Postcards to the fetus

I mentioned last week that a new book by Annie Paul likens a fetus’s experience in the womb to getting “biological postcards” from the world outside. Babble followed up their review of the book with a couple of excerpts.

One is on food, and I love that Paul doesn’t just parrot warnings about sushi but observes that setting up food as dangerous to a fetus, and the mother as responsible for that danger, has as much to do with our culture’s screwed-up attitudes about eating and motherhood as it does with biology. Taking the postcard view, a mom is sharing flavors (not to mention nutrients) with her little parasite.

The other one, on stress, is likewise fascinating. I’d love to hear the story of how stress went from “not on the list” of risk factors for pre-term birth to being considered a number-one cause of it. Meanwhile, the placenta breaks down some of the stress hormone, cortisol, but mild stress may be necessary for later cognition.

I just came across a study today showing that people who were in utero during a WWII famine in the Netherlands may have trouble with selective attention tasks as they get older. The authors think this means their cognition is declining faster than average, because people typically do worse on this test as they age. Previous studies on the “Dutch Famine Birth Cohort,” as this group is called, showed that they are more prone to heart disease and diabetes.

I have to wonder, in light of the “postcards from outside” hypothesis, whether being worse at selective attention means being better at something else. Could a supposedly poor score on the test reflect something like multitasking ability? And could that ability be adaptive in the face of periodic famines?

Linux kernel genomics, babyology, and the secret to lifting more weight without getting any stronger

1

A comparison of the Linux kernel’s system calls with the transcriptional network of E. coli shows two very different organizational structures. “Linux is middle-management heavy, whereas E. coli is workhorse heavy. … The authors conclude that the E. coli’s call graph evolved bottom-up, with system robustness being the main selective trait. In contrast, Linux evolved top-bottom, with reusability of the Workhorses being the main selective trait. Reusability and robustness are tradeoffs,” writes Iddo Friedberg.
[Byte Size Biology: Comparative functional genomics: penguin vs. bacterium]

2

“We do not know much about sleep in babies but it does not look like sleep in adults,” says one sleep researcher, about a recent study in which babies showed the ability to learn while asleep. Comatose adults can learn the same association (between a beep and a puff of air to the face) but the experiment doesn’t work on healthy adults, since they wake up. [New Scientist: Sleeping newborns are data sponges]

3

When you’re at the gym, cool your hands between sets and you might be able to lift more. The hypothesis is that the cooling makes you think you’re less fatigued. However it works, that’s just weird.  [Sweat Science: Cooling your palms enables you to bench press more weight]

4

Fetal cells stay in their mother’s body for years - maybe forever. Nancy Schute at SciAm writes that “Fetal cells also appear to migrate to injury sites and have been found in patients with thyroid and liver damage, where they had morphed into organ cells … A mother’s body might actually be recruiting the fetal stem cells to aid in healing.” Wow! [Scientific American: Beyond Birth]