Springer Nature

This month features a conversation with Senior Investigator, Professor Richard Jackson, who’s had an extensive career in Public Health. Now Professor Emeritus at the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, Richard has served in many leadership positions including nine years as Director of the CDC's National Centre for Environmental Health.

Our conversation covered a wide range of topics affecting children's health, from pesticides to urban planning to gun violence, testament to his rich and varied career.

Living near humans and human infrastructure has ecological effects on many species. Iberian wolf populations in human-dominated landscapes are unable to disperse as far as they would in the past. We find out how they are coping with this change, from Dr Carolina Pacheco, Dr Raquel Godinho and Dr Francisco Álvares.

Scientists have been amassing an increasing amount of evidence about the impact of racial discrimination and racial trauma, including how it can have an impact on brain regions involved with threat vigilance and emotional regulation. At the same time, there’s evidence that increased engagement in those areas has been linked to increased risk of mental health problems like depression, and they also suspect it could be a vulnerability for brain health issues such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Negar Fani is an associate professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine, and she worked with Aziz Elbasheir, a PhD candidate at Emory University in the neuroscience program, on the study. They knew that C-reactive proteins, or CRPs, are a marker of immune activation in the blood.

Read their full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-023-01737-7

In this episode, listen to our editorial apprentice, Dr. Eric Peeples describe the scope and importance of our collection on neonatal encephalopathy and hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy.

Visit the collection here: https://www.nature.com/collections/gbejedfegi

Gene-drives hold great potential for the control of biological pests, but first they need to be thoroughly tested under appropriate conditions. In this episode we discuss some new work assessing whether mosquito populations in Northern Australia could be used to test a gene-drive targeting malaria mosquitoes.

There’s a hormone called ghrelin that’s secreted in the stomach, and when someone is hungry it contributes to that feeling of hunger and the need to search for food. But neurological studies have suggested that ghrelin might also play a role in compulsivity and impulsivity, and it might be related to substance use disorders.

Rebecca Boeme is an assistant professor at Linkoping University in Sweden. She and her colleagues decided to use human subjects to investigate how ghrelin affects reinforcement learning, basically how ghrelin influences decision making when subjects receive positive and negative feedback —and also how it might actually be affecting the brain.

Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-024-01821-6

In this episode of Pediapod, Section Editor Jeanie Tryggestad discusses the most recent advances in the field of Pediatric Endocrinology.

Genes are recipes for proteins and proteins do stuff. But if a gene can make more than one protein, how does that affect genetic variation and the possible routes to adaptation? We get an introduction to the topic of adaptive alternative splicing from David Manahan.

We're in the age of big data, but there remain several hurdles to integrating genomics into conservation science. We hear about these issues from Prof Cock Van Oosterhout, and discuss the potential solutions he outlined in his recent perspectives article for Heredity.

Pediatric researchers Cynthia Bearer and Eleanor Molloy join podcast host Geoff Marsh to give an update on plans for the podcast and to offer some sage advice for Early Career Investigators.

Find more Pediapod episodes here: https://www.nature.com/collections/fcbjjbchaa