Climate change flaunted its deadly side during the 2003 European heat wave, which killed over 70,000 people across the continent. In London and Paris alone, global warming led to 570 more heat-related deaths than would be expected without human-caused warming, researchers estimate in the July Environmental Research Letters.
Daniel Mitchell of the University of Oxford and colleagues ran thousands of climate simulations with and without the influence of greenhouse gases emitted by humans. The simulations showed that 70 percent of heat-related deaths in central Paris during the heat wave and 20 percent in Greater London could be attributed to climate change. The study is the first to quantify climate change’s role in the event and will inform policy makers on the risks climate change poses, the researchers say.
Even if you’ve never lived in rattlesnake territory, you know what the sound of a snake’s rattle means: Beware! A shake of its rattle is an effective way for a snake to communicate to a potential predator that an attack could result in a venomous bite.
For more than a century, scientists have posited how that rattle might have evolved. The rattle is composed of segments of keratin (the same stuff that makes up human hair), and specialized muscles in a snake’s tail vibrate those segments rapidly to create the rattling sound. The rattlesnake’s rattle is a trait that evolved only once in the past and is now found in only two closely related genera of snakes that live in North and South America. But plenty of other species of snakes also vibrate their tails as a warning to potential predators.
Bradley Allf and colleagues at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill think that the tail vibration and the evolution of the rattle might be connected. They gathered 155 snakes of 56 species — 38 species from the Viperidae family, which includes rattlesnakes, and 18 species from the largest snake family, Colubridae — from museums, zoos and private collectors. Working with captive snakes let them control conditions, such as temperature, that can affect tail vibration. With each snake, one of the researchers tried to get it to behave defensively by waving a stuffed animal in front of it. The team videotaped the snakes as they vibrated their tails, or not.
The researchers plotted the snakes’ tail vibration duration and rate against how closely related a species was to rattlesnakes. One group of snakes that lives in the Americas was taken out of the analysis because its tail vibrations were so similar to those of rattlesnakes; it appears that these species are mimicking the dangerous snakes that live near them (not a bad strategy for survival). Among the rest of the snakes analyzed, those that were more closely related had tail behavior that was more similar to that of rattlesnakes.
“Our results suggest that tail vibration by rattleless ancestors of rattlesnakes may have served as the signal precursor to rattlesnake rattling behavior,” the researchers write in the October issue of the American Naturalist. “If ancestral tail vibration was a reliable cue to predators that a bite was imminent, then this behavior could have become elaborated as a defensive signal.”
Allf and his colleagues propose a couple of ways that this could have happened. Perhaps snakes that made noise with their tails were better at startling predators, and this may have prompted such noise-making tail features to spread and eventually become refined into what is now a rattle. Or maybe snakes that shook their tails longer and faster developed calluses of keratin. If these calluses provided better warning, that may have somehow evolved into a rattle.
“Thus, the rattlesnake rattle might have evolved via elaboration of a simple behavior,” they conclude.
A barrage of rocks hitting the solar system 3.9 billion years ago could have dramatically reshaped Earth’s geology and atmosphere. But some of the evidence for this proposed bombardment might be shakier than previously believed, new research suggests. Simplifications made when dating moon rocks could make it appear that asteroid and comet impacts spiked around this time even if the collision rate was actually decreasing, scientists report the week of September 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Many scientists think that a period of relative calm after Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago was interrupted by a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment, when rocky debris pummeled Earth and the other planets. The moon’s cratered surface holds the best evidence for this event; scientists have measured radioactive decay of argon gas trapped inside moon rocks to date when craters on the moon were formed. Many of the hundreds of moon rocks analyzed appear to be around 3.9 billion years old. That suggests the number of rocks hitting the moon suddenly spiked at that time — evidence for a Late Heavy Bombardment.
Geochemists Patrick Boehnke and Mark Harrison of UCLA took a second look at the data. Measuring argon from the same rock at different temperatures leeches the gas from different parts of the rock’s crystals; if all those age values align, researchers can be relatively confident they’re getting an accurate age. But many of the lunar samples previously analyzed gave different ages depending on the temperature at which their argon content was measured.
Instead of colliding sharply once and sitting undisrupted, which might give more uniform age data at different temperatures, these lunar rocks were probably tossed around and slammed into other rocks many times, Boehnke says. So assigning one impact age to those rocks might be an oversimplification.
