For the Week Ending July 19, 2020.
Were you tested for COVID-19 during Pregnancy or at birth?
If you were, complete Pregistry’s survey and help other women who are pregnant or contemplating becoming pregnant.
A collaboration of Pregistry and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Click here to Register.
Midwives on motorcycles
Traffic in Bangkok is intense. So police there are trained to weave in and out of the cars on motorcycles, getting quickly to women in labor, and deliver babies if need be. Read more here.
This is important for you because as crazy as your birth story may be, at least you will probably not be stuck in the back of a cab in the Thai capital.
How did humans take over the Earth? According to evolutionary anthropologist Karen Kramer, we may have been able to outcompete our fellow primates so dramatically by relying on intergenerational cooperation. Moms are able to take care of older kids because those older kids help moms take care of younger kids–which means moms are ultimately able to have more kids. Read more here.
This is important for you because if you have older children–use them!
Scientists at Wake Forest have built a rabbit uterus. First they took the uterus out of rabbits, and then they mixed some of the uterine cells with a biodegradable scaffold and put that back into the rabbits. Four out of ten of them carried pregnancies to term. Read more here.
This is important for you because uterine transplants can help women with infertility resulting from a dysfunctional uterus (about 6% of infertile women), but if donors are hard to come by this might provide a better option.
The maternal to zygotic transition is an event early on in embryogenesis when the zygote starts controlling the expression of its own genes instead of relying on the maternal factors in the egg. In order for it to occur, those maternal controlling factors must be degraded. And one of the enzymes that degrades them in fruit fly embryos is named Marie Kondo, after the clean up guru known for The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. Read more here.
This is important for you because she can really help you out when your nesting instincts kick in.
