a smartphone is that it’s capable of accessing and downloading email over either a Wi-Fi network or a cellular data connection. That means that your email is available in your pocket 24/7.

Texting or instant messaging is a nice middle-ground between email and voice calls. It’s an immediate form of communication, and it’s often way more convenient and courteous than a voice call.

This point started out being called “research.” Whether you need to keep up with breaking news in your industry, or you want to see how your investments or doing, the smartphone lets you surf the Web in the palm of your hand. You can compare features or research better prices while out shopping, book travel arrangements, or look up whether a narwhal is mythical creature or a real thing (Hint: it’s a real animal and it should have totally been called a “sea unicorn” or a “unicorn whale”).

Maps, and turn-by-turn directions are one of the most valuable functions of a smartphone. Whether you’re driving in your car or hoofing it, your smartphone can help you get from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible.

5. Camera

One of the most common uses for a smartphone is as a camera or video camera. Just look at the phenomenal success of Instagram, Flickr, and Vine. The iPhone is the most-used camera in the world. It’s not that the smartphone is a better camera than a DSLR, or even a traditional point-and-shoot—in fact most pale in comparison. It’s simply a matter of convenience because most people have their smartphone with them everywhere they go, and don’t carry a camera around unless they know they need to.

As a matter of fact, the “smartphone” has done just as much to make standalone GPS units and point-and-shoot cameras obsolete as it has for standalone mobile phones, so we could just as easily call it a “smartgps” or a “smartcamera.” Actually, when it comes to Samsung, I guess the “smartcamera” is sort of a real thing thanks to the Galaxy Camera.

So, have fun using your PCED, or getting work done while on the go from your MPC. I was trying to stay focused on functions with some intrinsic value for business users, so I didn’t even cover the fact that you can watch Netflix, read a book, or play Angry Birds as well. Oh, and don’t forget it can also make phone calls if you’re into that sort of thing.

Tony is principal analyst with the Bradley Strategy Group, providing analysis and insight on tech trends. He is a prolific writer on a range of technology topics, has authored a number of books, and is a frequent speaker at industry events.
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