Category:
Babies

My last placenta-related post… I promise

I came across the following placenta anecdote, related by Dr. H. Michener of Wichita, Kansas at the American Association of Progressive Medicine, held in Chicago, September 1917. It seemed worthy of sharing here:

A prosperous farmer who was expecting another heir had a sudden call to go East, and as he was about to take his departure he called his hired man and said to him, "Now, Mike, I am obliged to go away for several weeks and want you to look after everything carefully, and especially my wife, who will likely have another baby before my return; I want you to treat her just as well as you treat the cows when they have their calves." Mike promised to comply with the request.

When the farmer returned home he found his wife and the new-comer in such a remarkably fine condition, he hastened to the barn to thank Mike for his good stewardship; but Mike replied, "I had a 'ell of a time to get the Missus to eat the afterbirth."

Posted By: Alex - Sun Apr 15, 2012 - Comments (2)
Category: Babies, Pregnancy

More Placenta Weirdness

After posting a few days ago about the doctor who was speculating about the benefits of eating placenta, I realized I had merely scratched the surface of placenta weirdness. There's also a growing interest in placenta art — that is, smearing the placenta against a piece of paper and calling it art.



Another option is to transform your placenta into a placenta teddy bear. Your kid is sure to need years of therapy once he gets old enough to realize what he's been cuddling up with at night.

Posted By: Alex - Sat Apr 14, 2012 - Comments (3)
Category: Art, Babies, Pregnancy

The Benefits of Placentophagy

In a recent article in the journal Ecology of Food and Nutrition, Mark Kristal argues that placentophagia (that is, the eating of afterbirth or placenta) could offer significant benefits for humans — especially considering that all other mammals (including non-human primates) do it. (link: ScienceDaily.com). These benefits might include increasing mother-infant interaction, increasing the effects of pregnancy-mediated analgesia in the delivering mother, and potentiating opioid circuits in the maternal brain that facilitate the onset of caretaking behavior. He acknowledges that these possible benefits don't warrant "the wholesale ingestion of afterbirth," but he does think the issue deserves further study.

The strange thing is that although all other mammals practice placentophagy, no human cultures do (according to Dr. Kristal) — except for Hollywood celebrities.

Posted By: Alex - Mon Apr 09, 2012 - Comments (6)
Category: Babies, Food, Nutrition, Health

Weird Shorts – 4

Talk about a mammoth appetite, when most of the world’s large mammals went extinct roughly 10,000 years ago, the vast majority of the vanished species were herbivores. This of course meant that they were no longer around to eat the plants they otherwise would have, and - according to Christophers Doughty and Field from Oxford and Stanford Universities respectively – this freed up an extra 1.4 trillion kilos of food, roughly 2.5% of the net product of all Earth’s dry land. However, the researchers add, this excess had been ‘used up’ by burgeoning human numbers by around 1700 and today we consume six times as much as the Pleistocene critters ever did while simultaneously driving down land productivity by 10% (Nature)(PDF).

That’s not to say that our massive consumption doesn’t have it’s upside, As Vangelis Kapatos of Manhattan discovered when he attempted suicide by jumping from his ninth floor flat, only to survive when his fall was broken by a pile of uncollected garbage. Mr. Kapatos’ timing, from his perspective, couldn’t have been worse, the unusually large garbage pile was due to collections being suspended because of snow. They were due to resume the day after his impromptu dumpster dive (Today Online).

Mind you, we’re not the only animals prone to excess. After finding the bodies of dozens of starlings near the city of Constanta in Romania, locals were concerned that the cause might be bird flu, instead post-mortems of the birds have revealed that they in fact died of alcohol poisoning, having ‘drunk’ themselves to death on the discarded leftovers of the local winemaking industry. A least they died happy (BBC News).

