babies (Page 2)

Babies know a lot more than we used to think they did. And ladies: if you want to have lots of them, mate with a man who has a deep voice.

In LiveScience.com, Robin Lloyd reports that scientists have recently learned that babies can pick out their native language from a foreign one when they are only a few days old.

Speaking of voices, LiveScience reports that men with deep voices have more children, probably because studies have shown that women are more attracted to men with deep-pitched voices.

Art credit: freeimages.co.uk
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One of a Neanderthal baby’s first words was probably “papa,”according to linguists. They are interested in why over6,000 languages share so many sounds for the same words,especially words that are first spoken.

Anna Gosline writes in New Scientist that Pierre Bancel andAlain Matthey de l’Etang think these basic words come fromthe earliest languages, that were spoken 50,000 years ago.They’ve found that the word “papa,” meaning father or malerelative, is present in almost 700 of the 1,000 languagesfor which they have complete data.

Bancel says, “There is only one explanation for theconsistent meaning of the word ‘papa’: a common ancestry.”But he’ll never be able to prove it because “We have noNeanderthals around to ask.”
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She’s on a low carb diet, he carries a cell phone?no wonder they can’t have kids. Researchers have found that a low carb diet makes women less fertile, while carrying a cell phone does the same thing to men.

Caroline Ryan writes in bbcnews.com that when the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine fed mice a diet containing 25% protein, it made them less fertile. Researcher David Gardner says, “The rate of fetal development was severely reduced as a result of the high protein diet of the mother?”It’s conceivable that people who have protein intakes greater than 30% may have problems conceiving.”
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Parents who smoke produce fewer boys, according to research on Japanese couples. The researchers don?t know why this happens, but say both the mother’s and father’s smoking habits are important.

Stress, temperature, birth order and even the number of wives in a man’s harem are all known to influence the relative proportions of girls and boys at birth. But this is the first time the sex ratio of babies and smoking have been linked.

The researchers questioned over 5000 Japanese women on their smoking habits and those of their partner around the time they conceived their children. The 11,815 births reported were then split into groups based on parental smoking habits and the team compared the ratio of boys to girls in each category.
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