Stories tagged babies
Hundreds of dead baby penguins: you know, for kids!
A baby penguin: Enjoy it while it lasts.
Courtesy Ben CooperNature is playing a funny joke on the world. It involves cute, baby penguins, and the tropical beaches of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The punch line: the baby penguins are dead, and the beaches of Rio are covered in them.
You’ve all heard of the Circle of Life, I’m sure, and dead baby penguins are a beautiful part of that process, but this year something seems awry—namely that there are tons more dead baby penguins in Brazil than you’d normally expect.
The cause of the baby penguin die off is still unclear, but local zoo officials (the only authorities quoted in this article) believe that it may have to do with pollution, or over fishing causing the penguins to swim further for food than they normally would. Baby penguins would not be as able to contend with stronger ocean currents further from shore, and they’d, you know, drown and die.
So it may not be totally accurate to say that it’s Nature’s fault that all the baby penguins died. But it seems like something Nature would do.
Tags : Forget this cubicle, I’m becoming a drug dealer. Of babies.
Low-grade baby: but she seems to be enjoying it.
Courtesy ocadotonyI hope I don’t look like a chump. Because I’m no chump. I’m no chump, and I’m leaving this chump job. Goodbye, Chump Inc. Goodbye, Chumville. I’m starting an exciting new life, effective immediately, as a drug dealer.
And what poison will I peddle? What do I plan to sling on street corners and playgrounds? The worst and most deadly drug: pure, uncut baby.
Trust me; it’s the next big thing. I accept that my baby dealing operation will probably start out small (baby manufacturing is notoriously time-consuming), but before you know it gossip pages will be swimming in photos of starlets with babies peaking out of their handbags, or smeared on their upper lips. Why?
Because babies get you hiiigghhh!
Or at least they get mothers high, and that’s a market somewhat neglected by dealers. Cha-ching!
Research has shown that mothers, when shown pictures of their babies, experience strong brain activity in regions associated with reward and addiction—a natural high.
The strength of a mother’s reaction seems to depend partly on her baby’s expression. A crying baby, for instance, evokes a reaction little different from a mother seeing a stranger’s baby (ha!), whereas a smiling baby is like a spoonful of hot heroin. Relatively speaking.
That’s something I’ll have to factor into my operation—happy babies are the most potent, and I surely want to offer a high quality product. How do you make babies happy? It’s never really been my thing. Like…rattles, maybe? Cigarettes? I have the feeling that it’ll be a trial and error sort of thing.
Aside from inspiring a whole new career path for me, the research promises to be valuable in understanding some of the most basic elements of mother-child bonding, and why, in some cases, this bonding fails to occur. Neglect and abuse sometimes arises from such cases, and so, as a baby dealer, I think I would only be helping society by fixing up moms already jonesing for some baby, and encouraging the habit in others.
It's the story that just keeps going and going. One of the displaced panda's from the China earthquake has given birth to two cubs. There's tons of cute panda footage on this video for all you panda groupies out there. And here's the latest video, showing the actual birth of the panda.
Pigeons are smarter than babies. But then what isn’t?
Chill out kid: You're in the presence of great minds.
Courtesy Mario SepulvedaGet your lists out, Buzzketeers.
No, get ‘em out!
Or, you know, just sit there with your lists put away. Good job. You’re good at that.
Those of you who care about science, and have your lists out, thank you. And you may now add pigeons>babies to your “What is smarter that what” list. About time, huh?
I understand that intelligence is a tricky thing to measure, and we should acknowledge that there are several things that babies can do better than pigeons. Crying, throwing up, and pooping, for instance, babies are clearly more skilled at. But when it comes to self-cognitive abilities—something long considered exclusive to primates and large-brained animals like dolphins and elephants—pigeons take the cake. They take it away from babies.
Researchers in Japan have shown that pigeons can discriminate video images of themselves with as much as a 5-7 second delay, while 3 year old children have difficulty recognizing themselves after only a 2 second delay. Pretty embarrassing for the earth’s toddlers, if you ask me—3 years is pretty old to have trouble recognizing Number One.
I don’t totally understand the methodology behind telling whether a pigeon (or a baby, for that matter) can recognize itself, but the article gave some other interesting/hilarious examples of self-cognition tests.
Similar test have been performed on chimps by drawing on their faces when they were sleeping (drugged). Upon waking, the chimps were given mirrors to see how they felt about their new decorations. This experiment is frequently carried out on drunk humans as well (I tried to find a good picture of this, but they all seem to include a drawing of…a particular body part).
Researchers at Harvard University have shown that pigeons can discriminate pictures of people, and a laboratory in Japan claims that they can even distinguish between the works of certain painters.
Pigeons were also shown to be able to tell the difference between birds given stimulant drugs and sober pigeons. No word as to whether they’ll be trying that particular experiment on babies.
This is how trees grow on our planet: Also, on our planet, we hold cameras upside-down.
Courtesy JaboneyThe natural order of things has been a little bonkers this last week. Things all over the world are ending up where they don’t belong.
Snake on baby. Snakes don’t belong on babies. If anything, babies belong inside snakes.
Bomb in chicken. What on earth is a bomb doing in a chicken? I doubt that the chicken put it there.
Nail in head. The doctor removed it with a claw hammer. Seriously.
What good is science in a world like this? Educated guesses cannot be made, nothing is repeatable.
The number of males being born around the world is dropping. Though still outnumbering female births, the gap is closing. No one knows why.
OK, stop your snickering. A report from England indicates that a high-calorie, high-potassium diet prior to conception increases the likelihood of a woman giving birth to a boy. Low-calorie diets lead to more girls.
Is tossing babies off a 50-foot tower a good idea? In India, some think so
Can tossing a baby off a 50-foot tower into a white sheet be good for the health of a baby? Traditionalists in India think so and do it regularly. USA Today has a video report of the process. They insist that no babies have been harmed by this practice. Warning: This video does show babies being tossed from the tower.
Toddlers learn language by listening to their parents speak: Photo by nieve44 at flickr.com
It sounds like a particularly messy disease. Or my reaction to the idiot driver ahead of me. But “word spurt” is the term scientists use to describe the sudden onset of language that most children achieve around 18 months of age. Prior to that, they speak only isolated words from a limited vocabulary. But after the spurt, they suddenly start speaking whole sentences, expressing original thoughts.
Previously, scientists had thought that some mechanism in the brain had to develop to a point where it made language possible. But new research indicates that babies are learning words all along, almost from birth. It's just that they're learning many words simultaneously. Once they’ve figured out how to decipher a few dozen words, they start to understand the basics of how language works. From there, it becomes much easier to add more and more words.
Now all we need is for science to tell us how to get them to be quiet!
Visitors to the Science Museum will name some of the falcon chicks. (Haven't seen them? Stop by the Mississippi River Gallery: you can use a scope to see the nest box on the stack of the High Bridge power plant, and you can see a live video feed from inside the box.) Vote for your favorite name!
Recent comments
What's going on with science careers?
Are Midwestern winters getting warmer? Why or why not? Share your thoughts on local climate change.
Write your own label for the plant pathogens
Are Midwestern winters getting warmer? Why or why not? Share your thoughts on local climate change.
Subscribe
I want to learn about
Science Buzz and all related activitiesScience Museum of Minnesota, 2004-2008,
except where otherwise noted.
Copyright Information
Add a new comment