stretches of point will be abandoned. the water. has. to be stopped it's happening faster than anticipated. massive reforms are supposed to prevent flooding but the only delivery you never. know will we live in the future. 66 me using sea levels starts to flip on you. hello and welcome to you tomorrow today the science show on d w. unser day show we take a close look at viruses and bacteria that are good for us. but so what if the coronavirus we have to practice social distancing scientists in the antarctic are

learning all about isolation. social distancing is hard but it's key to preventing the spread of the corona virus if we carried on as normal and one infected person infected on average $2.00 others over a 5 day period then after 30 days that one person would be the source of more than $400.00 infections. reducing contact with others by 75 percent the total would be just 2 and a half infection. but what effect does isolation have on the mind and body. let's find out by heading to a research station in one of the world's loneliest places the at. a. time out for the expedition members at germany's neumeier research station in antarctica this is the 1st. time that they've seen the sun after 9 months of

darkness. this long period in isolation was extremely difficult for everyone here. i went to work and routine is what really helps and doing a lot together but at the same time giving everyone enough space. it can get pretty lonely here in the world southernmost continent trying times for station manager and doctor baggage check of back and the 8 other german team members far away from their families berlin shouting hospital is investigating the impact of this isolation the crew have to undergo medical tests and even a cat scan of the brain before their departure and on their return as well as giving all sorts of samples. examined were collecting all the bodily substances that we can get our hands on blood urine and stool and every few months some hair samples. the scientists and the team themselves have noticed

changes. sometimes you have to stop and remember which way is north east and south when you're outside you sometimes think that you've taken the wrong turn even though you actually know the way or this from a things can be a bit more difficult or you forget things for example how to find your way around the station where was that again it's strange sometimes. under these conditions one part of the brain shrinks by around 7 percent. one structure that we're interested in is the hippocampus that's an important area for episodic memory for learning and memory. this area of the brain gets smaller during the long months of darkness. research director alexander don has also asked the team to perform computer tests the study financed by the german aerospace center is also intended

to show what kind of changes astronauts might undergo. to complete this docking maneuver successfully we have to guide this green cross with the help of these tools toward the docking pin and have done so and trigger the docking procedure and your time to see how quickly and precisely you can do this is your it's an exercise that's intended to test the brain's performance during the months of darkness and isolation. or not we do this once a month during our stay to find out how our ability to concentrate our perception and our interest in this kind of task changes over time that people. responses to questionnaires about emotional changes are also sent back to berlin. the impact of this isolated and austere environment on group dynamics is also under

investigation. and this is a subject you see the classic conflict between the need for intimacy and for space that we know from our own relationships that exists in a group too it can feel constraining at times or you might want more intimacy but it's not the right kind of closeness because what you really want is your own family and that's the most difficult part of the berlin researchers are also keeping an eye out for signs of depression that's a distinct possibility when you're alone with the same few people for months on end when he is with yet one in underground do you feel isolated from the others have you had melancholy or depressive thoughts that might possibly require medical attention and at least i afford i'm quite and. this study could also help us cope with the coronavirus lockdown an exam just done as a piece of advice. was going eyebrows arms i was one with mom and you can do simple

things like brushing your teeth with your left hand while standing on one leg you know. the important thing is to avoid getting stuck in a rush kind of fight your brain needs fresh and push. the knowing meyer station team has created challenges for itself a boot camp to give the brain and the body a thorough workout eda is the driving force behind the exercise team and she and the other expedition members are top fit. i'm not sure it was difficult at 1st we had muscle aches and we cursed but we've come to love her but this. isn't a moment it's one of the main reasons that we've got through the winter so well you know. the researchers say that while the brain does shrink during isolation these changes are not permanent. you know government always does. i

assume that all these changes are reversible. the question is to what extent the team managed to reintegrate into everyday life you know resume their usual activities rebuild their social networks and pursue their normal lives again upon their return. whether you spend 9 months in the icy wastes of and arctica or weeks in coronavirus markdown in your own home isolation is difficult and it takes a toll among us. we asked our viewers what are your strategies for staying sane during the coronavirus pandemic. here are some of you are. philip template ginia from the philippines rose we are in the 8th week of lockdown my strategy is simple i check the news chat with family and friends work from home.

