Search Results for: label/mother

• Motherhood, war, and attachment: what does it all mean?

  The antebellum tales Scene 1: Two fathers encounter each other at a Boy Scout meeting. After a little conversation, one reveals that his son won’t be playing football because of concerns about head injuries. The other father reveals that he and his son love football, that they spoke with their pediatrician about it, and that their son will continue with football at least into middle school. There’s a bit of wary nodding, and then, back to the…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on May 16, 2012

• The Only Mother’s Day Gift Guide You Will Ever Need

  …embedded a little science here and there in the links. ) While the celebration of mothers is not a new concept, the modern version of Mother’s Day is a far cry from the ancient festivals that honored Cybele .  However, in 1907, when Anna Jarvis invented the modern Mother’s Day as a means to pay homage to her own mother, it was not her intention to use moms for profit. But, alas, by the 1920s, this well-intended national holiday quickly mo…

  Authored by Jeanne Garbarino on May 9, 2012

• Motherhood Defined: It is in the heart of the beholder

  “Motherhood”: Sculpture at the Catacumba Park, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Motherhood.  It can mean many things, and our own definition of it is largely defined by our individual experiences.  To one person, motherhood might simply mean the act of raising children; to another, motherhood might be what defines them.   It is not uncommon to generalize the concept of “motherhood” and lump everyone who upholds a singl…

  Authored by Jeanne Garbarino on May 11, 2012

• Pregnancy 101: My placenta looked like meatloaf, but I wasn’t about to eat it.

  …of us are involved in policing the neighborhoods, some of us build structures, some of us communicate information, some of us deal with food, some of us get rid of waste, etc.  Every cell gets a job (it’s the only example of 100% employment rates!). Now back to the cells in the fertilized egg.  As they start to learn what their specific job will be, the cells within the sphere will start to organize themselves.  After about 5 days after fertil…

  Authored by Jeanne Garbarino on July 27, 2012

• Childbirth and C-sections in pre-modern times

  …s  @BoneGirlPhD.] Basically since we started walking upright, childbirth has been difficult for women.  Evolution selected for larger and larger brains in our hominin ancestors such that today our newborns have heads roughly 102% the size of the mother’s pelvic inlet width (Rosenberg 1992). Yes, you read that right. Our babies’ heads are actually two percent larger than our skeletal anatomy.  Fetal head and mother’s pelv…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on July 2, 2012

• Mother’s Day: Part of me forever

  Always a part of each other. (Source) Double X Science’s Chris Gunter, science education and outreach editor, wrote this wonderful post for the Last Word on Nothing. We are featuring it here for Mother’s Day because, as she writes, if you’re a mother, you and your child are part of each other forever–and this time, we mean in a scientific sense. Source. This summer I put my Lilkid, as I call him online…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on May 12, 2012

• Depressing genes

  …ch experience — yet it was obvious he didn’t have the knack for it. This student’s dogged pursuit of a mental health career made me wonder what kind of emotional turmoil he experienced which would make him think, at age 19, that psychiatry was the only vocation worth working towards. Then there were the two graduate students who both worked incredibly hard and were both prone to obsess about their experiments. Each burned off stress in quit…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on May 17, 2013

• Are your children always on your mind? They may be IN your mind

  …). In this study, researchers examined postmortem brain tissue from 26 women who had no detectable neurological disease and 33 women who’d had Alzheimer’s disease; the women’s ages at death ranged from 32 to 101. They found that almost two thirds (37) of all of the women tested had evidence of the Y chromosome gene in their brains, in several brain regions. The blue spots in the image below highlight cells carrying these “…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on September 26, 2012

• Dominants, alphas, and queens: Happy Mother’s Day!

  Mothers who rule in the animal kingdom. by Jacquelyn Gill      On the second Sunday in May in the United States, mothers reign supreme, receiving tributes of breakfast in bed, hand-made cards, flowers, and obligatory long-distance phone calls. Meanwhile, for the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s just another day: eat, hunt, mate, birth, nest, migrate, defend, and rest. Some go it alone, but others—like spotted hyenas and bison—live in groups with…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on May 13, 2013

• If you want your dinner, little fairy wren, sing the secret password!

  …oo chick hatches, he’ll reap the benefits of having a fairy-wren mother to feed and protect him. But fairy-wrens have adapted to this evolutionary trick with a clever one of their own. A little more than halfway through their 14-day incubation, starting on day nine, fairy-wren mothers sing an “incubation song” while sitting on their eggs. Every four minutes, she sings a two-second tune, and the little growing chicks in her eggs are listening… and…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on November 14, 2012