Mom: Are you having a daughter? According to a new study of the 1959-1961 Great Leap Forward famine in China, women are more likely to give birth to girls during famine conditions than when there’s plenty to eat. With the recession on here in the US, we may start to see more girls born here as well.

In LiveScience.com, Stephanie Pappas quotes sociologist Shige Song as saying, "Investment on male children is a high-risk, high-return game, so you want to do it only if you are in very good situation." This may be part of the reason for the high rates of infanticide of girls in recent years, due to China’s one-child ruling.
read more

The (mostly) male hormone testosterone drops after a man becomes a parent, probably so that he will care for his infant, rather than try to kill him or push him out of the nest, as some other creatures do.
read more

We know that the Visitors “talk inside our heads,” but unfortunately, WE don’t. Many of us can identify a specific foreign language when we hear it, even if we can’t speak or understand what’s going on, because we recognize the accent. German researchers say that babies pick up the rhythms and patterns of their mothers’ speech while still in the womb, so that when they’re born, they will “cry” in that accent.

The researchers studied the cries of 60 babies born to families speaking either French or German and found that the French newborns cried with a rising “accent” while the German babies’ cries had a falling inflection, which matches up with the languages their mothers speak.
read more