Every day, millions of people take probiotics – preparations containing live bacteria that are meant to fortify their immune systems, prevent disease, or repair the adverse effects of antibiotics. Yet the benefits of probiotics have not really been medically proven. It is not even clear if probiotic bacteria really colonize the digestive tract or, if they do, what effects the colonies have on humans and their microbiomes – the native bacteria in their guts. Now, in two back-to-back reports published in Cell, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science show – in both mice and in humans – that a preparation of 11 strains of the most widely used probiotic families may sometimes be less than beneficial for the user and their microbiome.
September 06, 2018
Probiotics, hailed by some as a cure for all kinds of digestive ailments and recommended by many GPs alongside antibiotics, may not be as universally beneficial for gut health as previously thought. The gut microbiome is the sum total of all the micro-organisms living in a person’s gut, and has been shown to play a huge role in human health. New research has found probiotics – usually taken as supplements or in foods such as yoghurt, kimchi or kefir – can hinder a patient’s gut microbiome from returning to normal after a course of antibiotics, and that different people respond to probiotics in dramatically different ways.
September 06, 2018
Probiotics are packed into all sorts of pills and products promising to keep our guts healthy. But not only do most of the bugs not stick around in our bodies, they could, in fact, be harming us, researchers believe. As many as 3.9 million adults in the U.S. take prebiotic or probiotic supplements, according to recent estimates cited by the authors of two studies published back-to-back in the journal Cell. Users pop the pills in the hope of easing everything from gastrointestinal problems to fortifying the immune system, defending against infectious disease and preventing cardiovascular disease.
September 06, 2018
The quantum computers of the future will be able to perform computations that cannot be done on today’s computers. These may likely include the ability to crack the encryption that is currently used for secure electronic transactions, as well as the means to efficiently solve unwieldy problems in which the number of possible solutions increases exponentially. Research in the quantum optics lab of Prof. Barak Dayan at the Weizmann Institute of Science may be bringing such computers one step closer by providing the “quantum gates” required for communication within and between such quantum computers.
September 04, 2018
Last October, Aviv Regev spoke to a gathering of international scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science. For Regev, a computational and systems biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the gathering was also a homecoming of sorts. Regev earned her PhD from nearby Tel Aviv University in 2002. Now, 15 years later, she was back to discuss one of the most ambitious projects in the history of biology.
August 22, 2018
REHOVOT, Israel — One hot day this summer, 18-year-old Aleix Segui of Barcelona walked around an academic campus in this central Israeli city wearing a gray T-shirt with a mathematical equation on the front. The meaning of the shirt’s cryptic message would be lost on most people, but Segui’s new friends in a unique Israeli summer science program easily got the esoteric mathematical joke.
August 21, 2018
Cosmos magazine reports on Prof. Ilan Koren’s research showing that the planktons’ fragmented exoskeletons aerosolize and enter the atmosphere, affecting cloud formation … and more.
August 16, 2018
Weizmann researchers collaborated with colleagues at Yale to uncover “a key element to how glasses transition into very resilient states.”
August 16, 2018
When the body makes use of nitrogen, it generates from the leftovers a nitrogenous waste substance called urea in a chain of biochemical reactions that take place in the liver, which are known as the urea cycle. As a result of this cycle, urea is expelled into the bloodstream, and is later excreted from the body in the urine. In previous research, Dr. Ayelet Erez of Weizmann’s Department of Biological Regulation showed that one of the enzymes in the urea cycle has been inactivated within many cancerous tumors, thus increasing the availability of nitrogen for the synthesis of an organic substance called pyrimidine which, in turn, supports RNA and DNA synthesis and cancerous growth.
August 2018
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