Ancient Rapanui carvers worked at the behest of the elite ruling class to carve nearly 1,000 Moai because they, and the community at large, believed the statues capable of producing agricultural fertility and thereby critical food supplies, according to a new study from Jo Anne Van Tilburg, director of the Easter Island Statue Project, recently published in Journal of Archaeological Science.

Van Tilburg and her team, working with geoarchaeologist and soils specialist Sarah Sherwood, believe they have found scientific evidence of that long-hypothesized meaning thanks to careful study of two particular Moai excavated over five years in the Rano Raraku quarry on the eastern side of the Polynesian island.

Van Tilburg’s most recent analysis focused on two of the monoliths that stand within the inner region of the Rano Raraku quarry, which is the origin of 95 percent of the island’s more than 1,000 Moai. Extensive laboratory testing of soil samples from the same area shows evidence of foods such as banana, taro and sweet potato.

Van Tilburg said the analysis showed that in addition to serving as a quarry and a place for carving statues, Rano Raraku also was the site of a productive agricultural area.

“Our excavation broadens our perspective of the Moai and encourages us to realize that nothing, no matter how obvious, is ever exactly as it seems. I think our new analysis humanizes the production process of the Moai,” Van Tilburg said.

Van Tilburg has been working on Rapa Nui for more than three decades. Her Easter Island Statue Project is supported in part by UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. Tom Wake, a Cotsen Institute colleague, analyzes small-animal remains from the excavation site. Van Tilburg also serves as director of UCLA’s Rock Art Archive.

Van Tilburg, in partnership with members of the local community, heads the first legally permitted excavations of Moai in Rano Raraku since 1955. Cristián Arévalo Pakarati, a noted Rapanui artist, is project co-director.

The soils in Rano Raraku are probably the richest on the island, certainly over the long term, Sherwood said. Coupled with a fresh-water source in the quarry, it appears the practice of quarrying itself helped boost soil fertility and food production in the immediate surroundings, she said. The soils in the quarry are rich in clay created by the weathering of lapilli tuff (the local bedrock) as the workers quarried into deeper rock and sculpted the Moai.

A professor of earth and environmental systems at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., Sherwood joined the Easter Island Project after meeting another member of Van Tilburg’s team at a geology conference.

She wasn’t originally looking for soil fertility, but out of curiosity and research habit, she did some fine-scale testing of samples brought back from the quarry.

“When we got the chemistry results back, I did a double take,” Sherwood said. “There were really high levels of things that I never would have thought would be there, such as calcium and phosphorus. The soil chemistry showed high levels of elements that are key to plant growth and essential for high yields. Everywhere else on the island the soil was being quickly worn out, eroding, being leeched of elements that feed plants, but in the quarry, with its constant new influx of small fragments of the bedrock generated by the quarrying process, there is a perfect feedback system of water, natural fertilizer and nutrients.”

She said it also looks like the ancient indigenous people of Rapanui were very intuitive about what to grow — planting multiple crops in the same area, which can help maintain soil fertility.

The Moai that Van Tilburg’s team excavated were discovered upright in place, one on a pedestal and the other in a deep hole, indicating they were meant to remain there.

“This study radically alters the idea that all standing statues in Rano Raraku were simply awaiting transport out of the quarry,” Van Tilburg said. “That is, these and probably other upright Moai in Rano Raraku were retained in place to ensure the sacred nature of the quarry itself. The Moai were central to the idea of fertility, and in Rapanui belief their presence here stimulated agricultural food production.”

Van Tilburg and her team estimate the statues from the inner quarry were raised by or before A.D. 1510 to A.D.1645. Activity in this part of the quarry most likely began in A.D.1455. Most production of Moai had ceased in the early 1700s due to western contact.

The two statues Van Tilburg’s team excavated had been almost completely buried by soils and rubble.

“We chose the statues for excavation based on careful scrutiny of historical photographs and mapped the entire Rano Raraku inner region before initiating excavations,” she said.

Van Tilburg has worked hard to establish connections with the local community on Rapa Nui. The project’s field and lab teams are made up of local workers, mentored by professional archeologists and geologists.

The result of their collective efforts is a massive detailed archive and comparative database that documents more than 1,000 sculptural objects on Rapa Nui, including the Moai, as well as similar records on more than 200 objects scattered in museums throughout the world. In 1995, UNESCO named Easter Island a World Heritage Site, with most of the island’s sacred sites protected within Rapa Nui National Park.

