Newborn babies have one of three pioneer bacteria in their gut shortly after birth, one of which could be used to develop new personalised infant therapeutic probiotics, researchers show. In the largest study of UK baby microbiomes to date, researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, University College London (UCL), and the University of Birmingham, used … Read more
Bats are considered a natural pesticide, widely relied on by farmers as an alternative to chemical pesticides to protect their crops from insects. But since 2006, many bat populations have collapsed in counties in North America due to an invasive fungus found in the caves bats use during the day and throughout winter that causes … Read more
Pesticides and herbicides are critical to ensuring food security worldwide, but these substances can present a safety risk to people who unwittingly ingest them. Protecting human health, therefore, demands sensitive analytical methods to identify even trace levels of potentially harmful substances. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Nano Letters have developed a high-tech imaging method to … Read more
Texas’ six-week abortion ban, a 2021 law whose GOP backers claimed would “protect innocent human life,” is linked to a staggering rise in infant deaths, a new study published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association found. The study, published on the second anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, … Read more
Researchers at University of Galway have created digital babies to better understand infants’ health in their critical first 180 days of life. The team created 360 advanced computer models that simulate the unique metabolic processes of each baby. The digital babies are the first sex-specific computational whole-body models representing newborn and infant metabolism with 26 … Read more
On the heels of a shortage of nirsevimab for infant respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) prevention, a new tool may help identify newborns at highest risk for developing serious RSV LRTI, according to research published at the ATS 2024 International Conference. “Timely identification of infants at highest risk of RSV-related morbidity … Read more
Academics are proposing a new and improved way to help researchers discover when consciousness emerges in human infancy. When over the course of development do humans become conscious? When the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes was asked about infant consciousness by his critics, he eventually suggested that infants might have thoughts, albeit ones that are … Read more
Lockdowns imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on the gut microbiome development of babies born during these periods according to new research from RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, Children’s Health Ireland and APC Microbiome Ireland (APC), a world leading SFI Research Centre, based in University College Cork. Our gut microbiome, an … Read more
Significantly more babies were born on a weekday instead of weekend day or holiday, reveals a large-scale analysis of 21 million births in Japan over almost four decades published February 14, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Miho Sassa from the University of Tokyo, Japan, and colleagues. Medical resources are generally stretched during … Read more
A new King’s College London scanning study of 390 babies has shown distinct patterns between term and pre-term babies in the moment-to-moment activity and connectivity of brain networks. Supported by Wellcome and the National institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre, this is the first study to analyse how the communication … Read more
