“Hard, hard to be a baby—Baby animals like you’ve never seen them” is more or less the English translation of the French title of Brooke Barker’s book Dur, dur d’être un bébé—Les bébés animaux comme vous ne les avez jamais vus. The book is full of facts and drawings about many kinds and sizes of […]
Tag: baby
Bristly pacifiers, for weaning [new patent]
If you gave a baby a pacifier [that’s ‘dummy’ in the UK] which was covered in (mildly) irritating bristles, what kind of psychological impact might that have? “Minimal” says the documentation for a newly patented invention that incorporates : “[…] bristle like structures which discourages continued use of the pacifier by a child of appropriate […]
Upper-class People More Likely to Take Candy From Babies [research study]
Entitlements inspire this study of adults taking candy from babies: “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 109, no. 11, 2012, pp. 4086-4091. The authors, at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of […]
Appreciating the Ig Nobel Prize-winning momma-to-baby vaginal music communicator
The inventors of Babypod, the insert-into-your-vagina device that helps a pregnant woman play music for her developing fetus, produced this video ad: The 2017 Ig Nobel Prize for Obstetrics was awarded to those physician/inventors—Marisa López-Teijón, Álex García-Faura, Alberto Prats-Galino, and Luis Pallarés Aniorte—for showing that a developing human fetus responds more strongly to music that is played […]
Can trends in baby’s names foreshadow major social events? (new study)
“Before 1992, the names ‘Hillary’ and ‘Hilary’ had been increasing in popularity for several decades. After 1992, however, their popularity dropped suddenly 10-fold.” – explains Stefano Ghirlanda who is Professor of Psychology, Biology, and Anthropology, Brooklyn College, CUNY, and Founder and fellow, Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University. With this in mind, […]
Multifunction baby carrier exercise device (new patent)
“The care of a newborn baby is virtually a 24 hour a day job, leaving very little time for new parents to engage in traditional exercise. The lack of exercise runs contrary to traditional and prevailing medical opinions.” Fortunately, inventor Scott Krass of San Diego, California, has invented (and just received a US patent for) […]
Be still my beating heart … smashed fingers, battered shins and fake murder
If you (yup, you) use a fake weapon to brutally beat a stranger, and then slit his throat, and then shoot him in the face, and then you assault a little baby, will your heart and blood pump like mad — even if you know that it’s all a trick and the man will suffer […]
Crying Infant Assuager (new patent)
“Crying babies are the source of great frustration for adults, particularly for their parents. Because they cannot speak, infants cry as their primary means of communication and they do it with great frequency. Babies cry as a means to communicate that they are in pain, unhappy, tired, hungry or generally in need of attention. Sometimes […]
Extracting a stuck wine cork — or a new child [patent applications]
Extracting a stuck wine cork from a bottle inspired this method for bringing a child into the world. Jorge Ernesto Odon of Argentina invented a new method for assisting the birth of a child, using an insertable, inflatable bag to grip the child’s head, in the same way one can extract a cork that has […]
From the mouths of babes: An existential statistic [British]
The UK’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey includes a variable called “resbby — Whether respondent is baby“. The July-September 2011 survey reports that the value of this variable is YES for 228 of the 105488 respondents. Here is the pertinent detail from that report: Here is that same detail, this time including the full graph: A year later, […]