Alcohol and Caffeine (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #9)

It’s the Christmas season and, for many people, time to get merry. But pregnant women can’t drink – alcohol or caffeine – or can they?

All things, wrote Paracelsus, are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.

And dose, apparently, works both ways. You may be able to have too much of a good thing, but you may also be able to have too little of a bad thing.

We often think that a drug does nothing to us until the point where it has an effect – the threshold dose. However, this describes a linear dose-response relationship… which doesn’t fit every drug. Researchers think that some substances follow a biphasic dose response: at some point they switch over from stimulating to inhibiting or from inhibiting to stimulating. Alcohol is one such drug.

This dose response phenomenon is known as hormesis, and is explained in more detail in this article.

The hormetic effect. © TWDK.

Biodiversity on Ice

Whilst 97% of water on earth is salty and 1% is freshwater, 2% is locked up in snow and ice – but never gets a mention in the national curriculum! However, as the planet warms due to climate change, the ice is melting, and this could have an unprecedented impact on habitats and biodiversity.

Interestingly, as more water becomes available and the climate becomes more temperate, what is observed is a loss of biodiversity. Specialist organisms designed for living in harsh, cold, wintry environments die or are out-competed by more common species already found in neighbouring environments. The conclusion is that the unforgiving glaciers provide pockets for more unusual lifeforms to flourish. These lifeforms are known as extremophiles.

Exercise (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #8)

I wasn’t sure how to break it to her. The midwife. That I was a climber.

My greatest fears in pregnancy was being told not to climb, abused by people for doing it anyway, and turfed out of climbing centres – and I had done my research: exercise is highly advantageous during pregnancy, and there are no controlled studies on climbing whilst pregnant.

The body changes during pregnancy

During pregnancy, your body changes and remodels itself to create a nest to house your foetus for 9 months. As the hormone relaxin floods your body, your ligaments relax and joints loosen. Your centre of gravity shifts, upsetting your sense of balance. Your need for oxygen increases, with an extra 20% of blood flowing through your body, and this can make your blood pressure drop, leaving you more prone to dizziness.

So you should definitely exercise – here’s why

Exercising is good when pregnant for the same reasons it's good when you're not, but it can have additional benefits, such as supporting circulation through you and your foetus, reducing cramping and back pain, and improving balance as your centre of mass shifts.

Reproductive Immunology (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #7)

Morning sickness aside, I haven’t felt unwell during my pregnancy. Of course, winter is coming and that could all change, but I have prepared myself with influenza and whooping cough inoculations. These vaccines will be inactivated. ‘Live’ vaccines are normally withheld from pregnant women because they could cause unborn babies to become infected, although the risk is low.

Vaccinations

So why vaccinate during pregnancy? Not only does vaccinating yourself provide you with a good chance of fighting off a disease if you catch it, it can also incur herd immunity, making it difficult for the most vulnerable members of society to catch a disease, such as, oh, I don’t know, pregnant women and newborn babies, perhaps.

To read more about vaccination, check out our article on the topic.

Babies are vulnerable because their immune systems are starting from scratch: they’re born with just a few antibodies inherited from their mothers before getting their first inoculations and meeting everyday bacteria. Pregnant women are immunosuppressed. This means their ability to fight off disease is lowered during pregnancy.

Flu virus via Wikipedia Commons.

What can poo do for you?

This is a guest blog article written by Sarah Bailey.

Don't be put off by the title! Scientists often collect bodily fluids (or solids, in the case of poo) as they can provide very useful information about how the body works. In Life Study, a ground breaking new project aiming to follow 60,000 babies from birth into childhood, we use these waste products to answer questions about one of the most topical research questions around: how do microbes in our guts affect health throughout life?

What is Life Study?

 

The Life Study logo.Source and copyright: Life Study.

