Eating avocado as part of your daily diet can help improve gut health, a new study from University of Illinois shows. Avocados are a healthy food that is high in dietary fiber and monounsaturated fat. However, it was not clear how avocados impact the microbes in the gastrointestinal system or “gut.”

“We know eating avocados helps you feel full and reduces blood cholesterol concentration, but we did not know how it influences the gut microbes, and the metabolites the microbes produce,” says Sharon Thompson, graduate student in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at U of I and lead author on the paper, published in the Journal of Nutrition.

The researchers found that people who ate avocado e...

Chemists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) have developed a way to integrate liquids directly into materials during the 3D printing process. This allows, for example, active medical agents to be incorporated into pharmaceutical products or luminous liquids to be integrated into materials, which allow monitoring of damage. The study was published in “Advanced Materials Technologies”.

3D printing is now widely used for a range of applications. Generally, however, the method is limited to materials which are liquefied through heat and become solid after printing...

By monitoring the cosmos with a radio telescope array, an international team of scientists has detected radio bursts emanating from the constellation Boötes — that could be the first radio emission collected from a planet beyond our solar system.

The team, led by Cornell postdoctoral researcher Jake D. Turner, Philippe Zarka of the Observatoire de Paris — Paris Sciences et Lettres University and Jean-Mathias Griessmeier of the Université d’Orléans will publish their findings in the forthcoming research section of Astronomy & Astrophysics, on Dec. 16.

“We present one of the first hi...

The type and abundance of bacteria found in the mouth may be linked to lung cancer risk in non-smokers, finds the first study of its kind, published online in the journal Thorax.

Fewer species and high numbers of particular types of bacteria seem to be linked to heightened risk, the findings indicate.

Around one in four cases of lung cancer occurs in non-smokers and known risk factors, such as second hand tobacco smoke, background radon exposure, air pollution, and family history of lung cancer don’t fully explain these figures, say the researchers.

The type and volume of bacteria (microbiome), found in the mouth has been associated with a heightened risk of various cancers including those of the gullet, head and neck, and pancreas.

And the researchers wanted to find out i...