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Birth, like life, is messy. But, while life’s messes often harm health, the untidiness of our entrance into the world may profoundly protect it—at least that’s a leading hypothesis among microbiome researchers.

Microbes picked up from mom while in or exiting the womb kick off humans’ lifelong association with the invisible critters that live in and on us and affect our health. In cases where that microbial colonization of a newborn goes awry, researchers have noted links to chronic health problems, such as asthma, obesity, allergies, and immune deficiencies. Researchers have also found that such a microbial debacle is often brought on by Cesarean delivery (C-section), which is a common surgical procedure to birth a baby through the mother’s abdomen rather than the normal shove down the birth canal.

To reverse the potential ill-fate of C-section babies, researchers smeared surgically delivered babies with the vaginal fluids from their mothers in the moments just after birth. After tracking the babies and their microbiomes for a month, the researchers report Monday in Nature Medicine that the quick slather partly restored normal microbiome development.

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google's intent to transition to "Alphabet"—a company-full-of-companies that better represents the current layout of Larry Page's conglomerate—was announced back in August 2015. After getting organized and actually going through with the transition, today marks the first quarter of Alphabet's existence and its first earnings report. It even has a brand new investor site to celebrate.

For Q4 2015, Alphabet beat analyst estimates of 8.10 per Class A share and 20.77 billion on revenue, with $8.67 per share and 21.33 billion in revenue. The news sent the price of Alphabet stock up over 6 percent in after-hours trading, sending Alphabet's market cap over $550 billion. Apple's market cap is sitting at $538 billion, which makes Alphabet the most valuable company in the world. Alphabet's position as highest company by market cap is a product of both Alphabet's rise and Apple's fall. The amount is a far cry from Apple's all-time high of ~774 billion in February 2015.

As the first-ever Alphabet earnings call, Google is breaking out the non-Google parts into a segment called "other bets." Other than Nest and Google Fiber, the "other bets" segment is basically made up of Alphabet's moonshots. The company says the "other bets" segment had $448 million in revenue for 2015 ($327 million this quarter), but overall Alphabet's non-Google companies lost $3.567 billion this year, with $1.942 billion of that coming just this quarter.

Lowering Leona Philpot into the water. (credit: Microsoft)

Air conditioning is one of the biggest costs in running data centers. Traditional data centers use as much electricity for cooling as they do for running the actual IT equipment. Accordingly, much of the innovation seen in the high-density cloud server space has been to develop data centers that are cheaper to cool and hence cheaper to run. With its much higher heat capacity than air, water has become the coolant of choice, pumped around and between the computers to transport their heat outside.

Microsoft has demonstrated an experimental prototype of a new approach: instead of pumping water around the data center, put the data center in the water. Project Natick is a research project to build and run a data center that's submerged in the ocean. The company built an experimental vessel, named the Leona Philpot, and deployed it on the seafloor about 1 kilometer off the Pacific coast. It ran successfully from August to November last year.

Leona Philpot and the team that designed her: from left to right, Eric Peterson, Spencer Fowers, Norm Whitaker, Ben Cutler, Jeff Kramer. (credit: Microsoft)

As well as the obvious cooling advantage this brings, Microsoft argues that this kind of data center will bring other benefits, too. About half of the world's population lives within 200km of the ocean, and so the ability to put data centers in the water means that they can always be located close to major population centers. This in turn ensures that they offer low latency connections. The company also says that the self-contained units can be deployed quickly, within 90 days, rather than the 2 years it takes to build a conventional building, or the 1 year that Microsoft says its fourth generation data centers take. The units could also be paired with tidal power generation to further reduce their environmental impact.

This official Oral Roberts University photo sure has a lot of Fitbits in it, doesn't it? (credit: Oral Roberts University)

Oklahoma's Oral Roberts University opened in 1965 with a fitness course requirement for its newest incoming freshman and transfer students—a rarity among American universities. That requirement became even more unique to the evangelical university in January when the school added a technological requirement to the course: mandatory Fitbit ownership, whose fitness tracking must also be synced to the school's grading system.

The school formally announced the change in early January, and the news became better known around the country late last week as college-minded outlet The College Fix wrote about students' thoughts on the change. An Oral Roberts representative confirmed to Ars that students in the course, known as "Health Fitness I," have a student requirement of 10,000 steps a day, and the app-tracked targets account for 20 percent of a student's grade in the course.

In its formal press release, Oral Roberts University confirms that over 550 Fitbit units have been sold through its on-campus bookstore, and it describes the initiative as "literally transport[ing] digital electrons from student’s wearable band anywhere on campus into the secure Learning Management System."

Female Aedes aegypti mosquito as she was in the process of obtaining a "blood meal" (credit: US Department of Health and Human Services)

The mosquito-spread Zika virus linked to a spike in birth defects and neurological syndromes is a public health emergency of international concern, the World Health Organization declared Monday.

The declaration followed an emergency meeting in Geneva, in which health experts from around the world reviewed the data on the outbreak blazing through South and Central Americas. In some areas, infection with the Zika virus has been associated with a paralyzing neurological condition, known as Guillain-Barré syndrome, and microcephaly, in which babies are born with severely shrunken and deformed heads and brains.

In Brazil, which reported its first case of Zika last May, the virus has infected an estimated million people and been linked to a 20-fold increase in microcephaly cases. Since the outbreak began, health officials there have reported around 4,000 confirmed and suspected cases of microcephaly, compared to just 147 in 2014.

A report from The Information (subscription required) states that Google wants to take "greater control" over the design and building of Nexus phones. Currently, a Nexus device is a co-branded partnership between Google's Android team and an OEM, but this report says Google wants to move to a more "Apple-like" approach.

The report says that in the future, "hardware makers will be much more like order-takers, similar to the way contract manufacturers like Hon Hai (Foxconn) follow Apple’s directions for producing the iPhone." Apple designs its phones, SoC, and other parts and then ships the plans off to third-party factories to have them built.

Currently it's easy to draw comparisons to Pixel devices, which are also designed and branded by Google and built by third parties. Would this device be called a "Pixel Phone?" Pixel brand devices have typically come from the Chrome group, while Nexus has been from the Android Team. The branding isn't just about the operating system, it's also about which team inside of Google the product comes from. The Pixel group did recently create its first Android device, the Pixel C, but that seems to be more of a last-ditch effort to get the hardware out the door. The two operating systems are reportedly merging, though, so the line between teams and brands could get messier.

If you don’t pay $99 each year for an Amazon Prime membership, which promises two-day shipping on all orders, regular shipping on Amazon purchases might be slower than it was last year, according to a study from customer service metrics company StellaService.

In an interview with Forbes, StellaService vice president of research Kevon Hills said the company tracks how quickly orders from 40 companies are fulfilled. Amazon fell outside of the top 10 fastest companies for the first time this year, losing ground to companies like BestBuy and Apple.

Hills said the speed of shipments to Prime customers is unchanged, indicating that Amazon is throwing considerable investment at serving its rapidly growing Prime base—which increased by 51 percent in 2015. Although Amazon does not reveal numbers about how many customers are Prime members, analysts have estimated that Prime membership totals at least 46 million people and could be as high as 80 million.