Nature Magazine – April 11, 2024: The latest issue cover features the environmental challenges now facing insect populations, with climate change emerging as a key factor whose influence has potentially been underestimated…
The New York Review of Books (December 7, 2023 Issue) – The latest featuresA Fallen Artist in Mao’s China – Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow; Gut Instincts – Recent books about the importance of the microbiome have driven many patients to fixate on the idea of “gut health.” Are they right to do so?; Prelude to Empire – Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels, whether set in German East Africa or the United Kingdom, never cease to demonstrate how the minutiae of people’s lives have been affected by European colonialism…
Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow, a fictionalized account of the life of the actress Sun Weishi, depicts the hypocrisy of the Communist elites and the fate of those who embraced new ideals after the revolution.
The Woman Back from Moscow: In Pursuit of Beauty by Ha Jin
This book will be denounced in Beijing. Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow is a novel based on the life of Sun Weishi, an adopted daughter of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, whose brilliant mind and intensive study in Moscow of the Stanislavski acting method brought her to the pinnacle of China’s theatrical world during the Mao years. Her beauty and effervescent personality attracted powerful men—not only Zhou, who doted on her, but also Lin Biao, the Chinese Communist Party’s leading general, who divorced his wife in order to propose marriage to her (unsuccessfully), and Mao, who apparently raped her during a long rail trip. She had several other suitors and eventually married the film star Jin Shan.
Right before their colonoscopies, with the stress of a bowel prep still rumbling in their bellies and a mental image of the procedure beginning to sharpen, some patients will ask me why I chose a career in gastroenterology: “What made you interested in this?” The reason I usually give is that you could go all your life without a heart problem, or a lung problem, or a kidney problem, but not without a bit of nausea, constipation, or abdominal pain. The work of digestion is part of the rhythm of our daily lives, I tell them, which helps my work feel similarly immediate.
New Scientist Magazine (November 4, 2023): This issue features How healthy are you really? – New tests to give you the answer; The origins of Life; Machine Unlearning – Can we ever teach an AI to forget?; Moths that mimic spiders; Did wind help sculpt the Sphinx; and more…
IN THE LATE 2000s, Rachel Carmody was spending a lot of time counting calories. An anthropology graduate student at Harvard, she was studying whether cooking changed the number of calories the gut can extract from food. When humans invented cooking thousands of years ago, she and her advisor Richard Wrangham wondered, had they opened the door to a new source of energy?
DURING THE past two decades, the number of annual cancer deaths in the United States has fallen by 27 percent, a remarkable improvement driven by new precision diagnoses and treatments tailored to individual patients. Today, oncologists can detect cancer in its earliest stages and deliver drugs that enlist the patient’s own immune system to improve their odds of survival. Yet cancer remains the second deadliest disease in the United States, claiming more than 600,000 lives every year. Its persistence underscores the urgent need for a deeper understanding of how cancer interacts with the body. Assistant professor of neurology Humsa Venkatesh believes she may have found a promising new pathway for highly effective cancer treatments in the most unexpected of places: the human brain.
New Scientist Magazine (October 7, 2023): This issue features ‘You And Your Microbiome’; How the microbiome changes our idea of what it means to be human; The best way to care for your microbiome to keep it healthy as you age; and more…
As 2022 enters its final weeks, we look back on the past 12 months through the lens of Nature’s 10 — ten people who helped to shape science during the year. The cover takes its inspiration from the stunning images that have so far emerged from the James Webb Space Telescope. Launched on Christmas Day 2021, the telescope sent its first image back to Earth this summer and has since provided astronomers with views of the Universe in unprecedented detail.
The microbiota is a dynamic community that evolves through the lifetime of an individual, being influenced by multiple factors. Nutrition is essential in the process of establishing a healthy gut microbiome, with a key role of breastfeeding in early months, and important role of diverse diet to stimulate maturation of diverse gut microbiome.
Prebiotics, probiotics and synbiotics are key tools to boost the development of an age-appropriate microbiota and its related benefits, like healthy immune development and a basis for a resilient microbiota throughout life.