Mom's stress level can harm baby's brain

Visitors to the Royal Society Science Exhibition here can see how their stress levels affect the heart of an unborn baby and why it is essential for pregnant women to reduce anxiety. Researchers behind the exhibit, from Imperial College London, hope that it will raise awareness of the importance of reducing levels of stress and anxiety in expectant mothers. Reducing stress during pregnancy can help prevent thousands of children from developing emotional and behavioural problems, they said. Visitors will have the chance to play a game that shows how a mother’s stress can increase the heart rate of her unborn baby. They will also be able to touch a real placenta, encased safely in plastic. The placenta is crucial for foetal development as it usually from the stress hormone cortisol. However, when the mother is stressed, the placents become less protective and the mother’s cortisol may have an effect on the foetus. Imperial researchers work has shown that maternal stress and anxiety can alter the development of the baby’s brain.

Dinos chewed food differently

British scientists trying to solve the mystery behind eating habits of herbivorous dinosaurs found the species had a unique way of chewing their food unlike anything alive today. The scientists at University of Leicester, who studied the microscopic scratches on the teeth of Hadrosaurs, herbivorous duck-billed dinosaurs, found that rather than having a flexible lower jaw joint, the creatures had a hinge between the upper jaws and the rest of the skull. “As they bit their food the upper jaws were forced outwards, flexing along this hinge so that the tooth surfaces slid sideways across each other, grinding and shredding food in the process,” palaeontogolist Paul Barret said.

Lean kids have bigger bones

A child with leaner body mass or muscle builds bigger bones compared to one who weighs the same but has a greater percentage of fat, says the latest research. “We were interested in the relative influence of lean mass, which is muscle, versus fat mass on how bone grows as kids grow,” said Howard Wey, professor at South Dakota State University. “A larger child is going to have larger bones just because he’s heavier,” Wey said. “But if you have two kids at the same weight, the one whose weight is dominated by fat mass is more likely to have smaller bones than the one whose weight is dominated by lean mass. Smaller bones are weaker than larger bones.”