pregnant
edyong | November 24, 2009For the pipefish (and their relatives, seahorses and sea dragons), it's the males who get pregnant. After a male fertilises the female's eggs, he takes them up into a special brood pouch and shelters them until the babies hatch from his pot-bellied stomach several weeks later. He may seem like a shoe-in for the Dad-of-the-year award but this fatherly commitment has a sinister side to it. Not all of the babies he cares for make it out of his stomach alive.
Gry Sagebakken from the University of Gothenburg has proved that pregnant male pipefishes absorb some of the eggs and embryos within…
edyong | March 9, 2009Pregnant women are generally advised to avoid drinking alcohol and for good reason - exposing an unborn baby to alcohol can lead to a range of physical and mental problems from hyperactivity and learning problems to stunted growth, abnormal development of the head, and mental retardation.
But alcohol also has much subtler effects on a foetus. Some scientists have suggested that people who get their first taste of alcohol through their mother's placenta are more likely to develop a taste for it in later life. This sleeper effect is a long-lasting one - exposure to alcohol in the womb has been…
edyong | February 3, 2009Our health isn't just affected by the things we do after we're born - the conditions we face inside our mother's womb can have a lasting impact on our wellbeing, much later in life. This message comes from a growing number of studies that compare a mother's behaviour during pregnancy to the subsequent health of her child.
But all of these studies have a problem. Mothers also pass on half of their genes to their children, and it's very difficult to say which aspects of the child's health are affected by conditions in the womb, and which are influenced by mum's genetic legacy.
Take the case…