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First Gut Microbiome Map for Personalized Food Responses

Summary: A recent study has mapped how molecules in food interact with gut bacteria, revealing why people respond differently to the same diets. By examining 150 dietary compounds, researchers found that these molecules can reshape gut microbiomes in some individuals, while having little effect in others.

This breakthrough could enable personalized nutrition strategies to better manage health risks. The findings offer a deeper understanding of the gut microbiome’s role in health and disease.

How Ceres Challenges Our Understanding of Icy Bodies

Ian Pamerleau: “We used multiple observations made with Dawn data as motivation for finding an ice-rich crust that resisted crater relaxation on Ceres. Different surface features (e.g., pits, domes and landslides, etc.) suggest the near subsurface of Ceres contains a lot of ice.”


Was the dwarf planet Ceres once an ocean world like Europa and Enceladus? If so, how did it become the cratered and icy world we see today? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as a team of researchers from Purdue University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) investigated the formation and evolution of the internal geological processes of Ceres and how this could help scientists better understand ocean worlds throughout the solar system.

“We think that there’s lots of water-ice near Ceres surface, and that it gets gradually less icy as you go deeper and deeper,” said Dr. Mike Sori, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University and a co-author on the study. “People used to think that if Ceres was very icy, the craters would deform quickly over time, like glaciers flowing on Earth, or like gooey flowing honey. However, we’ve shown through our simulations that ice can be much stronger in conditions on Ceres than previously predicted if you mix in just a little bit of solid rock.”

Medicine Nobel awarded for gene-regulating ‘microRNAs’

The 2024 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who discovered microRNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that help to control how genes are expressed in multicellular organisms.

MicroRNAs perform a multitude of tasks in complex organisms, from…


Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun identified a class of tiny molecules that have a crucial role in controlling gene expression.

Implausibility of radical life extension in humans in the twenty-first century

Abstract Over the course of the twentieth century, human life expectancy at birth rose in high-income nations by approximately 30 years, largely driven by advances in public health and medicine.


In the twentieth century, human life expectancy rose dramatically. Based on the past three decades of observed mortality in the eight countries with the longest-lived populations and in Hong Kong and the United States, Olshansky et al. propose that, without medical breakthroughs that slow aging, radical lifespan extension is implausible in this century.

Scientists are now planning to ‘grow’ ice and ‘refreeze’ Arctic Sea

An innovative way is being created by scientists which will help them in “growing” ice and doing the impossible job of “refreezing” the Arctic Sea as initial tests prove promising.

Scientists are aiming at pumping seawater over the frozen Arctic Ocean. They have carried out trials in the Canadian Arctic which have seen sea ice getting thickened successfully.

According to a report published in New Scientist, if no action is taken right now, the accelerating climate change will make the Arctic “ice-free in the summer in the 2030s” which will be disastrous for the planet.