Month: February 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Your gut has an obvious job: It processes the food you eat. But it has another important function: It protects you from the bacteria, viruses, or allergens you ingest along with that food. “The largest part of the immune system in humans is the GI tract, and our biggest exposure to the world is what we put in our mouth,” says Michael Helmrath, a pediatric surgeon at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center who treats patients with intestinal diseases.

Sometimes this system malfunctions or doesn’t develop properly, which can lead to gastrointestinal conditions like ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, and celiac—all of which are on the rise worldwide. Studying these conditions in animals can only tell us so much, since their diets and immune systems are very different from ours.

Enlarge / Raft is developed by Redbeet Interactive and published by Axolot Games. (credit: Redbeet Interactive)

My co-op gaming group has logged a few hundred extra hours in Deep Rock Galactic since I wrote about it a year and a half ago, but we're always looking for another game to fall in love with.

We've tried a bunch of things in the last year, guided by a combination of positive reviews and "whatever is on sale in Steam at the time." We've logged time in Back 4 Blood, Payday 2, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, Sea of Thieves, Diablo III, Risk of Rain 2, and Borderlands 3, and each has had its charms. But the one that has stuck with me the most is called Raft, a game about building a raft.

Raft isn't new—it went into Early Access in 2018—but its formal 1.0 release happened this past June. The pitch: You begin the game drifting across an endless ocean on a tiny wooden raft cobbled together from flotsam and jetsam. Armed with only a trusty throwable plastic hook, you must comb the ocean for planks, plastic, and other bits of scrap that you can use to expand your raft and stay alive. And once you're no longer in constant danger of starving to death (and once you can steer your raft instead of just letting it drift), you can begin sailing to the world's remaining islands to figure out what happened to everyone else.

Enlarge / Transmission electron micrograph of poliovirus type 1. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

An eradicated form of wild polio surfaced in routine wastewater monitoring in the Netherlands last year, offering a cautionary tale on the importance of monitoring for the tenacious virus, researchers report this week in the journal Eurosurveilance.

The sewage sample came up positive for infectious poliovirus in mid-November and genome sequencing revealed a strain of wild poliovirus type 3, which was declared globally eradicated in 2019. Its potential revival would be a devastating setback in the decades-long effort to stamp out highly infectious and potentially paralytic germ for good.

For brief background, there are three types of wild polioviruses: type 2 and type 3 have been eradicated, with the former being knocked out in 2015. Wild poliovirus type 1 continues to circulate in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are also occasional vaccine-derived polioviruses that circulate in communities with low vaccination rates, which recently occurred in New York.