March 21, 2024: Organ transplants that grow with their recipient, old seeds could solve hunger in Africa, and this year's "kitten season" is out of control. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | In a new kind of organ transplant procedure known as a partial heart transplant, living valves and parts of blood vessels can be transplanted into children and grow along with a child. In 2022 a newborn named Owen Monroe became the first infant to receive such a transplant from a brain-dead newborn donor. Owen was born with a genetic defect that caused oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor blood to mix and pool in his lungs. Doctors replaced his malfunctioning valve with part of a donor aorta and valve, as well as part of a pulmonary artery and valve.
Why this matters: Children who are born with heart valve defects often undergo surgery to receive frozen valves from cadavers. But because thawed cadaver tissue is dead and doesn't grow, until they're adults the child must periodically have operations to get larger valves until they're adults.
What the experts say: "As he grows, the valves are proportionately growing. The valves function perfectly," says Joseph W. Turek, chief of pediatric cardiac surgery at Duke Health, who performed the surgery. So far Owen has been "meeting all of his milestones," Turek adds, and shows no signs of immune rejection of the new valves. A dozen such surgeries have been performed so far in the U.S. | | | Have you heard of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault? Built into a mountain in the icy high latitudes of the Norwegian Arctic, the monolith-like structure houses more than 1.2 million seed samples from every crop variety imaginable from Earth. Agriculturists started the collection to safeguard global crops against disaster–natural or human-made. Now, the co-founder of the vault, Cary Fowler, is part of an ambitious new project to use native seeds to fight hunger in Africa.
How it works: Native, nutrient-rich foods like cowpea, pearl millet, taro and African eggplant have been part of the African diet for thousands of years. But during the 20th century (and strongly encouraged by U.S. policies) large-scale African farms started growing international staples such as corn, wheat, soy and rice. Those monocultures have depleted African soil and yielded declining returns, and they are facing major challenges with a warmer future climate. Native African crops like grass pea are more drought tolerant. Plus, the new program will launch an app to show local farmers real-time soil health, so they can best plan their plantings.
Why this matters: Global hunger is on the rise as a result of the war in Ukraine, severe drought from El Niño and lingering supply chain disruptions from COVID. Nations need to act fast to solve the growing crisis, says Fowler. Rapidly warming global temperatures are changing the face of agriculture. "We are headed toward climates that [have] never existed [since farming began]. It represents the biggest challenge to food security we've ever faced." Since we have more than a million seeds to choose from, let's use them, he says. | | | Cary Fowler stands in front of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which he co-founded. Credit: Hemis/Alamy Stock Photo | | | • Cicadas spray their pee out in a high-speed stream, faster than many mammals. | 4 min read | | | An image of Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks and its rotating core taken by Jan Erik Vallestad. Credit: Jan Erik Vallestad | | | • As a measles outbreak spreads through Florida, the state's surgeon general Joseph Ladapo continues to openly reject long-proven public health practices, writes David Robert Grimes, a medical scientist and author. Ladapo has repeatedly distorted evidence, deliberately manipulated internal reports, and used bad science to support his claims, all for a political agenda, Grimes says. "Such behavior is a gross parody of what should be expected from any public health official genuinely concerned with societal well-being." | 5 min read | | | Amateur astronomers have made remarkable contributions to space science. They've snapped comets (like the comet 2P/Pons-Brooks above), supernovae, a mysterious gas cloud next to the Andromeda galaxy and more. In my own amateur estimation, we can't have enough eyes on the sky, it's too big for only large-scale observatories and other big telescopes to image (consider that the recently-released "deep field" image from the James Webb Space Telescope contained some 45,000 galaxies, but represented approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length against the sky). | Do you have plans to add your astronomical images to history on the day of the solar eclipse (April 8)? Let me know. I'd love to show off some submissions from readers in this newsletter. Email me: newsletters@sciam.com. Thanks for reading! | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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