Boehnke and Harrison created a model to simulate how this simplification might affect the patterns seen when scientists looked at the ages of many rocks. The team modeled 1,000 rocks and assigned each one an impact age. Some rocks hadn’t been knocked around and had a clear impact age. Others had been smashed repeatedly, which changed their argon content and obscured the actual impact age assigned by the model.
The model assumed that asteroid collisions decreased over time — that more of the rocks were older and fewer were newer. But still, collision ages appeared to spike 3.9 billion years ago thanks to the fuzziness introduced by the disrupted rocks. So the apparent asteroid increase at that time might just be a quirk due to the way the argon dating data were compiled and analyzed, not an indication of something dramatic actually happening. “We can’t say the Late Heavy Bombardment didn’t happen,” Boehnke says. Nor do the results invalidate the technique of argon dating, which is used widely by geologists. Instead, Boehnke says, it points to the need for more nuanced interpretation of lunar rock data.
“A lot of data that shows this complexity is being interpreted in a very simplistic way,” he says.
Planetary scientist Simone Marchi says he finds the paper “certainly convincing in saying that we have to be very careful” when interpreting argon dating data from lunar samples.
But there’s other evidence for a Late Heavy Bombardment that doesn’t rely on argon dating, such as dating from more stable radioactive elements and analysis of overlapping craters on the moon, says Marchi, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. He supports the idea of a gentler Late Heavy Bombardment 4.1 billion years ago, instead of a dramatic burst 3.9 billion years ago (SN: 8/23/14, p.13).
Other recent work has also pointed out limitations in argon dating, says Noah Petro, a planetary geologist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who wasn’t part of the study. Collecting new samples and analyzing old ones with newer techniques could help scientists update their view of the early solar system. “We’re at this point with the moon right now where we’re finding the limitations of what we think we know.”
The first time Jessica Cantlon met Kumang at the Seneca Park Zoo, the matriarch orangutan regurgitated her previous meal right into Cantlon’s face. “I was retching,” Cantlon recalls. “It was so gross.” But Cantlon was there to kick off a series of behavioral experiments, and her students, who would be working with Kumang regularly, were watching. “Does anyone have any towels?” she remembers asking, knowing she had to keep her cool.
Cantlon’s deliberate nature and whatever-it-takes attitude have served her well. As a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Rochester in New York, she investigates numerical thinking with some of the most unpredictable and often difficult study subjects: nonhuman primates, including orangutans, baboons and rhesus macaques, and — most remarkably — children as young as age 3. Both groups participate in cognitive tests that require them, for example, to track relative quantities as researchers sequentially add items to cups and to distinguish between quantities of assorted dots on touch screens. The kids also go into the functional MRI scanner where, in a feat impressive to parents everywhere, they lie completely still for 20 to 30 minutes so Cantlon and colleagues can get pictures of their brains. “She takes steps carefully, and she thinks very hard about where she is going,” says Daniel Ansari, a developmental cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, who is familiar with Cantlon’s work. “She goes for the big questions and big methodological challenges.”
The central question in Cantlon’s research is: How do humans understand numbers and where does that understanding come from? Sub-questions include: What are the most primitive mathematical concepts? What concepts do humans and other primates share? Are these shared concepts the foundation for fancier forms of mathematical reasoning? In addressing these questions, Cantlon draws on a wide range of methods. “Very few people can combine work on cognitive skills — studies from the point of view of behavior — with imaging work in very young children, and very few people do that same combination in nonhuman primates,” says Elissa Newport, who chaired the brain and cognitive sciences department at Rochester for more than a decade and now leads the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown University.
As a graduate student, Cantlon determined that neuroimaging studies would add an independent source of data to the cognitive questions under exploration in Elizabeth Brannon’s lab at Duke University. So she identified collaborators and taught herself functional MRI. “By the time she graduated, she had something like four dissertations’ worth of work,” says Brannon, now of the University of Pennsylvania.
