By Jane Weaver

There's no question that humans are smelly creatures — from our stinky feet to our putrid arm pits. There's not much we can do except scrub with soap and mask our odors with deodorant.

But if the malodorous stench is coming from your mouth, scientists are closing in on the cause. Blame a bug —Solobacterium moorei, to be specific.

Researchers at the State University Of New York at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine have identified a tongue bacteria that they say is associated with severe bad breath, Reuters reported.

Not much is known about the bacteria strain, although the researchers said it originally comes from, gag, human feces.

So it seems Dr. Billy Goldberg was right after all when he blamed the "poop fairy" for bad breath (back when Body Odd was a podcast).

Halitosis can be a sign of a medical problem such as liver or kidney disease, but even when it's not that serious, it's embarrassing and distressing — and often equally awful for innocent bystanders. It can kill your love life and make life miserable for your co-workers.

In a small study of people with chronic bad breath and a group without, the researchers collected culture samples by scraping an area of the tongue's surface. They also used a halimeter (bad breath machine) to rank the participants' breath from "no appreciable odor" to "extremely foul." They found the S. moorei bacteria in every one of the participants who had halitosis. Only a few of the subjects who didn't have halitosis had the bacteria, and all of them had a gum infection, which can eventually cause halitosis.

Men were more likely to have the bacteria than women, although it wasn't clear why.

Most people worry about bad breath sometimes, although the researchers estimated that fewer than a third actually do have hard-core halitosis.

With the finding, the researchers are hoping that new treatments can be developed to help rid us of the stinky breath scourge. So maybe someday you'll be freed from constantly chewing breath mints or compulsively cupping your hands around your mouth and nose to see if you offend.

Regular bad breath is usually caused by volatile sulfur compounds, or simple bacteria. It's also connected to dry mouth or respiratory tract infections, sinus infections or gastrointestinal problems.

If you don't actually have S. moorei, but just want to get rid of simple morning mouth, there are some things you can do (and should, for the sake of fellow man).

Commercial mouthwashes don't do the trick for long, although brushing your teeth for several minutes and scraping your tongue helps. Drinking green tea may also help control it.
 
"You have bad breath" can be tough to say to someone you like. Maybe now it'll be easier: just say, "Excuse me, I think you have Solobacterium moorei. Would you like some gum?"

Vote: Have you ever told someone "You have bad breath?"

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Baseball hero Roger Clemens swore under oath during a grueling Congressional hearing Wednesday that he didn't use steroids during his phenomenal baseball career. "I've been accused of something I'm not guilty of," he defiantly told committee members. His words may have denied the claims by his former personal trainer, but his body was saying something else. At least that's what one body language expert thinks.

During the 4½-hour hearing, Clemens was agitated, he didn't make direct eye contact with the committee members and he even stumbled over the name of Brian McNamee, his chief accuser.

"The body doesn't lie, the voice doesn't lie," Lillian Glass told NBC's Peter Alexander Wednesday during the hearings. "When you look at Roger Clemens, you see a lot of lip licking… It's very consistent. He's very nervous….You see a lot of wrinkling of the forehead. He looks down. He's disconnected. That makes you question what's really going on with him."

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Former New York Yankee pitcher Roger Clemens couldn't keep his tongue in his mouth while testifying before Congress.

Glass was all praise for McNamee, who sat at the same table.

"McNamee was forward. He was ready. He was receptive … not defensive. He looked right at the people who were questioning him. He wasn't nervous." WATCH THE VIDEO

Glass claims that when people are lying they move their shoulders, clench their jaws, lick their lips and shuffle their feet.

But does showing anxiety really go hand-in-hand with lying? It's popular to talk about a person's shifty eyes or to assume that when someone is fidgety or nervous that they're not telling the truth. Dr. Simon Rego, licensed clinical psychologist at Montefiore Medical Center in New York isn't so sure.

"Certain movements or gestures like those may be more of an indication of anxiety or nervousness than lying per se," says Rego. "This type of lie detection seems analogous to polygraph tests. They don't really detect when someone is lying as much as when they are anxious."

Other experts say that tone of voice is more revealing than eye contact, although people who are telling the truth often stumble over their words. It's the practiced liar who tends to be the smooth talker, they say.

No one would accuse Clemens of being a smooth talker under questioning. His career is on the line, and as he said during the hearing, "I'm never going to have my name restored."

Still, it's not only the body language experts who didn't believe Clemens. Just 1 in 5 msnbc.com readers think the Rocket is telling the truth.

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By Jane Weaver, health editor

Hardly a week passes without scientists warning about some scary new germ.

Even if bird flu is now being called the pandemic that wasn't there are plenty of deadly bugs to worry about these days – drug-resistant staph infections, the return of bubonic plague  and a new, crippling mosquito-borne virus spreading worldwide that experts think is connected to global warming. There's even a mutated cold virus that's been killing young adults – mostly military personnel — over the last 18 months.

All the talk about those nasty pathogens may turn you into an obsessive, Purell-hoarding germophobe, but what about the infections that are simply more annoying than deadly?

In episode 40 of the Body Odd podcast, Dr. Billy Goldberg and Mark Leyner discussed the  most annoying infections that cause all kinds of misery and suffering, but don't really do serious damage or leave lingering problems. Let's see, there's yeast infection – the bane of many women's existence. Don't forget bladder infections, also known as cystitis, or athlete's foot.

Of course, anything can kill you, really, as Dr. Billy notes. "You can get complications from very simple things."

For Mark, jock itch is a major embarrassment. But, he says, "the infection that drove me absolutely crazy, that I live in mortal fear of ever getting again is – pink eye. You wake up and your eyes are stuck together and you look in the mirror and you get a chill. I had buckets of pudding pouring out of my eye. It's a particularly gruesome …infection."

Actually, pink eye, or conjunctivitis, is an infection caused by a wide range of viruses, bacteria and irritants. It's most common in children, but can affect anyone of any age.

Billy also mentions sore throat, sinus infections and skin rashes among his top annoying maladies. Talking about rashes prompted Billy to share a little medical humor. "The joke about dermatologists is, if it's wet, they dry it, if it's dry, they wet it, and if they don't know, they give it steroids," he says.

Mark thinks a person's list of annoying infections is a Rorschach test of who he or she is. What's on yours?

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