Life Study is a cohort study; it’s recruiting 60,000 babies (and their mothers and fathers) to follow them into childhood and try to find out how events that happen early in life might affect long-term health. The study is run by researchers at University College London and is divided into several parts. My own work focuses on infection and immunity, and I’m trying to discover how bugs such as bacteria and viruses influence the immune system in early life, and what the knock-on affects are as children grow up.

Toxoplasmosis (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #6)

I once heard someone talking about arranging a hen do and struggling for ideas that would be okay for pregnant participants. At the time, I couldn’t see why it was so difficult… they were pregnant, not dead! …But I guess it depends how risk averse you are. If you’re avoid absolutely everything that could pose any tiny risk that includes alcohol, caffeine, household chemicals, saunas, certain foods, sports, paint, gardening, cats, non-stick frying pans and any person who could have an illness. In fact, staying locked indoors without human contact.

The outdoors thing intrigued me.

The great outdoors © TWDK.

So what is the risk?

Cat and mouse © TWDK.

The panic is over toxoplasma gondii, a protozoan parasite that will infect a third of people over their lifetimes. Most people never know: the zoonotic infection is asymptomatic in healthy adults, and humans are considered dead-end accidental hosts, because toxoplasma gondii can only reproduce in cats – and wants to get back in cats.

What happens after death?

Myths persist that death is somehow toxic or disgusting – a myth that dates back to before the theory of disease, when a common idea was that breathing the air of the dead could shorten your life. But modern research has shown this simply isn’t true: you can’t catch death, and dead bodies and the changes that happen to them are actually quite clean and safe. Natural decomposition processes allow a body to break down into its component parts, feed a plethora of insect life, and return the nutrients stored in it to soil.

Skull via Jakub T. Jankiewicz on flickr.

So where did the idea come from? Partly, it’s due to hysteria. When the origin of diseases were unknown, it was natural for people to grapple at ideas and desperately try to science themselves to safety. But ultimately, taking steps to distance themselves from death didn’t help reduce their chances of illness, so science moved on. Another factor is necromones, the odours of death. Necromones are the decomposition products of corpses that animals of the same species have a strong alarm response to. Necromones have been well established in some insect communities, where the oleic and linoleic acids produced by dead crustaceans and hexapods alert other members to the death and initiate gathering or fleeing behaviours. It’s also believed that necromones initiate fleeing in sharks, and might affect humans to a lesser degree. There’s no denying decaying human bodies smell horrible, but are they more horrible to us than other decaying animal bodies?

Nesting (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #5)

I’ve been experiencing some severe nesting symptoms. But is it because nesting’s a real thing, or because of my personal desire to organise and structure life (especially in the wake of impending chaos)?

Women have long been observed to clean more in the spring. But is “spring cleaning” driven by their desire to go out in the weather, or cast off the stuffiness of winter?

What is Nesting?

Nesting in preparation for a baby includes anything from cleaning to organising, decorating to stockpiling. I have done all this – from emptying and restructuring drawers to buying baby bits, to sewing, stewing, and sticking in a frenzy of creative energy.

Making © TWDK.

The Placenta (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #4)

The placenta is a complex and poorly understood organ. Found in placental mammals, it forms during pregnancy, starts to break up in the last few weeks, and is normally expelled within 30 minutes of the birth. Looking at it, it’s easy to feel intimidated by this mysterious, massive, living thing that is birthed and dies when your baby is birthed.

Placenta via Wikipedia Commons.

 

What is the placenta anyway?

The placenta is a two-sided disc. On the one side, the maternal placenta (stuck to the womb) develops from the mother’s tissues 7-12 days after conception; on the other, the foetal placenta forms 17-22 days after conception from the blastocyst after it burrows into and connects up with the mother’s blood supply. Scientists are still studying how the placenta forms.

Magnetic Monopoles and Geometry

Take a balloon, rub it against your jumper, then stick it to a wall. Why does this work?

By rubbing it on your jumper, you’ve given it extra electrons and, since the electrons have a negative charge, the balloon now has a negative charge too. So, why does this make it stick to the uncharged wall? Because, by comparison, the wall is more positively charged – and positive and negative electric charges attract. In some materials, charged particles even can shift about a bit to give a more positive side near to the balloon, creating stronger sticking.

