The American College of Surgeons has released free, publicly available educational materials and a checklist to help people recognize potential warning signs of colorectal cancer and prepare for primary care visits.

Scientists have identified a new way to distinguish healthy guts from diseased ones and track how some illnesses progress by measuring how gut bacteria interact with one another.

According to a study published in Science, a collaboration between scientists at Rutgers University, Universidad de Granada in Spain and Princeton University found that healthy and diseased gut microbiomes behave like two distinct ecological states, driven not by individual microbes but by how entire bacterial communities compete and cooperate.