Quick links: reproductive & digestive tract edition

So much good stuff this week! A lot of these warrant their own posts but it’s a busy week for me so all I’ve got is the links. Better short than never:

Researchers turn off severe food allergies in mice by feeding them a modified form of the food they’re allergic to. This binds to a special receptor on immune cells in the digestive tract, apparently re-training the immune system.

Sneaky comb jellies suck prey into their mouths without the prey noticing. Neat!

Breaking news: somebody is finally looking at how (monkey) dads’ bodies and brains change when they have a kid. Plenty of this research has been done on moms in the past, of course.

Review of Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives. It seems a mom’s body sends signals to the baby to prepare him for life on the outside. If food is scarce, for example, his metabolism will be prepared for that. The author likens the phenomenon to “biological postcards from the world outside.”

Gene found for age-related macular degeneration. That’s a major cause of blindness in old folks. The gene, when working normally, protects the cells of the macula with signposts that tell the immune system not to destroy them.

Pictures of a python digesting a rat. No comment, except this is awesome.

Underwire bras make you poop less: What bewilders me is that every outlet that reported this story used pictures of women in bras, but none used pictures of poop.

An oxytocin nose spray may help people with autism or other disorders connect with others socially. I know that when I had to take methergine, an oxytocic drug, it made me super happy and talkative. This comment on the article makes some good points (with pubmed references!) about the effects of oxytocin, a link to autism, and the ethics of this kind of therapy.

Antibiotics play hell with gut flora - you probably could have guessed, but the germs living in your intestines are important to your health and digestion - and killing them off with antibiotics is wiping out a whole ecosystem. You might not get some of those species back, afterwards. Tying that into our other theme for today: I wonder how routine antibiotics during birth (given as a “better safe than sorry” sort of measure) affect the gut flora of the newborn. More about gut flora & babies here. This is an area I’d love to dig into more.

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1. Beth Skwarecki » Postcards to the fetus — October 4, 2010 @ 12:32 pm

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