Charged balloon attracted to the hair of a cat. Public domain.

Bizarre symptoms (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #3)

For many women, pregnancy is a medley of bizarre and persistent symptoms – some well known, like morning sickness, and some… less so.

A missed period

Missing a period is a pregnancy symptom… but not every woman gets it! Some continue having “periods” for one, two, or more months. Whilst they are not truly menstruating, doctors can’t explain every bleed. Common explanations are implantation bleeding (when the embryo embeds into the uterus lining), subchorionic haematoma (where blood collects between the placenta and uterus lining), or miscarriage. Minor causes might be tears, inflammation, or infections. Around 1 in 5 women experience some kind of bleeding during pregnancy^[1].

Pregnant woman via Pixabay.

Diving with ‘Monsters’

Why are we so fascinated by monsters? Creatures of the jungles, of the deepest oceans, and of historic eras in our planet’s past have long captured our imaginations. Perhaps it’s our evolutionary instinct to learn from our enemies, and to study to outwit and outcompete our rivals. One thing is true: we have long been fascinated with monsters, and where better to find the unknown, the mysterious and the monstrous, than in the 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of oceans that stretches across our planet?

...Or, perhaps, in a small Blue Planet aquarium near Chester. Which is where I’m taking you now.

Shark in the Blue Planet aquarium, Chester. © TWDK

Weight (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #2)

If you’re pregnant and you’ve been reading books, boards and information sites, like me, you’ve probably got the wrong end of the stick about some things – such as weight. And the reason is this: having a baby in the UK is very different from having a baby in the US, and the US dominates these platforms.

Partly, this is because the NHS is unforthcoming: they don’t share information about being pregnant until you are. Their websites offer the bare minimum; their leaflets aren’t much better; they don’t answer my emails; and their advice is always to talk to your midwife. As mine explained to me, information is drip-fed as you progress to “prevent you from being bombarded”. Or, in other words, to maintain control over information access.

Meanwhile, the US sites would lead you to believe that medical health professionals are obsessed with monitoring, managing, and manipulating your weight gain throughout pregnancy, including berating you if you gain too little weight or, more emphatically, if you gain too much.

Diagram of weight versus gestational age by Yehudamalul via Wikipedia Commons.

Morning Sickness (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #1)

Recently, I’ve needed to take a lie down after every meal. This isn’t because I have a food baby – it’s because I’m having an actual baby, and that’s when morning sickness really hits me.

Numbers vary, but reports suggest two thirds or more women will experience some sort of morning sickness – which can include vomiting, nausea, food aversions, and feeling “under the weather”.

Most women get it between weeks 6 and 14 in the first trimester of pregnancy, but some get it earlier, have it fade sooner, or suffer it for most of the 9 months they are carrying. Some never get it. Some women suffer all hours of the night and day (I like to think the objectionable term “morning sickness” refers not to a propensity to suffer only in the mornings, but to the sickness as the “beginning” or “dawn” of pregnancy or motherhood), and some find it comes and goes throughout the day or even week to week. Some get it at specific times of day, or have it triggered by brushing their teeth, particular foods, or particular smells (I didn’t think smell affected me until someone walked past me on a train with one of those heavily processed Cornish pasties!). Unfortunately, we don’t know what causes morning sickness, nor why it varies so much woman to woman.

What causes morning sickness? Image via Wikipedia Commons.

Sleep Paralysis - A Ghost Story

I’ve just had my first sleep paralysis with shadows.

Champion of ghost stories, sleep paralysis is thought to lie behind hundreds and thousands of ghost stories and alien abductions every year.

It affects up to half of us during our lifetimes. It may even have happened to you.

We still have much to learn about how sleep works, how the brain works, and how our emotions guide understanding. One fascinating insight is this phenomenon. Rather like opening up the back of a watch, it spills its guts and opens up more scientific questions than it answers.

