Getting an early ultrasound to figure out when your child will be born has become part and parcel of becoming a new mom in countries like the U.S. For many women living in countries with poor-quality healthcare, however, ultrasounds are rarely available or too costly to afford. But a new study published by Science on…
American women had fewer children in 2017 than in any year since 1987, according to a new report released by the Centers for Disease and Prevention Thursday. And the overall birth rate was the lowest ever recorded in the US. While there are some positive trends in the report, such as fewer teen pregnancies, there are…
Is this it? Have we finally reached peak Star Wars figure?
It’s no secret that the US—when compared to similarly well-off countries—is not that great at keeping its infants (and new moms) alive. But a new study published Tuesday in PLOS-Medicine offers a detailed state-by-state look of how short of the mark we’re falling: Infants born in the US can be over twice as likely to…
We’re all familiar with the supernatural conception trope, where characters like Scully from The X-Files, Leo from Charmed, and Cordelia Chase from Angel are forcibly impregnated through unnatural means. It’s... not great, people. However, there’s another version of the trope called supernatural pregnancy where the…
To the untrained eye, babies are nothing more than drooling, crying blobs who do basically nothing all day. But a recent study published in Environmental Science & Technology has found that babies are actually drooling, crying blobs who stir up impressive clouds of bacteria, dirt, fungi, and bug bits wherever they…
Need to run downstairs to fetch the laundry? Or maybe there’s a phone call you just have to take? Life with a baby can make even the smallest chores feel like a herculean task if you don’t have a nanny. But it turns out, if you keep your floors clean using a robot, maybe you do have a nanny and just didn’t realize it.
We don’t remember what it was like to be a fetus. We don’t remember what we heard or smelled, and we certainly don’t remember what we saw. So fetuses, their development, and their experiences are a natural curiosity. When and how do fetuses start taking part in the human experience? Can they recognize faces from the…
Sometimes it seems the real reason some people choose to have kids is so that they can pour all of their pre-baby time and energy into a big “hooray, we’re pregnant!” announcement. YouTuber Nokem came up with a simpler, but utterly fantastic approach that fans of Star Trek: TNG will wish they’d thought of.
A lot of the stuff you’ll see online right now is pretty depressing, possibly concerning how the world is falling apart or like how we could randomly go to war at any second. But you know what isn’t depressing? This video of cheetah cubs doing their very best to let out some little roars.
There are literally wearables for everyone, even people who haven’t technically been born. A startup called Bloomlife is at CES with what it says is the first pregnancy wearable.
Now I’m not a baby, but I can imagine it would be really cool if my parents just knew it was diaper changing time without me crying about it and disturbing everyone within a thirty-mile radius. A team at Ritsumeikan University in Japan gets it—they’re working on a urine-powered diaper sensor that can tell when it’s…
Besides the free candy, Halloween is supposed to be about scaring yourself silly. But don’t waste your time on horror movies, haunted houses, or ghost stories. Just watch this behind-the-scenes look at how Hyperflesh makes its oversized baby masks. You’ll be terrified of going anywhere near a daycare afterwards.
Is that a baby or the blob? It’s actually just the sick and twisted result of a neural network predicting what a still photo of a baby would look like if it were moving. Researchers at MIT have published demonstrations of their work on generative video, and the “hallucinated” outcomes of are both impressive and…
One might think that caring for a robot baby—one that cries and sleeps like a regular human baby—might discourage teenage girls from getting pregnant. According to new research, however, the robo-babies actually appear to have the opposite effect.
Like any person scared shitless about the prospect of keeping a fragile new human alive, as soon as I found out I was pregnant I started googling the important questions. Among them: “What is the best baby monitor?”
Baby products have always been part of a predatory industry that feasts on the paranoia of new parents. But it’s gotten worse in the last few years with the wave of baby-tracking tech. Now Nest—which makes a camera which is one of the top-rated baby monitors—is proposing a smart crib, according to patent documents…
If you opt for the convenience of disposable diapers over their more environmentally-friendly cloth alternatives, you probably don’t stop to think about the science that allows them to keep your baby dry at night. But engineerguy Bill Hammack has, and in a new video, he explains why you’re actually wrapping your…
Facebook Live has given us many things: an exploding watermelon, a failed presidential interview, the joy of Martha Stewart, bike murder. On Monday, it also gave us the gift of life, when Kali Kanongata’a of Carmichael, California used it to broadcast the birth of his child.
Newborn infants are supposed to be capable of imitating our facial expressions, like sticking out our tongues and opening our mouths. A new study in Current Biology suggests there’s no actual imitating going on—and that it’s all in our heads.
