Health & Science

Proof of cannibalism at Jamestown

Starving settlers of Jamestown, the first English settlement in the New World, resorted to cannibalism to survive the harsh winter of 1609–10, new research has revealed. Anthropologists excavating a trash pile from the period have unearthed the skull and tibia of a 14-year-old girl cannibalized by desperate settlers, The Washington Post reports. After the girl died, someone made tentative chops to her forehead before an ax was used to open her skull; small, scraping knife marks were found on her jaw and cheekbones. “The clear intent was to dismember the body, removing the brain and flesh from the face for consumption,’’ says Douglas Owsley of the National Museum of Natural History. Settlers called that first winter at Jamestown “the starving time,’’ as disease whittled away their ranks, supply ships never arrived, and constant attacks by the Powhatan Indians prevented them from foraging and hunting. Written accounts indicate that the settlers ate their horses, dogs, cats, and leather boots, and that one man was executed for murdering and eating his wife. Until now, however, there was no forensic proof of cannibalism. Researchers believe the cannibalized girl arrived at Jamestown in the late summer of 1609, when the colony had 400 settlers; when supply ships finally arrived the following May, only 60 were still alive.

An organ made with stem cells

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A toddler born without a windpipe has been given one made in a laboratory, making her the youngest person ever to receive a bioengineered organ. No one with Hannah Warren’s rare birth defect, tracheal agenesis, has lived past age 6, and the 2-year-old had spent every day of her life with a tube down her throat, unable to breathe, swallow, eat, or drink on her own. But in a groundbreaking procedure, surgeons created a trachea by bathing a plastic tube for a week in stem cells extracted from Hannah’s bone marrow. When they implanted the new trachea, the cells are thought to have signaled other cells in her body to grow additional tissue, integrating it into her body. Hannah’s success after the experimental operation, performed in Peoria, Ill., “is really showing that the technique is workable,” says Anthony Atala, director of Wake Forest University’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Lead surgeon Paolo Macchiarini tells the Associated Press that Hannah “will go from being a virtual prisoner in a hospital bed to running around and playing with her sister and enjoying a normal life.”

What sleeping babies hear

The voices babies hear while they’re asleep can permanently shape their developing brains. That’s the conclusion of researchers at the University of Oregon who scanned the brains of sleeping 6- to 12-month-old babies while playing them nonsense sentences spoken in angry, happy, or neutral tones. They found that each of the tones activated different regions in the infants’ brains, suggesting that they didn’t need to be awake to take in aural information. Researchers also discovered that the brains of babies who came from high-conflict homes, where their parents often shouted at each other, reacted especially strongly to the angry voice. “That reactivity is in brain regions that we think are important later on in terms of your ability to regulate your emotions and function well,” study author Alice Graham tells NPR.org. It’s unclear, though, what that extra sensitivity means for the babies’ future. It could change the brain in ways that make them more prone to behavioral problems. But it could also help the brain develop resistance to the psychological damage often caused by exposure to parental conflict.

A cure for the wandering eye

Taking a common antibiotic can help men resist the allure of attractive women, Nature reports. Researchers recruited 100 men and gave half of them a course of minocycline, an antibiotic used to treat acne that also appears to improve decision-making. Then they asked them to play a game of trust, in which the men had to decide how much money to give to women of varying attractiveness, knowing that some women could opt to keep it all while others would give back triple what they got. The men who weren’t taking minocycline acted like typical men, giving more money to the women they considered highly attractive; the men on the antibiotic treated all the women the same. That suggests minocycline may disrupt the tendency of men to lavish attention and gifts on pretty women in order to seduce them and “increase the probability of producing attractive offspring,” the study authors say. For unexplained reasons, minocycline seems to affect the brain, improving focus and mood.