Shadow -  © TWDK

Sleep paralysis happens when the waking and sleeping parts of the brain become confused, usually just when you are about to drift off, or just as you awaken. When we’re in REM sleep, all of our muscles are frozen, except those in our eyes and diaphragm, to prevent us from acting out our dreams: when we suffer sleep paralysis, they remain frozen, even though our minds – our desperately trapped, struggling brains – are wide, wide awake.

It feels like you’re being held in place by invisible forces: unable to scream, unable to sit up. Worse, your paralysed torso forces you to breathe shallowly, and during the few seconds or minutes that sleep paralysis takes hold, it feels like a weight has been placed upon your chest, the ghost is sitting on you, squeezing out all the air… And, with air deficiency comes a real feeling of panic, and a powerful sense of impending doom.

Traumatic Brain Injury and Ageing

Written by Sofia Amirbayat
Edited by Rowena Fletcher-Wood

The brain is a complex organ that has a natural ability to adapt and change with time; it is made of about 100 billion neurons, able to connect to each other in networks and pathways. What makes these networks is our lived experiences with the world and people. When a baby is born, the brain has specialised areas for sensory perception, but doesn't have many learned pathways yet and is very open to learning and forming networks.

Lateral View of the Brain by BruceBlaus [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

There are several interesting parts of the brain, but perhaps the most interesting is the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is involved in higher cognition, planning, decision making, personality and social behaviours. There is one category of cognition that is often associated with the prefrontal cortex: executive functions – a group of complex mental processes and cognitive abilities such as working memory, impulse inhibition, and reasoning.

Patients with prefrontal cortex damage can experience blunted emotional responses, which may negatively affect their ability to make decisions. This can lead to them failing to see the consequences of their actions (what we call “thinking ahead”).

How does the structure of the brain change as you age?

When is a Strawberry No Longer a Strawberry?

You take that first bite, tearing through the cells of the red berry and allowing its fragrance to erupt. Juices ooze, coating your mouth. The sweetness, modulated with a slight bitter hint, hits your tongue and lights up your senses, and the distinctive flavour of the strawberry overflows.

Why do we love strawberries so much?

Why do we love strawberries so much? There’s something alluring about them, something intense and complex in the flavour we experience that is not matched by any other berry – its chemistry.

When we recognise a flavour – the combined experience of taste, mouth feel and (crucially) smell – we are actually recognising the aromatic chemistry of a food, the volatile molecules given off when we bring it close to our nose or after we bite into it. When we understand the molecules that make up the distinct chemical profile of a flavour, we can replicate it by creating those chemicals in a lab and stirring them together. This helps us make artificial banana flavour, artificial vanilla flavour, and artificial fresh grass smell. But strawberries are awkward. Strawberry flavour is made up of a chemical medley of many, many different molecules (more than 350), variation exists strawberry species to strawberry species, and we just don’t know how important each chemical is.

This is in direct contrast to the raspberry, a humble berry that we recognise as 4-(4-hydroxyphenyl)butan-2-one, or “raspberry ketone”. Whilst cranberries and blackberries also contain this odour, they mix it with other chemicals, whilst in the raspberry it is exclusively responsible for the raspberry profile we instantly know.

Raspberry ketone, the molecule behind the smell we know so well. © Things We Don't Know.

Lifetime of a Plastic Bag

450 years into the future - that’s the agreed lifetime of a uniform piece of plastic like a bag. But who’s arguing? Man-made plastics have only been around for about 50 years: we don’t know for sure how long it takes a plastic bag to decompose: so where does this number come from?

A floating plastic bag. Like so many, it has ended up in the ocean. Image credit: Andrew (Flickr).

Plastic readily breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces (microplastics) under environmental conditions: it can now be found anywhere, a splash of colour amongst sand particles viewed beneath a microscope. But this isn’t the same as biodegradation, defined as the bacteria-driven chemical transformation of a material into other compounds.

