One of the interesting findings of Elizabeth Spelke's Harvard baby brain research lab is that while babies prefer looking at pictures of people of their own race over other races, they are much more biased about language.
'They like toys more that are associated with someone who has spoken their language. They prefer to eat foods offered to them by a native speaker compared to a speaker of a foreign language. And older children say that they want to be friends with someone who speaks in their native accent.' Accents and vernacular, far more than race, seem to influence the people we like. 'Children would rather be friends with someone who is from a different race and speaks with a native accent versus somebody who is their own race but speaks with a foreign accent.'
A recent study of 740 first-time pregnant mothers in the UK shows that a mother's diet at conception can affect the gender of the baby.
The researchers found 56% of women with the highest energy intake around the time of conception had boys, compared to just 45% among women with the lowest energy intake. The average calorie intake for women who had sons was 2,413 a day, compared to 2,283 calories a day for women who had girls. Women who had sons were also more likely to have eaten a higher quantity and wider range of nutrients, including potassium, calcium and vitamins C, E and B12. They were also more likely to have eaten breakfast cereals.
The evolutionary guess is that when times are lean, a daughter will more consistently yield descendants than a son. (thx, meg)
In the Kottke/Hourihan household, much of the past 4 weeks has been spent determining which has the most sensitive built-in accelerometer: an iPhone, a Nintendo Wiimote, or our newborn son.
The iPhone was eliminated fairly quickly...the portrait-to-landscape flip is easy to circumvent if you do it slow enough or at an odd angle. The Wiimote might be the winner; it registers small, slow movements with ease, as when executing a drop shot in tennis or tapping in a putt in golf.
Newborns, however, are born with something called the Moro reflex. When infants feel themselves fall backwards, they startle and throw their arms out to the sides, as illustrated in this video. Even fast asleep they will do this, often waking up in the process. So while the Wiimote's accelerometer may be more sensitive, the psychological pressure exerted on the parent while lowering a sleeping baby slowly and smoothly enough so as not to wake them with the Moro reflex and thereby squandering 40 minutes of walking-the-baby-to-sleep time is beyond intense and so much greater than any stress one might feel serving for the match in tennis or getting that final strike in bowling.
Nina Planck on the recent death by starvation of a baby fed a vegan diet by his parents: "I was once a vegan. But well before I became pregnant, I concluded that a vegan pregnancy was irresponsible. You cannot create and nourish a robust baby merely on foods from plants."
Popular names for twins born in 2006. Almost all of the top name pairs start with the same letter: Jacob/Joshua, Landon/Logan, Ella/Emma, and the stunningly confusing Taylor/Tyler.
Rare semi-identical twins born. "They are the result of two sperm cells fertilising a single egg, which then divided to form two embryos - and each sperm contributed genes to each child."
Interview with Jill Youse, who started the International Breast Milk Project because she has excess breast milk that she wanted to donate to African babies in need. "Breast milk has this fascinating aspect to it. It's not something you look at in your freezer and say, 'Mmmm, boy, I'm hungry.' It's kind of gross, but it's also kind of cool, and there's this element of pride to it. It's got this ick factor and this awe factor. So I had my baby and I had my breast milk, and I thought that donating seemed like an easy thing that I could do."
True Hoop's Henry Abbott does a bit of research into baby names inspired by NBA players. "[Kobe] was drafted in 1996, and in 1997 the name debuted at #553. 2001 was its best year ever, when it was the 223rd most common name in America. Donald, Keith, Troy, Lance, Simon, Chad, Dante, Douglas, Tony, Joe all ranked lower."
Atul Gawande on the rise in Cesarean deliveries in the US, which soon may become safer than natural childbirth: "We are losing our connection to yet another natural process of life. And we are seeing the waning of the art of childbirth. The skill required to bring a child in trouble safely through a vaginal delivery, however unevenly distributed, has been nurtured over centuries. In the medical mainstream, it will soon be lost."
Brooke Greenberg is the girl who won't grow up. She's 12 years old but is physically and behaviorally stuck as a nine-month-old.
Josephine Rose Wilkie! Congratulations Mark and Tam!
Kian and Remee are twin daughters born to a UK couple...one is black and one is white. "If a sperm containing all-white genes fuses with a similar egg and a sperm coding for purely black skin fuses with a similar egg, two babies of dramatically different colours will be born. The odds of this happening are... a million to one."
