This is absolutely not true. In addition to participating in the fermentation of dietetic polysaccharides into simple carbs that can be absorbed and digested by the human metabolism, intestinal flora control the differentiation and proliferation intestinal epithelial cells and regulate protective mucus production.
Won’t work. The intensity of sunlight falls off as a square function of distance; at distances within Earth’s orbit there is sufficient sunlight incident to power spacecraft and (for a light enough vehicle) provide adequate constant impulse to alter the trajectory, but at distances of Jupiter solar intensity is only 4% of what it is at Earth, and beyond that it is barely more intense than the brightest stars in the sky. By the time you’ve gotten to the heliopause the impulse from the Sun is less than the drag that would be imposed by movement through the stellar medium. Even if this method of propulsion were feasible it would still not address the reliabily required for a space system that would have to operate decades without service or replacement and protection from radiation and erosive effects of high speed transit through unprotected space.
For my entry into this thread, I give you the Pysanka space habitat: I envision a large O’Neill “Island Three”-type cylinder made of both continuous wound fiber- and short fiber-reinforcedwater ice with a layer of water next to the inner wall surface, which would double both as a water reservoir and radiation shielding. “Land masses” would sit on top of this, either tied to a framework or just floating on top of the water. The thickness of the wall would be controlled by the temperature of the “ocean”, and any cracking or punctures of reasonable size would be filled by water from the reservoir, making such an object robust and more fail-safe than just a metal hull. The mass bulk of the ice and water would also prevent internal hazard from orbital debris or the occasional micrometeorite, absorbing the energy and ablating away.
Since you don’t have large strips of windows like the O’Neill concept you’d have to have a solar collector on one end (I think of it as “The Sunflower”) which is designed to face the Sun, and a large radiator on the other end which exhausts waste heat out to space (which is critically important, as excess heat will fill the “ocean”, resulting in heat transfer to the outer walls and eventually structural failure of the wall). The radiator could also be designed as a low efficiency thermal thruster to help keep the habitat aligned against precessive forces or make slow adjustments in orbit.
The upside of this is that it uses readily available and easily worked materials (ice, silicates) with only a moderate amount of prefabricated reinforcement, essentially no finished or refined metals or glass for the main structure, and it is more resistant to damage or radiation than more conventional steel habitats. It has the additional advantage of being able to be expanded; cut the hoop reinforcement in a few select places, give it more spin and let the hull “flow” outward in a carefully controlled fashion, chill the oceans a bit more, and voila, you have an expanding egg, to which you can then apply a new outer reinforcement wrap.
The downside is that there is a large minimum size this can be scaled to in order to maintain the necessary thermal equilibrium, and so it would require a substantial investment in terms of collecting all the necessary materials to get started, and would thus be unsuited for small scale space habitats. It would also be unsuited to high thrust applications, as the ice “hull” would tend to flow under continuous thrust. So the current utility is pretty much limited to speculation.
And you could make pretty colors by dying the water in bands. Just remember, now that it’s in the public domain, you can’t patent it.
Stranger