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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Hands-on: Ricoh's Theta, a personal 'Street View' camera

BERLIN—Imagine being able to take all-round pictures like those seen in Google’s Street View from a small camera you can carry around in your pocket. That’s the promise of Ricoh’s Theta, a sleek panoramic camera launched at this week’s IFA electronics show here.

The camera is intended for both consumer and professional users alike, and I tried it out at the show.

Photo: Martyn WilliamsRicoh’s Theta panoramic camera

Theta is long and thin and doesn’t look much like any other camera. It’s about as long as a smartphone but isn’t as wide and is quite a bit thicker. It’s most striking feature is a fisheye lens toward the top of the device. It’s matched by one on the rear and its through these that the camera can take pictures that extend almost 360 degrees in any direction.

There are only three buttons on its body: about halfway up its body is one for the shutter and on the side are buttons to switch on and off the power and Wi-Fi connection.

Using it is easy. Because it takes an all-around picture, you don’t need to worry which way it is facing. You just have to consider what’s around it.

There are two ways of taking pictures. The shutter button on the camera body will snap an image and store it in the Theta’s microSD card, but you’ll have more fun using a dedicated app on your cellphone.

When the shutter button on the app is pressed, the camera takes a picture and then transfers it to the phone over a Wi-Fi Direct connection. The software acts as an image viewer and lets you explore the picture you just took and share it online with services like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

Taking pictures with the Theta requires a bit of a change in the way you visualize your intended image. Instead of what’s in front of the camera, you need to consider what’s all around it so, for example, a picture of a group of friends works best if they are sitting around the camera rather than all lined up on one side.

It’s certainly a fun twist on the conventional pictures we all take on vacation, at parties and perhaps for work.

I had a chance to speak to the Theta’s designer, Hidenao Ubukata, general manager of Ricoh’s visual revolution unit, and he explained how it works.

Martyn Williams360-degree action!

Behind each lens is a 2-megapixel image sensor and they both snap a picture at the same time. The two images are stitched together in the device to make an equirectangular JPEG image with 2,000 pixel by 1,000 pixel resolution. Equi-rectangular projection is best known as the projection method used to show the Earth’s sphere on 2D maps.

That image is then transferred to the phone, where it is mapped onto a sphere to re-create the all-around image. The image capturing process takes about three seconds and then it takes another five seconds or so to send the image to the phone.

Ubukata said he anticipates the Theta’s first users will be digital creatives, and they are the people who will probably hit upon new uses for this style of photography, which isn’t new but has never been so easy.

The camera will be available in October and will cost $399. The software is compatible with iOS and an Android version will be released before the end of the year.

Martyn Williams covers mobile telecoms, Silicon Valley and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service.
More by Martyn Williams, IDG News Service

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Wanted: A truly helpful mobile virtual personal assistant

We've been on the brink of a new relationship with our gadgets for years.

"Real soon now," we're told, mobile apps will interrupt us with personalized information we never asked for. These interruptions would show us opportunities ("Those shirts you like are half-off at the store around the corner"), facilitate our social lives ("Your friend Janet is also visiting New York and is free for lunch—would you like to invite her?") and save our bacon ("You haven't ordered a flower delivery for your anniversary—would you like me to take care of it?").

What are they waiting for?

Apple's Siri responds impressively but doesn't take the initiative to interrupt much.

MindMeld is supposed to ship to general availability an app that churns out information related to your video conversations. The technology and platform look impressive, but the purpose of MindMeld's proof-of-concept app will be context for conversations, not mobile personal assistance.

EasilyDo is supposed to give you predictive results, but like most in this category, you have to work for it. The results are a fraction of what you want, actually harvesting data from social networks, calendars and location-oriented databases and placing them in a stream.

EasilyDo performs a wide variety of useful tasks like contacting people for you, telling you when to leave for your meeting, getting directions, automatically creating new contacts and many other things. EasilyDo automates tasks to simulate a personal assistant, but it doesn't do anything you haven't specifically commanded it to do. It doesn't interrupt you proactively with contextual information beyond things like telling you to leave for your next meeting.

Osito is another cool app that suffers from the same lack of creative interruption as EasilyDo. It's more of a rollup of the kinds of information you can get elsewhere, but presented in a stream with some pop-ups. It's more about automation than contextual assistance.

Foursquare just got interesting. The company rolled out a test version of Foursquare that throws advice and context at you when you walk into a restaurant or around a neighborhood. ("Try the cheese fries in this place—they're incredible.")

Checking in isn't required. In fact, the information will pop up even if the Foursquare app isn't running. Now that's what I'm talking about.

Sadly, the test is for 2000 lucky Android users only, with a wider rollout promised for an unspecified future. Foursquare tested a comparable feature called "Radar" two years ago, but killed it after "Radar" killed battery life.

Google Now has by far the best proactive interruption in the business, if you have an Android device.

Google Now grabs information about you from Gmail, Google Search, and elsewhere, and uses that data to improve results.

Lately, Google has folded in some amazing capabilities. For example, it preemptively feeds you information about your car rentals, public transportation information based on guesses about where you might want to go, movie tickets and sports scores.

Google Now tells you more information about whatever's on screen. It knows what you're watching because, with your permission, it listens to the sound of the show to figure out what you're watching.

Google Now is great in every way except one—it doesn't give you enough information. Leaving Google Now running gives you a mostly static view, with "cards" coming in very infrequently.

Field Trip, another Google product, is wonderful only because of what it promises, not what it delivers.

We learned recently that Field Trip was originally designed for Google Glass but shipped on the iPhone while Glass was still in early development. It's now available on Glass.

Field Trip has the right idea, popping up contextual data. However, these are based on a list of arbitrary database-oriented websites, such as "Historic Detroit," "Public Art Archive," and "San Francisco Architectural Heritage." Unless you're in a major city, Field Trip contextual information is slim pickin's.

There are other services that claim to interrupt with contextual information. But in my experience these require launching the app and refreshing it—a conscious choice followed by deliberate action, which is the opposite of what's promised in this category—interruption.

Looking at these few examples, the industry overall seems hesitant, unwilling or (most likely) unable to meet the promise of interruption for contextual information.

It's true that this category is fraught with hazard. People feel their privacy is being violated when a gadget demonstrates what it knows about them. It's an irrational concern because not letting the user take full advantage of harvested data (as is the case today for most users) doesn't equal privacy, just ignorance.

Users might get overwhelmed by too much interruption data. But there are better ways to stop overload than simply withholding messages. Let it be turned up gradually. Offer a snooze feature. Set times of day. Notify only when moving.

The ideal service would combine the benefits of Foursquare, Google Now and Field Trip. It would give you useful and interesting data not just for general areas or historic landmarks, but down to the specific address level.

It would be like the test version of Foursquare, interrupting you whether the app is running or not.

It would be like Google Now with its uncanny ability to know all about you and learn from your actions.

It would be like Field Trip in bringing in disparate human-curated databases to augment your reality.

Most of all, I would like these services to turn up the fire hose. Limiting access to a handful of users like Foursquare, dribbling out frustrating little bits of data like Google Now, and limiting information sources to a handful of content sources like Field Trip isn't going to cut it.

This category has been full of promise and potential for two years now. The wearable computing category is exploding with activity. It's time for the industry to get over its shyness and start interrupting us with more and better personalized contextual information.

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