then i do light exercise after dinner and read books my days are quite structured. from peru says i'm one of the few people who enjoy quarantine i love spending time with my family and cooking healthy meals and eating at a leisure pace i'll be sad when things go back to normal. owning g.e. in indonesia says it's an opportunity to try new things. i've taken up gardening as a hobby and i'm trying to muster hydroponics i hope to be able to eat my own harvest thank you for writing to us. the term social distancing may be new but place and pestilences and the practice of isolating the sick is thousands of years old but that doesn't make our current situation feel any less new and weird. and it's all because of

a microscopic vicious pathogen the sun's corona virus too. but what is a virus that's what out of the un as our in sedan wants to know. what of viruses. a tick bite can transmit viruses such as a form of and several lighters called t b e v in humans the pathogen can cause a fatal inflammation of the brain. in. other viral diseases are airborne so there are lots of ways they can spread. that's clever viruses which consist of just d.n.a. or r.n.a. in a protective envelope they don't have their own metabolism so they need a host like humans or other organisms in order to reproduce in the case of an infection a virus hijacks the host so and injects its genetic material internet host sound

then becomes a factory for making new viruses. many viruses can spread between species. the pathogens responsible for aids or may have traveled from apes to humans rodents can transmit hunter viruses for example. birds some flu viruses a vaccine may prevent infection. even though as in the case of flu the vaccine constant. he has to be adapted as the virus mutates. one type of antiviral vaccine protects against cervical cancer and sometimes viruses aren't pathogens but helpless. certainly parvovirus is for example target tumor cells without damaging surrounding healthy cells researchers are hoping to use them to develop a viral therapy to treat glioblastoma a highly aggressive brain cancer. viruses

cause many diseases like hiv aids needles and hepatitis but some viruses fight disease these spec to me if ages in vain bacteria viruses are made up of the genome within a casing bacteria are more complex and mostly much larger viruses contrie produce on their own they need to hijack bacteria or other organisms to do so and that is key to their potential role in medicine. these young scientists are reviving an old method biotechnology students i am diner and her team are using bacteriophages known informally as phases to combat bacteria. yet at the same age is a virus and the natural enemy of bacteria. for fate is

a naturally occurring and can be found wherever there are bacteria. in the audience of water for example in soil but also in the human body and these phages can only infect specific bacteria not human cells that's why they can be used to treat bacterial infections. a fish only targets a single species of bacteria so the researchers require a whole range of them so far they've isolated them from the environment in a complex process last minutes employer hands in our project we've identified collected and characterized multiple phage variants. as standards these are going to be used to infect and kill different species of bacteria. than. bacteria phages were discovered in 1917 by a french canadian microbiologist felix to. recognize their potential to fight

infectious diseases in the 1920 s. international pharmaceutical companies began making fades cocktails but the advent of antibiotics which were cheaper to make and more widely applicable soon displaced phage therapy until its recent read discovery but the students here need funding if their work is going to progress and big pharma isn't interested. for a start on intellectual property is hard to secure faith is over and then to successfully apply phage therapy you have to keep slightly modifying the phages in the course of the sarah pay. what if it's that sort of dynamic treatment isn't possible given current laws you need new clinical trials for every faith variant i. fish therapy is also patient specific and that means that for now at least it's not

economically viable. that terry if ages could be used to come back to sturdy and difficile and listeria which can contaminate fish meat and dairy products and cause a life threatening disease in humans. some strains of e. coli 9000 in food can also make a sick. kid fate has one day be used safely across the food industry to cleanse produce and products of certain bacteria. scientists involved in in the netherlands are researching how to fight tiny but dangerous organisms with even tinier organisms. the company my crew us develops bacteria phages. they are viruses that target specific bacteria. the cheesemaker wants to find out if ages can help make his products safer.