In the years since, Cantlon has identified a type of “protocounting” in baboons; they can keep tabs on approximate quantities of peanuts as researchers increase those quantities (SN Online: 5/17/15). In her most attention-grabbing work, Cantlon studied activity in the brains of children while they watched Sesame Street clips that dealt with number concepts — an unexpected success that proved everyday, relatively unaltered stimuli can yield meaningful data. An ongoing study in Cantlon’s lab seeks to find out how monkeys, U.S. kids and adults, and the Tsimané people of Bolivia, who have little formal education, distinguish between quantities. Do they determine the number of dots presented on the computer screen or do they rely on a proxy such as the total area covered by the dots? The work explores how the brain understands everyday concepts, but it could also inform strategies in math education. “If we understand the fundamental nature of the human brain and mind, that might give us a better insight into how to communicate number concepts to kids,” Cantlon says.
Growing up outside of Chicago, Cantlon enjoyed digging deep into a topic and becoming an expert. She and a friend turned themselves into ice skating superfans one summer, reading up on the Olympic skaters and checking videos out of the local library. In another project, Cantlon decided to learn everything possible about the price of gold. When she moved to a school where she could no longer take Latin, she taught and tested herself. Despite the fact that neither of her parents went to college, no one ever questioned that Cantlon would go. She studied anthropology as an undergraduate at Indiana University in Bloomington. “I was interested in the question of where we come from,” Cantlon says. “I was interested in studying people.” During college, she went on an archaeological dig in Belize and studied lemurs in Madagascar. For a year after graduation, she observed mountain gorillas in Rwanda, detailing their behavior every 10 minutes. “What they were thinking was something that was constantly on my mind,” she says. “‘How are we similar? Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’” Though she might have succeeded in any number of careers, she wanted exploration to be a big part of her life: “I don’t think doing a less exotic type of work would have been as satisfying.”
Today, Cantlon, who at age 40 recently earned tenure, doesn’t spend much time in the field. And even in the lab, she leaves much of the data collection to her graduate students and research assistants. “At this point, we are a well-oiled system,” she says, referring to the brain scan studies on kids. To make the kids comfortable, Cantlon’s team does trial runs in a mock scanner, describing it as a spaceship and providing “walkie-talkies” for any necessary communication. To keep them interested, the researchers treat it as a team activity and offer a ton of positive reinforcement, with prizes including Lego sets and a volcano-making kit. The kids receive pictures of their brains, which typically interest the parents most. The older of Cantlon’s two daughters, a 5-year-old extrovert named Cloe, has participated in behavioral tests and will no doubt be excited for her first brain scan.
The Sesame Street study was in part inspired by a paper by Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist at Princeton University who imaged the brains of volunteers while they watched The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. To better understand brain development, Cantlon wanted to see how brain activity compared in kids and adults exposed to math in a natural way. Of particular interest was a region called the intraparietal sulcus, or IPS, thought to play a role in symbolic number processing. The results, reported in PLOS Biology in 2013, showed that kids with IPS activity more closely resembling adults’ activity performed better on mathematical aptitude tests.
“It was the clearest, cleanest — did not have to come out this way — result,” Cantlon says.
Cantlon is notable for her diverse set of tools, says Steve Piantadosi, a computational neuroscientist and colleague at Rochester. “But she has something which is even more powerful than that. If you have different hypotheses and you want to come up with the perfect experiment that distinguishes them, that is something she is very good at thinking about. She is a great combination of critical and creative.”
To add another methodological approach, Cantlon next plans to collaborate with Piantadosi to develop computational models that explain the operations the brain performs as it counts or compares quantities. She would also like to add data analyses from wild primates into the mix. When researchers talk about the evolution of a primitive number sense, they often speak about foraging activity — identifying areas of the forest with more food, for example. But Cantlon wonders whether social interactions also require some basic understanding of quantities.
As for a recent question from a colleague about what risky project she’ll pursue now that she has tenure, Cantlon says nothing in particular comes to mind: “I feel like we’ve been doing the crazy things all along.”
ORLANDO, Fla. — New evidence from separate labs supports the controversial idea that an overlooked and unexpected Culex mosquito might spread Zika virus.
The southern house mosquito, Culex quinquefasciatus, is common in the Americas. Constância Ayres, working with Brazil’s Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Recife, previously surprised Zika researchers with the disturbing proposal that this mosquito might be a stealth spreader of Zika. But two U.S. research groups tested the basic idea and couldn’t get the virus to infect the species. Now, preliminary results from Ayres’ and two other research groups are renewing the discussion. The data, shared September 26 at the International Congress of Entomology, suggest that Zika can build up in the house mosquito’s salivary glands — a key step in being able to transmit disease. Basic insect physiology is only part of the puzzle, though. Even if the mosquitoes prove competent at passing along Zika, there remain questions of whether their tastes, behavior and ecology will lead them to actually do so.