Natural plastics do exist and do biodegrade: rubber and cellulose, for example. But these don’t make a good comparison with man-made plastics: cellulose is eaten by many animals, and enzymes and microorganisms exist in nature to catalyse its break down, which normally happens by about 6 months^[1]. There are some man-made plastic-eating bacteria, but these have only recently been discovered: how fast they act or what products the plastics are broken down into (and whether they are safe and useful) is still a mystery^[2].

Toxic Climate: how climate change changes pollution

When it comes to climate change, contaminated land is the forgotten risk.

Climate change leaves us worrying about quite a lot of things: tropical diseases, extreme weather events, extinctions... But we don’t tend to worry about pollution outbreaks. In DEFRA’s climate change risk assessment, it doesn’t even get a mention.

But is that because we’ve forgotten the risks, or because we don’t know?

Extreme weather may affect land safety, access and use. Image © Rowena Fletcher-Wood

Lots of land is “contaminated land”. This doesn’t mean it glows yellow in the dark or is a breeding site for mutant flesh-eating bacteria. Most land is contaminated by waste from agriculture, industry, energy or medicine, and that can be anything from fertilisers that cause algal overgrowths to pharmaceuticals that make male fish feminine^[1]. Humans like to concentrate chemicals to put them to use doing specific jobs. This is great when they’re where they’re supposed to be, but leftover chemicals or waste products are still relatively concentrated and can be poisonous or harmful.

Contaminants can also come from the land itself: like arsenic, which is rife in various rocks. Or radon, a radioactive gas found in granite, and especially Cornwall.

There are three main ways of dealing with chemicals in the environment:

1. Spread them out – diluting them more and more until they’re no longer at harmful concentrations
2. Concentrate them – and lock them up in a box or a landfill somewhere they can’t do any harm
Or 3. Change them. Chemical reactions can change the nature of some chemicals, such as pharmaceuticals, making potentially harmful things into harmless things.

These processes are called remediation.

Can we power the world with HYDROGEN?

Hydrogen fuel cells

 

Hydrogen fuel cells operate by reacting hydrogen and oxygen gases together to make water. This process is exothermic – it releases usable energy. Although it uses both hydrogen and oxygen, it is called a hydrogen fuel cell because hydrogen is a fuel that’s burnt in the presence of oxygen to make water, exactly the same way that a fossil fuels burn, except that there’s no carbon dioxide made from hydrogen.

Hydrogen is considered a green fuel, and because of this it is an attractive future energy source. Scientists have envisaged a future where hydrogen gas could be a major source of everyday energy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, reducing the problem of climate change, and letting us use our televisions and computers to our hearts' content.

The hydrogen fuel cell is a simple bit of kit. It’s lightweight, with no moving parts, so doesn't malfunction easily. To work, hydrogen loses electrons that then travel round an electrical circuit to join up with oxygen atoms, producing hydrogen ions (or protons) and oxygen ions. The hydrogen ions are small enough to travel through a semi-permeable barrier to where the oxygen is. Here, they react together to produce pure, clean drinking water.

Fuel cell. H2 is catalysed to H+ at the anode; electrons travel through the circuit to provide a direct current and meet oxygen gas at the cathode, forming O2-. H+ ions then travel through a semi-permeable membrane to combine with O2- ions and make water. Image via © TWDK.

The Call of the Void

Apparently, I experience ‘High Place Phenomenon’.

As a climbing instructor, I’m used to people saying “I can’t go any further – I’m afraid of heights.”

And I always say, “So am I.”

Of course I am. Everyone is. We just develop strategies for managing that fear, and some manage it better than others. The first time I climb somewhere new, I can feel the fear eating away at me, like a voice in my head saying “Oh god, oh god, oh god.” My strategy is just to get to the top and get it finished – and once I’ve done that, going up again has lost its dauntingness.