to phages are grown in liquid bacteria cultures that allow them to multiply rapidly . the bacteria are the same as the ones that they want to get rid of and the cheese phage is our natural enemies of bacteria micro supplies its customers with phage is to fight listeria and some another bacteria. this is how they do it. in the facial latches onto the surface of a bacterium and injects its d.n.a. into us using list the bacteria to replicated c.n.a. producing dozens of new phages eventually they calls the bacterial cell to burst releasing new phages that then infect understory more bacteria. when the micro also researchers investigate whether their faces could help improve food manufacturers safety standards they always follow the same procedure they take to samples of contaminate them with the bacteria they want to destroy. in the u.s.

a listeria outbreak linked to apple's claims. number of lives. one of these contaminated products is sprayed with water to control samples. the other is sprayed with bacteria phages. the scientists take swabs from the products put them on plates containing nutrient. and leaving to incubate for 24 hours. the project leader is impressed by his faith his determination the fact that this big features are brilliant because they're so specific they only destroy a certain strain of bacteria when you have good bacteria like those in cheese and yogurt they won't be destroyed so features can be used in a very targeted way that's. phages are also being used in medicine to treat bacterial skin infections for example takes just a few days for symptoms to improve significantly. after an incubation

period of 24 hours the listeria samples are examined by the scientists a lot of bacterial colonies are formed in the control sample and only a few in the fade sample a few shouldn't non-form as there are only a 10th as many as in a control sample now you could destroy 10 times more bacteria if you used 10 times as many phases but the question is is that really necessary the food industry is extremely hygiene and clean the risk of listeria contamination is minimal if you destroy a 90 percent of the bacteria that risk is even smaller and the food safer. phages could soon be used in germany too in sausage factories the casing is made from animal got could be impregnated with the bacteria killing biases the faces would remain on the surface of the food and act as a line of defense to keep out bacteria that would also be useful in the production

of smoked fish if microbiologist buyer is. a researcher at the university of hoenheim in strict got we asked him whether phages could also pose a danger. one type of phage called temperature does not immediately force its bacterial host to produce a new phase generation instead it integrates its genome into the out of the bacterium. and the bacterium reproduces it also replicates the virus genome at the same time it's a very elegant method of genetic reproduction but it also makes this sort of phage potentially dangerous because when the viruses are finally released they can also transfer part of the bacterial genome of their host including genes for antibiotic resistance or toxins to other bacteria if it's legal in this way it's well known that bacteria phages can spread factors such as virial and genes or resistance genes and that could also possibly happen if they are used in the food industry but

these kind of faces temperate phages which can integrate their genome into the genome of their host bacterium wouldn't be used in the food industry. that sector would focus on phages that really only destroy bacteria. and there the likelihood of transmission is very very small. so in the future viruses in food could actually be good for us that's an idea that will definitely take some getting used to. many kinds of bacteria are beneficial some live in the soil and in hans it's quantity bacteria are present in most habitats in desert sands and. it is thought that they make up 3 courses of all known species of forms of. blunt down ground where they congregate in vast numbers. and for the most past they're very

welcome. little alexis is just a few hours old he arrived by says arry inception interventional birth could have swallowed some of his mother's bacteria as he passed through the birth canal and dr fleming was providing the newborn with maternal bacteria an alternative way. visits the sort of. odd as we tried to do at the request of the parents is to collect bhajan of fluids from the mother in swap the baby's mouth with industry into the foster home the idea behind this is to pass good luck tyria from the mother to her infant of skin to bottle. this should only be done when the mother is completely healthy or it could harm the baby studies show that maternal bacteria that colonize the baby during birth are important for the child's health breastmilk also plays a key role. the clinic has set up

a bank of breast milk donors for mothers who can't breastfeed breast milk contains the bacteria an infant needs for a healthy gut micro biome. but as we grow up we eat things that aren't necessarily good for us like burgers and fizzy drinks can too much unhealthy fast food impact our gut flora and even our psyche. these researchers think it can i took far as easy and after mitt haasan from the austrian university of droughts are observing the behavior of mice fed on a poor diet they're giving their test myself either healthy grains in dried grass or the special feed that accounts for 60 percent of its calories similar to fast food after 8 weeks the scientists examine the behavior of the mice i top that's one of the green mice into a cage it hasn't been in before it eagerly explores its new environment.

