In general, the enteric microbiota composition is relatively stable due to the ongoing competition of bacterial members for space and nutrients. Newly arriving bacteria hardly find an empty niche and sufficient nutrients to thrive and colonize. Shortly after birth, however, this situation is markedly different. The neonate is born sterile and newly incoming bacteria can easily find a place and nutrients to stay and colonize the neonate's intestinal mucosa. Notably, it is generally thought that this process is mainly driven by exposure to bacteria derived e.g. from the mother of the environment. But is that really true? If only the environment determines the microbiota composition couldn't that go terribly wrong? Shouldn't we expect that host factors influence the emerging microbiota ensuring a beneficial bacterial composition?

Violence against women is a pernicious public health problem that destroys lives all over the world. The World Health Organization reports that more than 1 in 3 women face violence from an intimate partner during their lifetime, and nearly 1 in 4 murders of women worldwide are by intimate partners. Developing effective interventions to reduce intimate partner violence requires understanding the underlying risk factors for such violence. In our study appearing in Nature Human Behaviour, we investigated some of the factors associated with intimate partner violence; we focused on how early exposures to family violence, attitudes about aggression, and decision-making authority in marriage impact women’s risk of experiencing physical abuse. We were motivated to conduct this study by prior research among Tsimane, which indicates that, on average, husbands want more children than their wives, and that wives have more children than they themselves think are ideal. While, in general, wives’ own desired family size better predicts how many children they end up having than husbands’ preferences, we sought to explore whether some men in this particular high fertility context might resort to intimate partner violence to increase their lifetime number of children.

Using a newly developed tool, SkyFACT, which is a hybrid approach between template fitting and image reconstruction, we study the gamma-ray emission from the Galactic Center. We find that the morphology of the so-called “Fermi-LAT Galactic Center Excess” is better described by the distribution of stars in the boxy bulge rather than the expected dark matter density squared. This supports the interpretation that this emission is due to millisecond pulsars instead of dark matter.