This is the first definitive study to reveal the quarry as a complex landscape and to make a definitive statement that links soil fertility, agriculture, quarrying and the sacred nature of the Moai.

Van Tilburg and her team are working on another study that analyzes the rock art carvings that exist on only three of the Moai.

This unusual size difference has left researchers puzzled for years. With a few exceptions among animals such as echidnas and kangaroos, no other mammal newborns are so tiny relative to their mothers. No one knows why, but a Duke University study of bones across 10 species of bears and other animals finds that some of the current theories don’t hold up.

Duke biology professor Kathleen Smith and her former student Peishu Li published their findings this month in the Journal of Anatomy.

Baby panda skeletons are hard to come by, but the researchers were able to study the preserved remains of baby pandas born at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

The National Zoo’s first panda couple, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, had five full-term cubs in the 1980s, but none of them survived long after birth.

The researchers took micro-CT scans of two of those cubs, along with newborn grizzlies, sloth bears, polar bears, dogs, a fox, and other closely related animals from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and the North Carolina State College of Veterinary Medicine.

They used the scans to create 3-D digital models of each baby’s bony interior at birth.

As a baby animal grows and develops inside the womb, its bones and teeth do, too. The researchers examined the degree of ossification, or how much the skeleton has formed by the time of birth. They looked at whether the teeth had started to calcify or erupt, and the degree of fusion between the bony plates that make up the skull.

The panda may be an extreme example, but all bears have disproportionately small babies, Li said. A newborn polar bear’s birthweight as a fraction of mom’s is less than 1:400, or less than one-half of one percent of her body mass. For the vast majority of baby mammals, including humans, the average is closer to 1:26.

One decades-old idea links low birthweights in bears to the fact that, for some species, pregnancy overlaps with winter hibernation. Pregnant females don’t eat or drink during this time, relying mostly on their fat reserves to survive, but also breaking down muscle to supply protein to the fetus.

The thinking is that, energetically, females can only afford to nourish their babies this way for so long before this tissue breakdown threatens their health. By cutting pregnancy short and giving birth to small, immature babies, bears would shift more of their growth to outside the womb, where babies can live off their mother’s fat-rich milk instead of depleting her muscles.

Proponents of the theory concede that not all bears — including pandas — hibernate during the winter. But the idea is that small birthweight is ‘locked in’ to the bear family tree, preventing non-hibernating relatives from evolving bigger babies too.

“It’s certainly an appealing hypothesis,” Smith said.

But the Duke team’s research shows this scenario is unlikely. The researchers didn’t find any significant differences in bone growth between hibernating bears and their counterparts that stay active year-round and don’t fast during pregnancy.

In fact, despite being small, the researchers found that most bear skeletons are just as mature at birth as their close animal cousins.

The panda bear is the one exception to this rule, results show. Even in a full-term baby panda, the bones look a lot like those of a beagle puppy delivered several weeks premature.

“That would be like a 28-week human fetus” at the beginning of the third trimester, Smith said.

Other factors might have pushed panda babies toward smaller sizes over time — some researchers blame their bamboo-only diet — but data are scarce, Li said. The researchers say the panda bear’s embryonic appearance likely has to do with a quirk of panda pregnancy.

All bears experience what’s called “delayed implantation.” After the egg is fertilized, the future fetus enters a state of suspended animation, floating in the womb for several months before implanting in the uterine wall to resume its development and get ready for birth.

But while other bears gestate for two months after implantation, giant pandas are done in a month.

“They’re basically undercooked,” said Li, now a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago.

The researchers say they only looked at skeletons in this study, and it could be that other organs like the brain tell a different story. But the new study suggests that baby pandas follow the same trajectory as other mammal relatives — their bones mature in the same sequence and at similar rates — but on a truncated timetable.

“Development is just cut short,” Smith said.

Scientists are still searching for a complete explanation of why the panda’s peculiar size differential evolved over geological time, and how.

“We really need more information about their ecology and reproduction in the wild,” Smith said, and we may not have much time given their risk of extinction. But this study brings them one step closer to an answer.

This research was supported by a Shared Material Instrumentation Facility Undergraduate User Program grant, the Duke Department of Biology, and the Undergraduate Research Office at Duke.

The Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future project aims to break the cycle of intergenerational and complex trauma experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people, by co-designing strategies for new parents.

