The Science Baby

As babies and toddlers learn to move around and experience the world, they’re soon going to be accumulating injuries, whether from their own fingernails or from the inevitable bumps and scrapes of toddlerdom.

But no sooner do those injuries appear, than they heal, uncannily quickly, and rarely leaving behind any scars at all. We dive into what’s going in inside their tiny Wolverine bodies to give them this super-healing ability. 

What to Expect in This Episode

As always, we start with a catchup about what’s been going on in our lives this last week. This week ahs been a big one fore both. Leila’s husband has just turned 50, and we discuss the inevitable mid-life crises that come along with major milestones. Meanwhile, Kim’s daughter has just turned 6 months and has embraced her weaning journey (which we talked about last episode), and we laugh about the highs and lows of that experience.

Getting to the theme of the episode, we share our experiences on how easily our little ones are able to injure themselves, especially as they begin to discover their own hands. But more remarkably, also how quickly they heal from bumps and scrapes.

A lot of this is down to how fast they’re growing. A baby is expected to triple their birth weight in their first year, and all of that growth means that they have to constantly divide and replace new cells all the time. We compare it to the kinds of growth that animals with exoskeletons go through, drawing on Kim’s experience as a natural history producer to consider much more gruesome ways that we could showcase our growth!

Most of the time we don’t notice our baby growing from day to day, but one place that it is all too obvious is in their fingernails. Like the rest of the body, these grow at an accellerated rate through babyhood, meaning parents will find themselves having to trim them every week. Although, interestingly, toenails never grow quite as quickly as fingernails.

Next, we take a deep dive into the cellular biology of healing and scarring, exploring the role of collagen and other cells in rebuilding the skin, as well as a balanced immune response to protect and regulate, and the overall instructions given by our genes. Through all of this, we use the analogy of building a skyscraper and protecting it with security to explain how this process changes through early life.

We couldn’t talk about baby growth without mentioning stem cells, which almost certainly play a role as well. The potential and promise of these versatile baby cells is staggering, but there’s tons to talk about so they will get their own episode at some point in the future, too.

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