The human small intestine is an essential organ that helps us absorb nutrients and vitamins from food. It is an average of 6 meters long and is covered with millions of villi that are separated by ...

This story is part of a series exploring human anatomy and physiology complexities. Each story in this collection showcases discoveries reshaping our understanding of the body's inner workings, ...

Tourists visiting an unfamiliar city would have a hard time finding their way around if they were using nothing but a topological map, no matter how detailed. Most tourist maps, therefore, highlight ...

Research from an international team finds that the human gut is a site of rapid change, with recent and important deviations from other mammals, including our closest living relative, the chimpanzee.

The human gastrointestinal tract is in a constant state of flux; it hosts a diverse and dynamic community of microbes known as the gut microbiome, and is constantly exposed to things in the ...

Pediatric short bowel syndrome (SBS) is a debilitating condition resulting from substantial loss of functional small intestine 1. Despite advancements in patient care, individuals with SBS experience ...

This video explains how mechanical and chemical digestion break food down and how the small intestine’s adaptations increase ...

Taken together, we observed heterogeneity within the human intestinal tuft cell lineage. At steady state, the predominant subsets represent tuft-1 and tuft-2, which phenocopied the two previously ...

Microbiome research to date has been much like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. How much can be said about an elephant by examining just its tail? Researchers have studied what is most ...