I like to think of myself as more than just human. It’s not that I have super powers or robotic limbs, but rather that my body can be considered an ecosystem in itself. New research on the microscopic organisms living inside and on our bodies has painted humans as human/bacteria/fungi superorganisms. Such a shift in self-identity has made me reconsider the sterile, Western lifestyle that I was raised with. From hand sanitizer to antibiotics to processed foods — I find myself asking why have I been enlisted in this invisible war against germs, and when can peace accords begin?

Such questions were first borne by the Human Genome Project, an international, collaborative, biological experiment started in 1990 that aimed to sequence the entire human genome. When the project was imagined in the 1980s, researchers hypothesized that the human genome would be made of nearly 100,000 genes. The hypothesis reflected our own anthropocentric ideas of ourselves as magnificently complex organisms. The results of the project actually found that the human genome consists of about 20,000 protein-coding genes, which researchers have remarked is not too different from a fruit fly.

If our genomes are not as intricately complex as we once thought, then what accounts for the differences between humans and the creatures circling above our week-old trash bins? This question then spawned a research project called the Human Microbiome Project that is examining the organisms that exist within our body — sometimes called our “secondary biome” — that may be responsible for the complexity of our species.

Microbiologists around the world are beginning to sample and sequence the bacterial communities within our bodies to determine what a robust and balanced microbiota looks like. Because research and analysis in this field has just begun, scientists are wary to raise any definitive flags on the links between the human microbiota and health, environmental toxicology, medicine or food.

However, some overall trends are becoming clear that make us revalue conventional wisdom. The adage “You are what you eat” might soon be reworded to “You are what eats what you eat” when you consider that much of our diet is only beneficial if the bacteria inside our gut prefer it.

Researchers in Brussels have succeeded in reproducing inflammation in mice fed “junk food” similar to that of inflammation in obese individuals. The junk food diet feeds a select population of gut bacteria that thrive on those foods while essentially starving out other bacteria that thrive on food sources like fiber. The bacteria that are starved out in our junk food binges are often the ones that help maintain balance within our guts and digestive systems.

Additionally, researchers from Washington State University have evidence that supports that plants grown in soil with a rich microbiota will produce food that has more antioxidants and phytonutrients than their conventional counterparts. The controversy over the link between soil health and nutritional quality is well-placed, because it would support the argument that organic practices are not only better for the environment, but they are better for our health, too.

What if we extended the logic that “quality ingredients produce quality end products” to soil? Soil is unmistakably an ingredient in the production of our food. It is not merely a container or holding space from which the food bursts forth, but rather a vital component.

The work of the Human Microbiome Project and associated inquiries is pushing us to redefine the limits of ourselves. If the soil becomes part of the plant, and the plant becomes part of the microbes in our gut, then through the transitive property of equality, soil is a part of us.

It helps me to imagine my gut fauna as a social network. When I eat processed foods that lack a diversity of microbes, the bacterial party inside my body turns into one of those awkward gatherings with only a handful of attendees. But when I garden outside, interact with animals or eat fermented foods like yogurt and miso, I am essentially enlivening that same bacterial party with a diverse guest list and bumpin’ tunes.

To be invited to one of ELLEN PEARSON’S bacterial gut parties, email her at erpearson@ucdavis.edu.

I would love to be an artist. I would go to a pond with my easel and beret and I would oil paint still-lifes of the ladybugs and water lilies. I would also have to learn French and dye my hair jet black with short bangs. It would be the classiest version of myself that I could possibly attain.

Unfortunately, I can neither draw nor pull off jet-black hair without looking surprisingly similar to a vampire, so my dreams of being absolutely and utterly cultured are out the window. And in terms of art, because stick figures are about as good as it gets for me, I have found that fashion is a good middle point for my artistic endeavors. Someone else makes the art, and I get to piece it together and put it on display.

I have to admit I put a lot of value on what other people do and do not wear. Every morning, a person makes a decision on how the vast majority of people are going to perceive them. I personally know about 0.1 percent of people at UC Davis. That means that when I’m piddle-paddling around campus, 99.9 percent of people only know me based on what I’m wearing and how I present myself. What we put on tells others a surprising amount about our values, what we find important, what kind of a phase we are going through and our general aesthetic of life. Whether it’s actively choosing not to get nicely dressed up in the morning, needing to wake up at 5 a.m. to get everything in order or somewhere in between, the way we look is a big part of the impression we give to others.

I also think that certain outfits are drawn to certain books. When I see what someone wears, I often categorize them under a genre of literature. Not that I have done anything close to an experiment on this; it’s just that I often bring up the topic of books during conversations, so I’ve had plenty of opportunities to associate fashion with genre choices.

So, for everyone who wants to make assumptions about other people without getting to know them, here is my list of literary genres according to people’s fashion choices.

Exciting leggings: This person likes confusing books. She last read Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom and was one of the few people who knew what was happening the whole time. Her exciting leggings are an ironic metaphor for the banality of regular existence: in a world void of imagination, her leggings with intergalactic kittens contrast the sea of jeans and white T-shirts. Just like the twisted tale of a civil war patriarch, her leggings — and her outlook on life — are intense.