In the current outbreak, the World Health Organization has focused on mosquitoes in a different genus, Aedes, particularly Ae. aegypti, as the main disease vector. But Ayres had announced months ago the discovery of the virus in Brazil’s free-flying house mosquitoes (SN Online: 7/28/16).
At the congress, Ayres’ foundation colleague Duschinka Guedes reported that captive mosquitoes fed Zika-tainted blood had virus growing in their own guts and salivary glands within days. The virus doesn’t spread every time a mosquito slurping contaminated blood gets virus smeared on its mouthparts, though. To move from the mosquito to what it bites, viruses have to infect the insect midgut, then travel to the salivary glands and build up enough of a population for an infective dose drooling into the next victim. When Guedes offered the infected mosquitoes a special card to bite, they left telltale virus in the salivary traces, a sign of what they could do when biting — and infecting — a real animal.
Researchers from China and Canada who were not originally on the symposium program also stepped up to share their results, some of which are unpublished. Some tasks are still in early stages, but both labs showed Zika virus building up in some kind of Culex mosquitoes.
At the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, Tong-Yan Zhao found the virus peaking in the house mosquitoes eight days after their first contaminated drink. As a test of the infectious powers of the mosquitoes, researchers let the Zika-carrying insects bite baby lab mice. Later, the virus showed up in the brains of eight out of nine lab mice. The results were reported September 7 in Emerging Microbes & Infections. From Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada, Fiona Hunter has found signs that 11 out of 50 wild-caught Culex pipiens pipiens mosquitoes picked up the virus somewhere on their bodies. So far, she has completely analyzed one mosquito and reports that the virus was indeed in its saliva.
These positive results contradict Culex tests at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Those tests, with U.S. mosquitoes, found no evidence that C. quinquefasciatus can pick up and pass along a Zika infection, says study coauthor Scott Weaver. Stephen Higgs of Kansas State University in Manhattan and his colleagues got similar results. “We’re pretty good at infecting mosquitoes,” Higgs says, so he muses over whether certain virus strains won’t infect mosquitoes from particular places.
The main risk from Culex at the moment is distraction, warned Roger Nasci of North Shore Mosquito Abatement District in Northfield, Ill. After the talks, he rose from the audience to say that Ae. aegypti is a known enemy and limited resources should not be diverted from fighting it.
George Peck, who runs mosquito control for Clackamas County in Oregon, isn’t convinced that the high virus concentrations dosing the test mosquitoes are realistic. Yet he’s watching the issue because like much of northern North America, Clackamas doesn’t have the Ae. aegypti vector to worry about. But it does have plenty of Culex mosquitoes.
Baby humans’ brain cells take awhile to get situated after birth, it turns out. A large group of young nerve cells moves into the frontal lobe during infants’ first few months of life, scientists report in the Oct. 7 Science. The mass migration might help explain how human babies’ brains remain so malleable for a window of time after birth.
Most of the brain’s nerve cells, or neurons, move to their places in the frontal lobe before birth. Then, as babies interact with the world, the neurons link together into circuits controlling learning, memory and social behavior. Those circuits are highly malleable in early infancy: Connections between neurons are formed and severed repeatedly. The arrival of new neurons during the first few months of life could help account for the circuits’ prolonged flexibility in babies, says study coauthor Eric Huang, a neuropathologist at the University of California, San Francisco. “The fact that [the neurons] are migrating for months and months is remarkable,” says Stephen Noctor, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis who wasn’t involved in the work.
Huang and colleagues noticed a group of cells making proteins related to migration when looking at slices of postmortem infant brains under an electron microscope. To catch these neurons in the act of moving, though, the team used rare samples of brain tissue collected and donated immediately after infants’ deaths. The team infected those tissues with a virus tagged with a glowing protein. When the virus infected the brain cells, they glowed green. Then the researchers could track the migrating neurons’ path across the brain. The neurons started as a cluster in the subventricular zone, a layer inside the brain where new neurons are born, and then formed a chain moving into the frontal lobe, Huang’s team found. Once the migrating neurons settled down later in development, they mostly became inhibitory interneurons. This type of neuron acts like a stoplight for other neurons, keeping signaling in check. Huang’s team found migrating neurons in the brains of babies up to about seven months old, with migration peaking around 1.5 months and then tapering off.