It can even feel exciting. I’ve oftentimes sat on the edge of a ledge preparing to belay and realised how easily I could unclip and jump to my death. The thought of the rush of the world shooting past, the feeling of somehow having triumphed over my survival instincts and beaten nature, the sense of freedom, power, and the excitement tremble through me. I’m drugged up on adrenalin. My fingers move instinctively with the rope – and it’s a good job they do, because my mind is addled.
 

Looking down from above. Image © Thing We Don’t Know.

Does this sound familiar? 30% of people experience it at least once. The French call it l’appel du vide – the call of the void – and that is exactly what it feels like to me. A beckoning. As though someone were on my left shoulder... whispering, “Do it!”

Carbon-Based Hydrogen Bonding

Many chemists will be shocked to discover that carbon-based hydrogens can hydrogen bond. Weakly. But actually.

If you're not a chemist you're probably thinking that doesn't sound like much of a surprise... A hydrogen can hydrogen bond? Who've thunk it? And that is the first condition for hydrogen bonding – having a hydrogen.

However, until the discovery of the carbon-based hydrogen bond between acetone and halogenated hydrocarbons in 1937, it was believed that that the hydrogen could only make these bonds when attached to something very electronegative – electron-loving.

Why is this?

Electronegative atoms are electron-greedy and pull the electrons in a bond towards themselves. The electrons are shared unequally, leaving the electronegative atom a bit negative and whatever it’s bonded to a bit positive. We call this bond polar, because it has two differently charged ends, like a magnet. And, just like with two magnets, when the positive end of one comes near the negative end of the other, they bond. All polar molecules do this; we call it permanent dipole bonding. But hydrogens do it with an aggressive zeal that marks them out as unique.

Hydrogen bonds form between the slightly positive hydrogen atoms and slightly negative oxygen atoms in water molecules. Image via Wikipedia Commons.

There are three elements considered electronegative enough to polarise a hydrogen: fluorine, oxygen and nitrogen. Fluorine is the most electronegative element in the periodic table, given the Pauling electronegativity value (a made up scale we use to compare electronegativity values) 4. Oxygen is just behind it, with an electronegativity value 3.5, and nitrogen is 3. In contrast, hydrogen has an electronegativity value of 2.1, which means the difference between it and fluorine is 1.9 – considered enough to make a bond polar. But carbon is not very electronegative, and the difference between it and hydrogen is 0.4, surely too little to create polar bonds?

Apparently not.

Language of Smell

One of our five senses, it is the most complex, the most evocative, and the most mysterious sense – But we don’t know how to talk about it

Think about that for a moment – what words have you got to describe flavour except for comparing it to something else? Strong, weak, rich, complicated – there are some, but not many. Compared to the plethora of words we have to describe colour, shape, movement, sound – the flavour landscape is desolate. Most people duck away from vivid descriptions, preferring hedonic terms, like “It’s good.” And yet food is incredibly important to us; it evokes memories, creates atmospheres, is used to bond with other people and change our mood.

Smell plays a bigger role in our lives than we might realise Image credit: Public domain

Different people respond to different flavours differently, partly because of memories, and partly because of different sensitivities to flavours.

Sensitivity can be mapped: our sensitivity to bitterness is gradually lost as we age, allowing us to drink stronger tea. Strangely, this changes differently for men and women: the decline in scent and in bitterness sensitivity is gradual for men, but for women, doesn’t kick in until the menopause. This may be because many bitter things are natural poisons. Our ability to detect them directly impacts our ability to survive in the wild. It’s more important to refine this sense early so we learn lessons we remember our whole lives. Similarly, children are mad about sugar. This sensitivity to it, which we lose as we age, could be another survival tactic, encouraging children to quickly hone in on the densest sources of energy.

But different people lose sensitivity to different smells. It's possible this may depend on the pollutants and viruses you’re exposed to during your lifetime. More mysterious is the fact that by actively studying scents, you can halt sensitivity loss entirely. You can also teach yourself to like flavours or get sick of them by exposing yourself to them – adjusting your internal regulator.