Clothes with holes/stains: Dude, he just finished Hesse’s Siddhartha and he’s realizing that his old attachment to early objects is really ruining, like, his vibe, you know? Everything is just so contrived and he wants to move past materialism and place greater importance on the real issues — like how to keep his kombucha from dying. Real talk.

Uggs with shorts: Whatever books these people read must not have any seasonal settings, because it seems as if they’ve never run across an explanation of winter, and how that’s different from a thing called summer. Or maybe they just have really cold feet and then really warm legs. I heard humans lose heat from their extremities, but I’m still pretty skeptical on the mismatched combination.

Super expensive clothes: This person just finished Tina Fey’s Bossypants and found it super relatable. She also just bought Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?. She’s really smart, but for whatever reason she just refuses to read substantive books. Not saying that Tina Fey isn’t substantive, it’s just that this person is selling herself short. She would probably like Bronte’s Wuthering Heights if she gave it a chance, but she won’t because the copy you gave her was from a thrift store and smells like old cigarettes.

Interesting glasses: After finishing Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, this guy couldn’t trust his girlfriend anymore because he was almost convinced she was a robot. Like his glasses, he’s a little strange, and he reads sci-fi because it fills his need for weirdness.

I hope that instead of relying on my very comprehensive list, you go and actually talk to these people before deciding a bunch of things about them. On the other hand, if during this conversation they tell you their favorite book is The Catcher in the Rye, let the judgment commence.

To make clothes out of books with EREN KAVVAS, you should email her at ebkavvas@ucdavis.edu.

Remember the day you found out you had been accepted into UC Davis? I do — it was a Friday afternoon and I was at work. I got the email and immediately freaked out. I couldn’t believe it had actually happened!

I decided to wait about a week to tell my parents. They had decided I needed to go to community college for a few years, so the least I could do was punish them with the old “I didn’t pass my last semester of community college classes — just kidding I actually got into UC Davis” fake-out.

Anyway, once they had both gotten over their “near heart attacks,” time felt like it flew by. I was packing, moving, taking classes, studying for finals and now I’m filing to graduate.

It’s been a wonderful whirlwind and has given me a lot to say.

Just like Grandpa at every Thanksgiving dinner, let me tell you some stories and give you some advice — here are some things you should and shouldn’t do once you’ve officially become part of a university system (whether it’s undergraduate or graduate).

1. Do come up with a really cool way to tell your parents you’ve been accepted, but also anticipate that telling them you’ve “failed some classes this semester or whatever” will lead to a pretty intense, and loud, lecture — even if you’re in a restaurant. And yes, that’s from personal experience.

2. Do join some clubs and find ways to get involved on campus. I was never particularly “school-spirited” in high school — though I do have some particularly horrifying high school Dance Team memories that may make me appear so — and I never assumed that would change once I got to college.

But it did. As soon as I found out I was accepted into UC Davis, I immediately tracked down a list of all the on-campus organizations and clubs.

I was so excited to actually have something school-related to be excited about.

Even as a senior, I love having that opportunity. UC Davis students are lucky to have access to tons of interest groups, intramural and club athletics and a huge Greek life. Take advantage of what’s around … which brings me to say,

3. Do utilize on-campus resources. Take a day to check out the Student Academic Success Center in the SCC, or the Student Health and Counseling Services website. Go to your professor’s office hours. Join the various Facebook groups. Why not?

You’ve got nothing to lose by going, and if your CCC was anything like mine, then surely you’ve already wasted time with stuff like this — except now, the difference is that it will actually help.

So don’t let those old CCC flashbacks stop you. Following on,

4. Don’t just think of UC Davis as a more difficult version of your CCC. Your CCC wasn’t just an improved version of your high school, or an extended version of your high school experience, so this won’t be like that.

5. Don’t waste too much of your time dabbling in different subjects. This may be the pot calling the kettle black, as I was the girl who planned to major in dance and English and minor in writing and take textiles and exercise bio classes — but still. You only have about two years here, and you don’t want to be cramming in the last few classes you need in your final quarters.

6. Don’t be all work and no play. Yes, UC Davis classes are incredibly difficult, and yes every student should get their money’s worth out of their education by putting in 100 percent effort all the time, but the experience is also part of the education.

Follow me for just a second … I’m not suggesting that you go out and party every night. BUT, if you’ve never ridden the (hungover) struggle bus (or in my case, the 8 a.m. Unitrans V Line) to class the day of a midterm or had a nervous breakdown because of a caffeine high, then you’re just not prepared for the real world.

To be more like SARAH MARSHALL’s grandfather by lending her some advice or telling her funny stories, email her at smmarshall@ucdavis.edu.

Thirteen years have gone by since Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman managed to escape from a maximum security prison in the city of Guadalajara — rumor holds of a daytime escape in the smelly depths of a laundry cart with the aid of prison employees. In that time we have seen a troubling, but favorable, détente among the Cartels and the federal government eschewed in favor of all-out violence and a near constant state of war in several regions of Mexico.

