Your gut microbes might encourage criminal behavior

His case, along with several other scientific studies, raises a fascinating question for microbiology, neuroscience, and the law: How much of our behavior can we blame on our microbes? Each of us hosts vast communities of tiny bacteria, archaea (which are a bit like bacteria), fungi, and even viruses all over our bodies. The largest collection resides in our guts, which play home to trillions of them. You have more microbial cells than human cells in your body. In some ways, we’re more microbe than human. Microbiologists are still getting to grips with what all these microbes do. Some seem to help us break down food. Others produce chemicals that are important for our health in some way. But the picture is extremely complicated, partly because of the myriad ways microbes can interact with each other. But they also interact with the human nervous system. Microbes can produce compounds that affect the way neurons work. They also influence the functioning of the immune system, which ca ... Read full article.