Feeling evolution in your guts: Evolutionary biology can benefit from a bit of fecal matter, as it gets the Weird Science treatment this week thanks to the primary component of those samples, namely gut bacteria. It’s possible to compare DNA sequences of all the great apes, including us humans, and figure out what their evolutionary relationships are. But you don’t need to use the animal’s DNA. It seems that the gut bacteria of the species started diverging at the same time the species did. So, at least within primates, you can sequence the DNA in a fecal sample and figure out what the evolutionary relationships are.

Is it better to scrape or cut a used diaper?: That’s just one of the many questions answered by a paper that describes the use of infants’ diapers in order to define the timecourse of hormonal surges in infants. It turns out that, with the exception of a single burst of activity, we don’t really know how the hormones of newborns change over the first few months of their lives. Since jabbing them for blood samples daily probably isn’t a good idea, a group of researchers decided that fecal samples were the way to go, and they collected them from used diapers. For the curious, it doesn’t matter whether you scrape the sample off or just gently cut around it.

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Weird Science flings poop at the primate family tree