Better than dying happy, though, is living happy, and the secret of that, says the UK’s Office for National Statistics, is having a job. But it’s not the pay but the job security that counts, say the government statisticians, which ironically are facing staff cuts themselves due to the economic downturn. Other key happiness factors, according to the preliminary report, are good personal health and a decent family life. What will we do without these people (Telegraph)?



More in extended >>

Posted By: Dumbfounded - Thu Jan 13, 2011 - Comments (4)
Category: Animals, Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Creatures, Armageddon and Apocalypses, Babies, Crime, Death, Human Marvels, Inebriation and Intoxicants, Religion, Sexuality, Weird Names, Body Fluids, Perfume and Cologne and Other Scents

Follies of the Mad Men #105



I'm sorry, that trailing umbilical cord freaks me out too much to pay attention to the message.

Posted By: Paul - Mon May 31, 2010 - Comments (7)
Category: Babies, Health, Disease, PSA’s, Pregnancy

Weird Science - I Sing The Body Eccentric

President Obama’s recent fall in approval rating may have an unusual cause, he may possibly be too thin. In a recent study by Elizabeth Miller of the University of Missouri, voters prefer their male politicians to be portly, while women representatives should be more wasp-waisted. In an experiment involving 120 volunteers, people were asked to assess fictitious male and female candidates from a brief bio and a picture, crucially two pictures of each candidate were used, a natural one and one manipulated to portray the person as overweight. People shown the heavier male scored him an average 10% higher for reliability, honesty, dependability and inspiration than his thinner doppelganger, but this relationship was reversed in the woman candidate. In the journal Obesity, Miller puts this down to societal expectation and stereotyping (Telegraph).

Social pressure also crops up in explaining another finding this week, this one by Meridith Young of McMaster University in Ontario, that what single women eat depends a lot on whom they are eating with. After covertly monitoring the canteen behaviour of 470 undergraduates, Young found that women significantly lowered their calorie intake when sat with men compared with all women groups. Moreover, the more men a woman sat with, the less on average she consumed. In the journal Appetite, she puts the discrepancy down to women unconsciously advertising themselves to men, adding "the salad leaves are meant to say, I'm pretty, I'm attractive, I take care of myself" (Guardian).

Of course, we all know what men really like in a woman; that she not appear too powerful. Or so says a study by Brian Meier and Sarah Dionne of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. In the study, eighty 19 year-olds were asked to rate the attractiveness of a number of images presented in random order, some of which would be repeated. In fact the subjects saw each image twice, once near the top of the screen and once low down. The researchers found that men rated women 1.8% more attractive when observed near the bottom, and women found men 1.5% better looking when higher up. They suggest that their findings might explain why men are taller than their women partners more frequently than would be expected by chance (Times of India).

As to what women really like in men, perhaps not being British should be somewhere on the list. After champagne controversially lost out to an English wine earlier this week, French scientists have hit back at British research that concluded that the mythical “G-spot” did not exist. “Of course it exists,” say French gynaecologists, “you just can’t find it!” The original study by King’s College in London looked at over 900 pairs of identical or non-identical twins in the expectation that the identical siblings should both report having a G-spot more frequently than the others, they did not. The French however claim their cross-channel colleagues have got the wrong end of the speculum, “It is not a question of genetics but of use," said one (Telegraph).



More in extended >>

Posted By: Dumbfounded - Wed Feb 03, 2010 - Comments (6)
Category: Babies, Cosmetics, Exercise and Fitness, Politics, Science, Anthropology, Experiments, Psychology, Sexuality, Divorce, Obesity

Not So Cute Baby

When babies go robotic, they seem more creepy and less cute. Hopefully, these guys will figure out a better face!!



But I bet they would sell better if they looked like Chuckie!!

Posted By: gdanea - Wed Oct 21, 2009 - Comments (4)
Category: Babies

Try Not To Laugh at This Serous Baby

There's a reason this clip has over 28 million views -- so if you've seen it before, I apologize for making you laugh again.



Just don't give me the evil eye!!

