babies

Even though the combination of affluence and fertility drugs has raised the age at which many women give birth, children born to older women continue to suffer a disproportionately high rate of birth defects and genetic disease. Many of these problems result from the degradation of the area of the region of the egg around the nucleus.

To correct for those problems, a team of Japanese researchers has implanted the nucleus of an older woman's egg into the egg cell of a younger donor. This may fix the problem, but it also moves medicine closer to the ethically challenging creation of a person with three biological parents.

People who hate creepy kids and Halloween aren't out of the woods yet. A new Wii-exclusive Baby and Me arrives just in time for the holiday season, so that every Nintendo-loving household can stick a wiimote in an anatomically correct doll's back to rock it lovingly via accelerometer and hear its gurgles, giggles and wails through a tinny Wiimote speaker.

Scientists recently spotted a swarm of baby comets flying away from a passing parent comet -- the largest comet birth ever witnessed. The discovery was assisted by a special digital filter that enhances faint features within the cloud of comet debris.

It seems like every couple of years there are some new baby rules. Don’t lay them down on their stomachs. Don’t lay them down on their backs. Do yoga while pregnant. Don’t do yoga while pregnant. Breast feed. Don’t breast feed. In light of a new study, the latest piece of baby advice you might hear from your doctor may be “don’t conceive in the spring or summer.”

We’ve all heard the news: We’re getting fat. Americans are inactive, McDonald’s-eating smokers with diabetes, right? That’s certainly a generalization, but you know what they say. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Tons of research dollars have been poured into studying this historic obesity epidemic. While some may imagine that obesity begins once a child is tall enough to reach the top shelf where mom and dad keep the cookies, a new study points to an even earlier age that jump starts obesity: infancy.

Are you feeling lucky? If you were born in December, January or February, maybe not. Economists from the University of Notre Dame found people born during winter months tend to be less healthy, less intelligent, less educated and lower paid compared with individuals born in spring, summer or fall.

The stereotype of pregnant women experiencing bizarre cravings has long had people believing that all expectant mothers go a little crazy when it comes to food and drink over the course of nine months. Though the image of a petite woman screaming at her husband at 2:00 in the morning, "I WANT BROCCOLI AND STRAWBERRY SYRUP!" may lead us to imagine that all pregnant women gain extra, non-baby weight, a recent study shows that those who are more likely to over-gain weight during pregnancy are overweight or obese mothers-to-be who underestimate their weight at the beginning of term.

Babies with Down's Syndrome typically learn how to stand upright and walk a year later than other children. But Dale Ulrich of the University of Michigan has found that by getting the infants to work out on a tiny treadmill eight minutes a day, five days a week for six to eight months, he can speed up the process by as much as four months.