While pills are more practical than injections or infusions, digestion in the stomach prevents many drugs from being taken orally. Better drug design could change this.
Constipation can occur when there’s a delay in digested food passing through your body and being expelled. It can also happen when your poo is too hard, often because it doesn’t contain enough water.
David Hu, Georgia Institute of Technology and Patricia Yang, Georgia Institute of Technology
New parenthood got our fluid dynamics experts thinking about what ends up in the diaper. They headed to the zoo and the lab to come up with a cohesive physics story for how defecation works.
The process of passing a bowel motion is more complicated that you might think.
Chakrapong Zyn/Shutterstock
Pauline Hanson’s concern about the ATO installing squat toilets to cater for its increasingly diverse workforce has prompted debate about the best way to go to the toilet: sitting or squatting.
Pandas are bears – but two million years ago they stopped eating meat. Their digestive systems have not yet adapted, though. Do upset stomachs make panda pregnancy more difficult?
For years, we’ve known that brain activity can affect our gut.
amanda tipton/Flickr
Could it be that in some cases, changes in the gut are actually driving mood disorders rather than the other way around? Mounting evidence suggests this is likely to be the case.
Threadworm infection is common but it’s often asymptomatic.
Ayaka Darkly/Flickr
Intestinal worms (or helminths) are multicellular parasites that live inside the gut. When mature, they can generally be seen with the naked eye. In developing countries with poor sanitation, the most…
Allergic reactions to food have dramatically increased over the past 10 to 20 years.
Dan Peled/AAP
Reema Rattan, The Conversation and Alexandra Miller, The Conversation
Changing the bacteria in the gut could treat and prevent life-threatening allergies, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal today. “These…
About 40% of people produce smelly gas because of a certain bacteria in their bowels.
HyoJung Kim
To understand why we fart, you need to know something about the volume of gases produced in the bowels first. Imagine how much space 25 litres of gas would occupy – about one third of the interior of a…
Research Fellow University of Notre Dame Australia; Adjunct Fellow (National Institute of Complementary Medicine), Western Sydney University, University of Notre Dame Australia