“In the first six months, that’s kind of [infants’] critical period when they slowly develop their response to [their] environment. They start to engage with emotions,” says Huang. “Our results provide a cellular basis for postnatal human brain development and how cognition might be developed.”
By replenishing the frontal lobe’s supply of building blocks midway through construction, the new neurons might help babies’ brain circuits stay malleable longer. The mass migration after birth means that experiences in infancy could affect where these neurons end up — and, by extension, the connections they form.
The finding raises additional questions about the timing of the event, Noctor says — like when the migrating cells were born and how long an individual cell takes to move.
Mars is about to get another visitor. The European Space Agency’s ExoMars mission arrives at the Red Planet on October 19. A spacecraft known as the Trace Gas Orbiter will go into orbit around Mars while a lander named Schiaparelli will touch down on the surface.
ESA will live stream the landing starting at 9 a.m. EDT on October 19.
The arrival ends a roughly seven-month journey. Schiaparelli, which separated from the orbiter on October 16, is expected to enter the Martian atmosphere at 10:42 a.m. and land in a plain dubbed Meridiani Planum about six minutes later. Parachutes will ease its entry and rockets will slow the lander down until it is about two meters from the ground, at which point it will drop the rest of the way, cushioned by a collapsible structure.
Schiaparelli will test technology needed for a future European Mars rover. The lander doesn’t have a long-term power source, so it will last for only a few Martian days. But it is carrying a few scientific instruments, such as a camera and weather sensors.
The orbiter will stick around to study trace gases such as methane in the Martian atmosphere. It will eventually become a communication hub between Earth and another European Mars rover expected to arrive in 2021.
Using nasal cartilage cells to repair joints is nothing to sniff at.
It has worked in goats. Now, in the first human trial, researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland have grown cells called chondrocytes, taken from the noses of 10 patients with damaged knee joints, into cartilage grafts. These repair patches were then surgically implanted into the patients’ knee joints.
Two years after surgery, nine patients have seen improvements in knee function, quality of life and pain. (One patient dropped out of the trial because of additional athletic injuries.) MRI scans showed that the grafts looked like normal hyaline cartilage, the hard-to-replicate material that coats the tips of bones, the team reports in the Oct. 22 Lancet. Tests in more people are needed to determine whether the technique is ready for prime time.
There are many places in the world where you can see bottlenose dolphins, but the dolphins swimming in the Port River estuary near Adelaide, Australia, are special. They gambol about in waters surrounded by factories, power stations and other signs of human habitation.
For much of the 20th century, there were no dolphin sightings in the inner estuary. Prior to European settlement in 1858, bottlenose dolphins were commonly seen by the local Kaurna aboriginal tribal group. But as the city of Adelaide was built, the dolphins disappeared. What changed that enabled their return? A combination of improved environmental conditions, a little bit of protection and some public education, researchers report October 24 in Marine Mammal Science.
“The future of these dolphins would appear to be as secure as any population of any species can be in this era of climate change,” says the study’s lead author, Mike Bossley of Whale and Dolphin Conservation Australasia in Port Adelaide, who has studied the area’s dolphins for 25 years.
As the city of Adelaide grew, the Port River grew to be an unfriendly spot for marine wildlife. People cleared away the marshes and mangroves, replacing them with sulfuric acid and soda ash producers, sugar refineries and power stations. Sewage and storm water flowed into the river. Boats and ships traversed the estuary, which had become the main shipping port for the state of South Australia. And no one reported a dolphin sighting between 1940 and 1980.
Scientists began field studies in 1989 and started finding bottlenose dolphins — and documenting threats to them. In addition to pollution, any dolphins brave enough to traverse the Port River had to deal with boat strikes, infections, entanglement with nets and other marine trash and even deliberate attacks. In response, the Adelaide Dolphin Sanctuary was established by law in 2005, setting aside a small patch of river for the resident dolphin population (about 30 live in the river; another 300 visit the area regularly) and establishing resources for public education about the dolphins. And over the last few decades, water quality has improved as some of the least environmentally friendly activities — such as sulfuric acid production, salt evaporation and coal-fired power production — have ended.
