I'll accept that there's a lot to be learned from stool, but I don't think this explanation has much to do with it: “Have you ever figured how information-rich

I'll accept that there's a lot to be learned from stool, but I don't think this explanation has much to do with it: “Have you ever figured how information-rich your stool is?,” Larry asks me with a wide smile, his gray-green eyes intent behind rimless glasses. “There are about 100 billion bacteria per gram. Each bacterium has DNA whose length is typically one to 10 megabases—call it 1 million bytes of information. This means human stool has a data capacity of 100,000 terabytes of information stored per gram. That’s many orders of magnitude more information density than, say, in a chip in your smartphone or your personal computer. So your stool is far more interesting than a computer.”