El Chapo (as he is known for his lowness in height — equivalent to “Shorty” in English), one of the primary actors in this Narco-Tragedy, met his fate this past Saturday as he was captured overnight in a hotel in the beach city of Mazatlán, in his home state of Sinaloa. Having been one of the world’s most wanted criminals, he rose to near legendary status as the head of the Sinaloa Cartel — one of the most profitable and equally ruthless drug operations the world had ever seen.

He had been on the run (I use this term loosely since staying in multi-million dollar mansions and cavorting with beauty queens isn’t exactly my idea of “on the run”) since his escape from prison in 2001.

The next 13 years were dominated by the nagging suspicions and conspiracy theories that such true crime tales provide. The dominant belief being that anyone with that kind of money could be hiding in any country, in any place on the face of the earth. Rumors circulated of a fortified compound in the Netherlands; DEA cases were financed almost exclusively on the belief that they would yield El Chapo’s hideaways in the United States. As it turned out, he was apprehended some 140 miles from the city of Culiacan, the headquarters of the Sinaloa drug cartel.

El Chapo gained, amid his growing infamy, a reverential following in certain circles of Mexican society. Among the poorest and those most attached to his humble rags to criminal riches story, a corrupted Robin Hood narrative took hold. It coupled itself with the merciless Tony Montana persona that he had taken on as the leader of the feared Sinaloa Cartel. Stories abound of his routine “generosity,” such as the ones wherein he picked up entire restaurant tabs as diners looked on at the small man who commanded such power. The cynic — a figure so ever-present in Mexican society, out of necessity — would see this for what it was: a de facto bribe among the many he doled out in his life — “I’ll pay for your dinner, as long as you acknowledge I was never here.”

Growing up, Guzman experienced firsthand the dispiriting poverty that millions of other Mexicans face in their lives. Selling oranges just to scrape enough money together for a family meal drove him to seek a way out of that life. But what might have been the story of a Sinaloan immigrant searching for a better life in the U.S. (among the millions of others) took a criminal turn and became the story of El Chapo. This only magnifies the Robin Hood appeal that some hold of him when you account for the fact that at his height Forbes magazine ranked him as No. 701 on their list of richest billionaires among a star studded cast of tech CEOs and energy tycoons.

Mexico is a country deeply bound to a historical pessimism that mediates most everything that happens in the country. The most wanted man in Mexico finally being re-captured will not serve to change that. If anything it has heightened the prominent status of the handmaiden to such a pessimism: a national skepticism. The fact that El Chapo’s capture has come about only a few days prior to a visit from President Obama is not something to be ignored in the eyes of many. As is the popular belief that his years as a successful fugitive from the law — eluding “close encounters” from federal forces dozens of times over the years — can’t be chalked up entirely to his cunning hide-and-seek technique. There’s more to this story than meets the media eye. That much is for certain.

If you hold any interest in the intersection of society and art as it relates to the drug trade, JORGE JUAREZ at jnjuarez@ucdavis.edu will be writing on the fascinating world of Narcocorridos in his next column. 

On March 1 at the Pavilion, ESPN2 will televise the UC Davis vs. UC Santa Barbara men’s basketball game. Aggies, it’s time to put your game face, or rather, your pre-game face, on.

At noon, an “ASUCD-sponsored tailgate” competition will take place at a designated area in front of the ARC parking lot. According to the competition’s Facebook event, student organizations will compete in throwing the best tailgate, with a $200 gift card to a local grocery store on the line. The event organizers “recommend 30 racks” and “shotgunning IS encouraged,” all the while being as “discrete [sic]” as possible.

What better way to show school spirit than by going YOLO with the Solo (red cups)?

Interestingly, ASUCD is explicitly sponsoring an event that touts for the consumption of alcohol on campus, as well as “working with the police so they are more lenient.”

Bear in mind that UC Davis is a “dry” campus (minus Gunrock Pub and the classes we have on beer brewing and viticulture). We don’t want to be buzzkills and we do love to have a drink or two or three; however, we don’t believe ASUCD should be advertising and supporting such an event while asking for other public events, such as Picnic Day, to be drug and alcohol-free.

Yes, Picnic Day is known as a family-friendly event. But historically, it is also known as a time to get friendly — very friendly — with the attendees. While there have been occasions when Picnic Day was almost canceled, the University and City of Davis have continued working together to advocate safe celebrating.

So, how exactly do the organizers plan on coordinating with UC Davis Police to promote a safe environment while tailgating, when football games are typically the only times tailgating is permitted? Do the organizers have permission from the University to host the competition at the ARC parking lot? How do they plan on preventing underage drinking? And who is giving the $200 away?

According to the UC Davis Policy and Procedure Manual (Section 21, Sales, Service and Consumption of Alcoholic Beverages), the approval for service of alcoholic beverages will not be granted in open areas, unless the event is deemed out of public view (the front of the ARC parking lot is quite public). Additionally, an event cannot have the consumption of alcohol as its primary focus (did we forget to mention that it’s a tailgate competition?).

We understand — we live in Yolo County and might as well live up to its name. But having ASUCD actively sponsor an event that involves alcohol consumption on campus is hypocritical and quite frankly, stupid.

ESPN2 is already doing UC Davis a favor by televising the game. We may as well do everyone a favor and play it safe.