The new breath test opens up new opportunities to measure gastrointestinal health and function.

Small children may one day avoid invasive, painful and often traumatic oesophageal tube-testing for gut damage and coeliac disease with a new method of simply blowing into a glass tube to provide effective diagnoses. Research describes an exciting new breath test that could have global implications on how to detect gastrointestinal damage. Read more.

Researchers at the University of Bradford have shown a link between the diet of Roman Britons and their mortality rates for the first time, overturning a previously-held belief about the quality of the Roman diet. Using a new method of analysis, the researchers examined stable isotope data (the ratios of particular chemicals in human tissue) from the bone collagen of hundreds of Roman Britons, together with the individuals’ age-of-death estimates and an established mortality model. Read more.

In an underground vault enclosed by six-foot concrete walls and accessed by a rolling, 25-ton concrete-and-steel door, University of California, Berkeley, students are making neutrons dance to a new tune: one better suited to producing isotopes required for geological dating, police forensics, hospital diagnosis and treatment.

Dating and forensics rely on a spray of neutrons to convert atoms to radioactive isotopes, which betray the chemical composition of a substance, helping to trace a gun or reveal the age of a rock, for example. Hospitals use isotopes produced by neutron irradiation to kill tumors or pinpoint diseases like cancer in the body.

For these applications, however, only nuclear reactors can produce a strong enough spray of neutrons, and there are only two such reactors west of the Mississippi.

As an alternative, a team including UC Berkeley students has built a tabletop neutron source that would be relatively inexpensive to reproduce and eventually portable and also able to produce a narrower range of neutron energies, minimizing the production of unwanted radioactive byproducts. Read more.

Understanding this process could lead to innovative and improved therapies

Prostate cancer often becomes lethal as it spreads to the bones, and the process behind this deadly feature could potentially be turned against it as a target for bone-targeting radiation and potential new therapies. Read more.