Posted By: gdanea - Tue Oct 20, 2009 - Comments (4)
Category: Babies

Weird Science - Biology

Men are now obsolete, thanks to work by scientists at the Northeast England Stem Cell Institute. Professor Karim Nayernia and team have managed a "scientific first" by inducing stem cells into becoming artificial sperm in laboratory conditions. In mice, these sperm have proven able to fertilise eggs and produce viable offspring, opening the door to potential new infertility treatments in humans. Additionally, the stem cells themselves may come from either sex, raising the possibility of children being born without the traditional male input. Any such treatment is many years away however, and there are still problems to be overcome, not least that all the mice babies so far produced by this technique had abnormally short lives. Nayernia admits that the process is not perfect, but says that it could be ready for human trials in less than ten years (Telegraph).

But mothers, don't kick out the old man yet, not if you want a little help with the childcare that is. A team from the "Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution" in France has confirmed a prediction of the theory of evolution that fathers will invest more in children that resemble them. A total of 30 Senegalese families were studied and the paternal investment and resemblance were quantified for each. As expected, there was a significant correlation between the resemblance and investment scores, but also between investment and the nutrition and health of the child. So it seems we fathers still have our uses, for now (Science Daily).

Animals do many weird things to avoid being eaten, from camouflage, to making themselves look bigger or more dangerous, to having a false head or eye on a less vital point to divert attackers. However, one spider has a tactic that's never been observed before; it makes decoy models of itself. The Cyclosa mulmeinensis spider of Orchid Island, near Taiwan, decorates its web with pellets of silk the same size and (to wasps) colour as itself, then hides among them. Researchers from Tunghai University were actually able to observe wasp predators attacking the decoys while the spider escaped, confirming the effectiveness of the trick. The strategy is not without risk though, by having more spider sized blobs on it, the web may also be easier for the wasps to detect (Daily Mail).



More in extended >>

Posted By: Dumbfounded - Wed Jul 08, 2009 - Comments (6)
Category: Animals, Babies, Family, Insects and Spiders, Medicine, Science, Anthropology

Weird Weddings

In Saudi Arabia it is the groom who traditionally bears the cost of the marriage, and often men will put off the event to save for a bigger ceremony. So the prize of an all-expenses-paid wedding by a Saudi charity is quite an offer, even when it does come with a catch. To enter the draw you have to give up smoking. The charity "Purity", who is behind the campaign, will award the grand prize plus 20 runners-up prizes of free furniture in August, with all the winners being drawn from those men who complete a seven-day course on quitting. Hundreds of men have entered, including one who admitted taking up smoking just so he could enter by quitting (BBC News).

Mind you, it might be as well to get as healthy as possible before the big day, because according to recent research, marriage puts pounds on you. Lona Sandon, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, claims that newlyweds commonly gain up to 10 pounds in the months following the wedding. But before anyone assumes this is scientific proof that your partner has let himself/herself go, be advised that most often both partners gain weight together (Examiner).

Meanwhile, in Japan, most of the weight gain is starting to happen before the ceremony, as it is becoming increasingly common for the bride to be "eating for two". What was a shameful thing in Japan less than a generation ago is now being increasingly celebrated as a dekichatta kon or "double joy" wedding. According to Chika Hirotani of Watabe Wedding as many as 20% of weddings they supply are so blessed (Telegraph).

Another sort of double joy wedding also took place in Russia this week, when twin brothers married twin sisters in a twin ceremony. Alexei and Dimitry Semyonov finally tied the knot with their sweethearts Lilia and Liana after the four of them met at a dance party a year ago (MOS News). A video of the ceremony is also available (if you sit through the advertisement).



More in extended >>

Posted By: Dumbfounded - Tue Jun 30, 2009 - Comments (3)
Category: Addictions, Babies, Ceremonies, Weddings

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Who We Are
Alex Boese
Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction, science-themed books such as Elephants on Acid and Psychedelic Apes.

Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.

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