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An artificial uterus sounds like a scene from Brave New World. In reality, scientists at the Port Stephens Fisheries Institute in New South Wales, Australia, have so far only nursed six embryos of a wobbegong shark through their last 18 days before birth successfully in a souped-up aquarium with delicately balanced chemicals, filters, and monitors that copy a shark’s womb. The ultimate goal is to incubate embryos of the endangered grey nurse shark throughout their gestation. What’s really strange is the reason they need to do it. The grey nurse shark is endangered in part because of its weird way of reproducing:
After mating, a female produces as many as 40 fertilized embryos, separated between two separate wombs. The embryos take nearly a year to fully develop, but they begin hunting long before that. After about two months, their own yolk sacs go dry. Hungry, they start eating their brothers and sisters. After the rampant in utero cannibalization, only one shark — the biggest and strongest — is left in each womb.
At birth they’re three feet long and experienced hunters, with a good chance of survival. But the tiny brood size, nearly year-long gestation period, and relatively restricted maternal capacity — after giving birth, mothers must wait a year to reproduce again — limit the number of young sharks.
Read more about this research in artificial shark gestation at Wired Science. Link
(Image credit: Port Stephens Fisheries Institute)
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No wonder learning a new language can be more difficult the older you get. We were learning our individual languages before we were even born! That’s what researchers revealed in a release today by Current Biology.
It seems that fetuses not only warm to the sound of mother’s voice as they gestate, they also are being programmed in the direct patterns inherent in certain languages. By the time we are born, our dialect is determined.
Wermke’s team recorded and analyzed the cries of 60 healthy newborns, 30 born into French-speaking families and 30 born into German-speaking families, when they were three to five days old. That analysis revealed clear differences in the shape of the newborns’ cry melodies, based on their mother tongue.
Specifically, French newborns tend to cry with a rising melody contour, whereas German newborns seem to prefer a falling melody contour in their crying. Those patterns are consistent with characteristic differences between the two languages, Wermke said.
ScienceDaily has a brief story about this new knowledge: Link
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Uterus transplants have been thus far unsuccessful because the transplanted uteri do not maintain a blood supply strong enough to keep a fetus alive. But now British medical researchers may have solved that problem. The Guardian reports:
They have worked out how to transplant a womb with a good blood supply which could mean it lasts long enough to carry a pregnancy to term.[...]
Their most recent study involved five donor rabbits and five recipients, which were operated on at the Royal Veterinary College in London.
Five rabbits received a womb using a “vascular patch technique” which connected major blood vessels, including the aorta.
Of the five, two rabbits lived to 10 months and examinations after death showed the transplants were a success.
Link via Discover | Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
