A new theoretical study comparing two of the most widely used polymer manufacturing methods — injection molding and FDM 3D printing — finds that neither process is universally superior, and that the right choice depends on a carefully considered combination of mechanical requirements, production volume, and budget constraints, with important implications for how engineers and manufacturers approach material selection and process planning for polypropylene parts.

A randomised controlled trial conducted in critically ill patients recovering from abdominal surgery found that a novel probiotic-enriched tube feeding formula reduced serious gut complications dramatically compared to standard enteral nutrition — with no cases of diarrhea recorded in the probiotic group, against a 60% rate in the control group — though the authors caution that the two formulas also differed in their nutritional composition, making it impossible to attribute the benefit to probiotics alone.

The trillions of microorganisms living in our intestine influence our health, from digestion and metabolism to immunity. Yet scientists still struggle to understand how these microbes shape these important physiological functions because gut microbiomes are extraordinarily complex, redundant, and dynamic. New technologies are therefore essential for advancing microbiome research. Researchers at the University of Vienna have now reported effective strategies for simultaneously measuring thousands of microbial and host proteins. The findings have been published in Nature Communications.

A new home test can detect type 2 diabetes or prediabetes with high accuracy. The test has been developed using artificial intelligence and large amounts of health data – and surprisingly, one of the steps involves measuring the length of your thigh.

A novel AI model can use information collected during routine sleep studies to identify patients’ long-term health risks, according to a new study published in Nature Communications. Developed by a multidisciplinary research team, the model uncovered hidden sleep patterns linked to risks including heart disease, cognitive decline and death. The findings also suggest that routine medical tests may contain substantially more physiologic information than current clinical practice extracts from them. In this case, AI identified meaningful signals in standard overnight sleep study data that are not captured by conventional summary measures alone.

Researchers at University of Tsukuba and the Japan Research Committee of the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare for Intractable Vasculitis have identified genetic factors associated with eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis (EGPA), a rare systemic inflammatory disease and a designated intractable disease in Japan. Their findings suggest that a variant in the thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP) gene increases disease susceptibility in Japanese and European populations, whereas specific HLA-DRB1 variants influence disease risk differently across populations. The study provides new insights into the genetic architecture of EGPA and advances our understanding of disease mechanisms in East Asian populations.

EPFL researchers have developed a nanopore sensor that distinguishes seven toxins from cyanobacteria blooms, and can detect one common toxin at concentrations far below World Health Organization guidelines.