In 1990, Bossley and his colleagues started surveying the Port River dolphins. The researchers would take their boat out on a 40-kilometer journey through the estuary, following the same path each time and photographing any dolphins they saw. They used distinguishing marks, such as shape or notches, on a dolphin’s dorsal fin to identify the animal and ensure each was only counted once.
From January 1990 to December 2013, the researchers made a total of 735 complete journeys, averaging one survey every 11.7 days. Based on those surveys, and the near absence of dolphins in the 1980s, the team estimates that bottlenose dolphin sightings are increasing by about 6 percent a year. “The trends in sightings provide compelling evidence of a large change in some aspect of relative abundance and occupancy and usage of the Port River estuary,” the researchers write. The increase could be the result of an increase in the resident population, in the number of visiting dolphins or a combination of both.
Improved water quality may be better for the dolphins or their prey. Plus, the establishment of the sanctuary gave the dolphins some protection against human activities. In addition, Bossley notes, “by designating the area as a sanctuary, the public is both more aware and more protective of the dolphins.” The dolphins still have to deal with human impacts — the river is not pollution free, an attack occurred as recently as 2014 and there’s a growing new potential threat in the form of tourism — but the dolphins appear to be able to cope.
The Adelaide dolphins offer a lesson in conservation, Bossley and his colleagues note. Corralling off large areas for wildlife from human activities isn’t always necessary. “People have to learn to live with wildlife,” Bossley says. And that “requires taking into account both the wildlife itself and its habitats.”
Mothers who don’t eat enough during pregnancy could give birth to babies with long-lasting heart problems. The results from a new study in primates add to accumulating evidence that a mother’s nutrition has more bearing on her child’s health than previously thought.
“We pass more biological milestones during development than we will ever pass again in our entire lives,” says Peter Nathanielsz, coauthor of the study published November 6 in the Journal of Physiology. And during those critical nine months, calorie intake at the extremes — too many or too few — appears to have a lifelong influence on newborn weight, future metabolism and chronic health problems (SN: 1/23/16, p. 22). One landmark epidemiological investigation found that people born in the Dutch Hunger Winter during World War II suffered from an elevated risk of heart disease and other health concerns, with some risks even affecting two generations. But studies of human populations are complicated. It’s hard to account for the role of stress, behavior or environmental exposures. So Nathanielsz, of the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and colleagues from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio studied baboons, close genetic relatives to humans.
Sixteen pregnant baboons were fed their normal amount of chow, while 16 others received 30 percent less during pregnancy, a reduction researchers characterize as “moderate.” All other living conditions were the same. The researchers then compared offspring of the well-fed mothers with the offspring of undernourished mothers.
Infants of the underfed mothers were born small but nonetheless caught up in body weight to the offspring of the well-fed mothers by young adulthood. However, those whose mothers were underfed had more fibrous, abnormally shaped heart muscle, the researchers report. A normal heart is roughly an upside-down pyramid, but underfed offspring had more rounded and less muscular hearts. Evidence showed that these less-muscled hearts were not as efficient at pumping blood, with an average output about 20 percent lower.
Offspring undernourished in the womb also had hearts that appeared to age faster. By age five, the human equivalent of almost 25, many of their heart functions more closely resembled those of hearts of primates about three times as old.
Such experiments can show cause and effect — something that human studies can’t do, says Susan Ozanne, a developmental endocrinologist at the University of Cambridge. As a result, they provide strong evidence about the effects of maternal nutrition. “What this shows us is that certainly maternal diet has an effect on a child’s cardiac health long-term,” she says. Studies in rodents have produced similar findings, but “when you validate those in multiple species, it shows you you’re looking at a fundamentally conserved mechanism.” The next step, she says, is to learn whether diet and exercise after birth can make up for poor nutrition during development. Doctors also don’t know whether there is a window of time during childhood for intervention, or a longer period to counteract any effects, she says.
Much attention on maternal nutrition has focused on the obesity epidemic, Nathanielsz says, but undernutrition remains a public health challenge throughout the world, even in developed countries. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that approximately 13 percent of American households in 2015 reported food insecurity, or uncertainty about having enough money for food. “The number of people with food insecurity is very high,” Nathanielsz says. “It would be sad if we discounted this problem.”