The international research team, led by Associate Professor Catherine Chamberlain of La Trobe’s Judith Lumley Centre and published today in the journal PLOS ONE, reviewed more than 20,000 scholarly articles to build a comprehensive understanding of pregnancy and birth for parents who have experienced trauma in their own childhood.

The study identified seven themes, derived from studying interviews with more than 350 parents who experienced trauma as children, relate to parents’ experiences during pregnancy, birth and the first few weeks after birth.

Associate Professor Catherine Chamberlain said the research is critical for informing discussions with Aboriginal parents and communities to create a strong foundation for work to heal complex trauma.

“This gives us a thorough and deep understanding needed to help co-design support strategies with communities to improve the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their babies,” Associate Professor Chamberlain said.

“We have shared these themes in discussions with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents and community members to see if any are relevant. Doing so also helps parents to understand these experiences are shared, even in other countries.

“The next stage of our Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future project will use these themes to examine what support strategies have been evaluated in research. We will look at whether this research reflects what support parents say they want and what they feel works.”

The seven themes are:

• New beginnings: Becoming a parent is an opportunity for ‘a fresh start’, to put the past behind them and move forward with hope for the future to create a new life for themselves and their

  child.

• Changing roles and identities: Becoming a parent is a major life transition, influenced by perceptions of the parenting role.
• Feeling connected: The quality of relationships with self, baby and others has major impacts on the experiences of becoming a parent.
• Compassionate care: Kindness, empathy and sensitivity enables parents to build trust and feel valued and cared for.
• Empowerment: Control, choice and ‘having a voice’ are critical to fostering safety.
• Creating safety: Parents perceive the ‘world as unsafe’ and use conscious strategies to build safe places and relationships to protect themselves and their baby.
• ‘Reweaving’ a future: Managing distress and healing while becoming a parent is a personal ongoing and complex process requiring strength, hope and support.

Associate Professor Chamberlain said the seven themes also resonated strongly with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents and she was grateful to the research team for all their hard work and expertise, and to Lowitja Institute and the NHMRC for funding this phase of her work.

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Nearly one-quarter of people living with HIV were willing to risk near-certain death in a clinical trial, if volunteering for the trial would help find a cure for the disease, according to the new study “HIV Cure Research.” “I am not going to live forever,” said one interviewee, “it is about the next man, the next woman, and you have to have the mindset to care about people, which I do.” Another interviewee said, “I’m willing to go the course for the cure and for the HIV community. I can’t imagine how many people’s lives would change if there was a cure.” The authors of the study write that if people living with HIV are permitted to enroll in risky HIV cure trials, there need to be additional ethical safeguards. They concluded that this does not mean that people should be allowed to participate in research that is “sure to kill them,” but that patient preferences should play a strong role in research that involves risk of harm.

In “Safeguarding Participants in Psychiatric Genetic Research,” the authors write that genetic and psychiatric research may elicit “exceptionalism,” the belief that these types of research deserve special protections. They find that patients and family members view safeguards as more important than other stakeholders do, creating implications for research participation and informed consent.

And in “Including Pregnant Women in Clinical Research,” Pamela Payne proposes guidance for including pregnant women in research. Scanty evidence exists for the safe and effective use of medications for women that they may need to treat health issues during their pregnancies. Payne writes that researchers should justify, not presume, exclusion of pregnant women from research trials.

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The virology team, led by Professor Eric Gowans and Dr Branka Grubor-Bauk — based at the Basil Hetzel Institute for Translational Health Research and supported by The Hospital Research Foundation — has developed a vaccine that prevents Zika infection in pre-clinical models of the disease.

Their findings have been published today in the leading international journal Science Advances.

Zika is a mosquito-transmitted ‘flavivirus’ which can cause microcephaly (a birth defect where a baby’s head is significantly smaller than expected) and severe birth defects in infants born to infected mothers.

The introduction of an effective vaccine for Zika will prevent infection of pregnant women and the resultant congenital effects in the unborn child.

Dr Grubor-Bauk, senior research officer with the Adelaide Medical School, said the team had developed a novel vaccine against Zika that proved effective in mouse models.

“This is the first vaccine study that shows that a T cell-based vaccine can confer protection against a systemic Zika infection,” she said.

“Our vaccine offers an advantage over other vaccines in development by eliminating the ongoing concerns in the field about enhancement of infection following exposure to dengue virus. This finding demonstrates for the first time that protective T cell vaccines against Zika are achievable.

