Let Me Fix That Headline For You

Only socialists, liberals, with a bevy of Marxists care about navels. They spend enough time gazing at them.
That with the heeps of bodies each dogma eventualy produces.

Gotta disagree with you here. This is brilliant. We only know a fraction of a percentage of all the species of bacteria that exist and most of those even are incredibly hard to culture in the lab.

I expect this will be a boon to microbial taxonomists and have interesting health and medical applications as well.

Do innies an outies have different types of bacterial colonies?

mike

Well. No wonder we have so many sterile(as in no normal exposure to childhood dirt)kids dying from having a peanut butter sandwich eaten four floors away!!! Kill all the bacteria and allergens,NOW!
Sheeesh.Just wait until they start a study on all the shiite in the human gut(that is supposed to be there!)

I agree with you Dante, the more we know about our world the better off we will be. Right now the state of our knowlege is about looking for a black cat in a dark room while wearing blinders. I don't mean that we are stupid,it's just that there is more that we don't know, than we know.

Too much funding for the wrong research that is for sure.

Readers of this blog would be shocked to learn how much funding is now going to "green" research. Another giant sinkhole for taxpayer dollars.

Gross.
And to think Michael Moore uses his navel as a cereal bowl in the morning and to hold chip dip the rest of the day.

bellybutton lint.

Oz, thanks for my evening laugh.

The United Nations must declare this habitat off limits to development.

Can a environmentalint movement be far behind?

This modified headline is soooo wrong.. .so wrong... scientific funding is of upmost important to human progress. That even if 50% of funding goes to wasted projects.

Religious and military funding is wrong.
There can never be too much science funding.

This could turn out to be very important research. The trend in surgery today is towards less-invasive procedures whenever possible, including going in through the body's natural orifices with endoscopes. If they are going in through the navel (with a very narrow scope) then they need to know what sorts of bacteria or other substances they may be bringing into the body with the endoscope.

"There can never be too much science funding." I am amazed that you have not already culled yourself from our population with that level of idiocy.

What a wonderful new discovery and right before our gazing eyes as it were. I can see a whole new industry of anti-bacterial navel sprays.

Puts a whole new light on participating in Belly Shot games..................................eh?

This is unbelieveable and a new low for "science".

I remember when I was a kid there was a schoolyard myth that, if you stuck your finger in your bellybutton and smelled it, it would smell like pooh. Of course it was a myth -- we tried it many times and our fingers never smelled of pooh. It was obviously a joke to get naive fellow schoolmates going around and checking for the imaginary "pooh in the navel".

In case "scientists" haven't noticed, the umbilical cord was tied off and atrophied after birth -- the sealed navel has absolutely no access to the colon or digestive system or the fecal matter being produced in our innards. I guess "scientists" never realized that the schoolyard myth they heard as small children was only a joke.

(P.S.: if your navel does in fact smell like "pooh", then stop sticking your finger up your rear then poking around with your navel. And talk to a psychiatrist).

queberker

"and military funding is wrong"

the military is the source of a lot of scientific and technical discoveries

try again fool

Researching bacterial ecologies in various parts of the body is important medical research. I must say that the results surprised me as, during my microbiology labs I never thought of swabbing my navel. Skin swabs routinely just yielded boring Staph Aureus - had the urge to stick the swab in my navel overtaken me almost 40 years ago I might have become a microbiologist.

We're host to a few pounds of bacteria most of which are in the gut. One thing I don't recommend people do is send off a stool sample to one of the labs in the US that, for under $1000, will isolate all of the bacteria they grow out of that sample and send you a nice printout with the hundreds of species isolated. I have no idea what those results mean unless I see clear pathogens on the list.

Things get even more interesting when one considers bacterial biofilms and the changes that occur in bacteria once they form colonies. So, no more research money for CAGW related topics and transfer some of it into microbiology research as we're barely keeping ahead of the bacteria now. Look at bacteria as a simple, but massively parallel biocomputer just salivating at the prospect of coming up with the right mutations to be able to utilize all that food walking around on the world.

Some scientists think that all life has eveolved from bacteria. So i guess we're just getting to know our ancestors!

I think this research is right on the button...