pregnancy

Though the University of Utah in Salt Lake City might not be the first place one would expect to find researchers getting experimental in the bedroom, a team of scientists there have developed a new gel that can quickly shift from liquid to solid, for use in a vaginal condom that more easily protects against both pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

For most of us, procuring a gallon of milk requires only a quick trip to the corner store. Breastfeeding mothers, on the other hand, need an estimated 30 percent more energy to keep a newborn nipper happy with fresh mama juice. Eating like a horse and lazing about are two ways to offset this extra energy demand, but another factor may contribute as well. According to a new study, support from family may play a key role in helping mothers conserve energy and therefore allow their bodies to prepare more quickly for another pregnancy.

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.

The seahorse is a strange fish. Many of the traits it possesses have evolved in a direction unlike any other family of animals underwater—its bent S-shape; its head at a 90-degree angle to its body; its prehensile tail; and, most curiously, the male's brood pouch. A lab at Texas A&M University led by Adam Jones is currently studying these structures in the hope of understanding how it was that male pregnancy evolved in seahorses and how it affects the traditional sex roles in the fish.

I wrote the first Science Confirms the Obvious round-up in Popular Science a few years ago. But keeping pace with the stream of no-duh research takes the likes of a blog. So welcome to the inaugural post of my new column, Science Confirms the Obvious: Your one-stop source for scientific no-brainers—findings that dont rattle conventional wisdom, settle great mysteries, win Nobel Prizes or inspire future generations of brilliant thinkers—and why scientists bother producing them in the first place.

A fetus lives in a world of bubbles. In its earliest days, it’s shaped like one. Later, it floats in one—the squishy, enveloping amniotic sac. And eventually, if all goes well, the fetus releases one bubble of fluid, then another and another, like smoke signals, as it puckers and swallows and floats in the womb. It