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 don’t 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