then comes the fast food mouse who's put on quite a lot of weight it has little desire to move which is a sign of depression the fast food mice are also not very sociable unlike the grain fed subjects they prefer to be alone away from their fellow mice. an examination of their feces reveals drastic changes in the gut bacteria of the fast food mice could this be the reason for their behavior. to suppressing steinle microbial we will use antibiotics and this is study we are planning to do if the depression like behavior disappears in the my is receiving antibiotics this means that exists it's not in the micro biome is necessary for the development of end of the person like behavior. and that's not the only

type of food that's thought to affect the gut. foods and drinks containing artificial sweeteners are popular with people trying to lose weight. but. often it's not clear if a product contains sugar substitute and there is evidence that these could harm our micro biome. as part of an experiment i will be a bookie manner and julie vine bag will drink 12 saturates of saccharin every day for a week the israeli study hopes to find out whether or not this sweetener affects our intestinal flora and with our health you never know what's good for you and especially that in my family i know if we have a day of beauty of everyone to know what's good for me for 3. both women are examined at the weitzman institute in israel. the researchers want to see how their

health changes over the week including whether or not the sweetener impacts their blood sugar they are fitted with a sensor on the upper arm the device will measure their blood sugar levels throughout the next 7 days. the women are told to eat as they normally would so as not to skew the results and to enter everything they eat into a nap. dr york times u.s. believes that sweeteners do have an influence on intestinal bacteria to find out he's asked the test subjects to provide stool samples. he identifies the different types of gut bacteria in the lab and the results show that the diversity decreases in most subjects. when the guts material is just sort of shows that they richly impacts the guts material we can detect looked area that are probably

killed by the. confines of that looked area and they're going to go up it can guess that baby they're using this of the fishes to today of the 2 women only one saw changes in her gut bacteria. and her blood sugar levels also deteriorated. before the test her blood sugar was normal but during the sweetener experiment the levels rose dramatically which can cause weight gain and disease more testing is needed to see whether sweeteners have this effect. but both women say they now plan to avoid them. if album is read why are great but maybe ok to. do you have a science question that you've always wanted answered it like we're happy to help out yes send it to us as a video text over oyster mail if we answer it on the show we'll send you a little surprise as a thank you can all just ask. and for more stories about the world of

science visit us on our website on twitter and facebook. that's all for today the next time on tomorrow today we'll go exploring in one of europe's few remaining old growth forests. and build a company an expedition that's investigating why build in its habitats are so important. until then good bye.

this state of emergency is the new normal. people around the world are documenting these traumatic times. they're keeping a corona diary. and welcoming us into the house. they let us get

as up close and personal as the pandemic will allow. 15 minutes on t w. like we were. when we were. 80 percent of americans at some point in our lives will experience a tight ship that listen. to. the minds. beethoven is for me. is for. beethoven is for him. is for. beethoven is for. beethoven is for everyone. in towson 2020. 150th anniversary here on d

w. i'm going crazy thing in all the time. how to handle our new allies in times of the corona pandemic d.w. reporter keep your job using flickers notes and she's looking for answers and thankfully with the help of many a few of them well. thank you bruce is not life as we know it up. in this together our new web series. frank food. international gateway to the best connection self road and rail. located in the heart of europe you are connected to the home will. experience outstanding shopping and dining offers and try our services. bialik gassed at

frankfurt airport city managed by from a bought. this is the job you news live from berlin if you need prepares to get back to business restaurants bars hairdressers and department stores are among the services reopening today after a 2 month quarantine the government warns the virus is still circulating and physical distancing rules need to be respected also coming up. brazil's president

turns out to greet his supporters who defied state home orders to rally behind them shouted most or not or is under pressure for downplaying the time to make as death sad.