“Zika virus is extremely detrimental if you’re pregnant and there has been no therapy or vaccine available to date. If we can progress this work and immunise women who are of reproductive age and most at risk, we can stop the devastating effects of Zika infection in pregnancy and make a huge difference to the health of the global community.”

This research, which has been years in the making, has progressed to this significant stage thanks to funding from National Foundation for Medical Research and Innovation (NFMRI) and ongoing funding from The Hospital Research Foundation.

The work was done in collaboration with eminent global vaccine researcher Prof Dan Barouch, Director of Harvard Medical School’s Centre for Virology and Vaccine Research (CVVR) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre; as well as Adelaide’s Prof Sarah Robertson, Director of the Robinson Research Institute, University of Adelaide; and other scientists from the universities of Adelaide, South Australia and Flinders.

“The next steps are to advance the vaccine to being ready for Phase I human clinical trials. This involves further pre-clinical studies which are vitally important to identify the most effective dosing and demonstrate protection against Zika infection in different pre-clinical models of the disease,” Dr Grubor-Bauk said.

“The goal is to de-risk and create an attractive technology with a strong IP position, for licensing or co-development with a commercial partner.

“We are grateful to The Hospital Research Foundation which has been instrumental in their support of our research over this time. We could not have reached this point without them.”

The findings of this study will also greatly inform other research in the development of flavivirus vaccines by shifting the focus of vaccine development from viral envelope and antibody-based vaccines to T-cell based vaccines.

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Materials provided by University of Adelaide. Original written by Elisa Black. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Now, research led by University of Massachusetts Amherst environmental toxicologist Alexander Suvorov, with co-authors in Moscow, Russia, has identified the likely mechanism responsible for the pollutant’s effect: an altered liver epigenome. The epigenome refers to heritable changes in gene expression without changes in the DNA sequence. “Changes in the liver epigenome can explain those functional changes in the liver,” Suvorov explains. “We looked at two different epigenetic mechanisms and there were changes in both.”

Published Dec. 13 in the medical journal Epigenomics, the study showed that environmentally relevant exposure to polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) through the umbilical cord and breast milk permanently changed liver metabolism in rats. The mother rats were fed enough PBDEs to cause concentrations in their fat similar to those found in humans living in big cities in the U.S.

“The pups never got exposed directly, yet it altered the way their liver works forever,” says Suvorov, associate professor of environmental health sciences in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences. “Normally when you remove the stressor, the organ will recover. But in this case, it’s not recovering. Epigenetic changes can persist in a row of cellular divisions and can even propagate through generations.”

The findings are potentially applicable to humans, a hypothesis Suvorov and colleagues will explore in a new study funded by a $230,000 grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Suvorov says the new research in humans could begin to tie prenatal exposure to flame retardants — present in everything from baby pajamas to plastics and furniture — to an increased risk in adulthood of diabetes and other metabolic disorders, as well as heart disease. “Our research may have a tremendous impact on public health and public health spending,” he says.

In the U.S., concentrations of PBDEs in human tissues is still increasing, even though the industry stopped using the flame retardants in 2013, five years after Europe phased out their use due to health concerns. “These chemicals are extremely stable, and they bioaccumulate and bioconcentrate,” Suvorov says. “Likely we will be exposed for another 50 years or so. Even more important, we have never deeply analyzed the long-term effects of exposure.”

Suvorov and colleagues will use data and samples from the GEStation, Thyroid and Environment (GESTE) prospective birth cohort study in Quebec, Canada, which was designed to investigate flame retardant toxicity in children. By following the same individuals over time, prospective cohort studies allow researchers to establish exposure level before outcome is known, providing stronger evidence than other study designs.

Between 2007 and 2009, the GESTE study began following 269 women who were less than 20 weeks pregnant. Suvorov will look for associations between PBDE levels in maternal blood and the activity of a protein known as mTOR in the baby’s placenta. mTOR is thought to mediate the changes in liver metabolism caused by PBDE exposure. Researchers also will evaluate the effects of PBDE exposure on childhood lipid levels by examining the lipid profiles and markers of liver injury in the children at age 8-9.

“We hypothesize that high PBDE levels are associated with higher triglycerides in childhood,” Suvorov says. “And the diseases come later. What will happen to them at age 50? That is my major research question.”

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