Maybe you’ve already received this humdinger of a question; maybe you’ve got a few more years to puzzle out your answer for when the time comes.

How does Santa do it? How does he fly around the world with reindeer and enough presents for every good boy and girl? How does he know who’s been naughty or nice?

Well, to hear one professor from North Carolina State University tell it, Santa is very tech-savvy.

“He exploits the space-time continuum,” says Larry Silverberg, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. […] “He understands that space stretches, he understands that you can stretch time, compress space and therefore he can, in a sense, actually have six Santa months to deliver the presents,” Silverberg told Reuters.

“In our reference frame it appears as though he does it in the wink of an eye and in fact there have been sightings of Santa, quick sightings, and that’s in our reference frame, but in Santa’s reference frame he really has six months”.

And that’s only the beginning. All of those presents? Don’t look to an impossibly overloaded sleigh as the answer; how about nanotechnology instead? Santa just takes raw materials and grows your gifts under the tree!

Satellite-type surveillance assists in his list-checking for naughty and nice children, and his reindeer are genetically bred to have the powers they do.

How’s that for an answer, little Johnny? Somehow I think “It’s magic” will have to do for my own kids when the time comes.

What accounts for the downturn in crime in New York City in the last half of the 1990s? Economist Rick Nevin has a short answer: Lead. That is, reducing the number of toddlers who have lead poisoning leads to fewer criminals when these kids come of age.

What makes Nevin’s work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

“It is stunning how strong the association is,” Nevin said in an interview. “Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead.”

Lead levels in old housing is one source that has come under better control, particularly in cities such as New York that have attacked the problem aggressively, especially in poor neighborhoods. But lead in gasoline is another huge factor. In the US, lead in gasoline peaked in the early 70s and then started to decline, falling very sharply in the early 80s; it was nearly eliminated by 1987. In New York, lead levels plummeted in the early 1970s. The impact? Data show that between 1970 and 1974, the number of children heavily poisoned by lead fell by 80%. Fast-forward twenty years, and you have a plummeting crime rate. By contrast, in countries that have been behind the US in putting constraints in leaded gasoline, crime rates are soaring.

Other research that supports the lead-crime connection is out there but has garnered little attention:

Other evidence has accumulated in recent years that lead is a neurotoxin that causes impulsivity and aggression, but these studies have also drawn little attention. In 2001, sociologist Paul B. Stretesky and criminologist Michael Lynch showed that U.S. counties with high lead levels had four times the murder rate of counties with low lead levels, after controlling for multiple environmental and socioeconomic factors.

In 2002, Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh, compared lead levels of 194 adolescents arrested in Pittsburgh with lead levels of 146 high school adolescents: The arrested youths had lead levels that were four times higher.

Wow.

Naturally, I’ll now segue to the need to keep lead out of kids’ toys and gear. Granted, occasionally playing with a toy made with lead paint may not put a kid in danger of serious lead poisoning (unless he swallows it), but if we keep letting crappy lead toys and kids’ jewelry into the country, who knows what the cumulative effect could be? Why should we let foreign factory owners and careless importers undo what de-leading efforts have accomplished in the US? Let’s get the word out to the acting chair of the CPSC that we want our government to take a harder line against importers of lead-containing children’s gear.

Posted by MommaSteph.

Even though many medical groups aren’t supportive of certain types of genetic testing, research shows that the next generation will probably not feel that way. A new study shows that children of people with certain mutations that may make them more susceptible to developing breast or ovarian cancer later in life are heartily in favor of genetic testing for these markers.

Dr. Angela Bradbury, of the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, and her colleagues interviewed 53 people (all parents) with BRCA mutations and 22 adult children of those parents. The researchers found that 40 percent of the parents and children supported genetic testing of minors, with half of those in favor only under certain circumstances.

Meanwhile, a majority of the adult children — potential consumers of genetic testing — supported the idea.

Wouldn’t you, if you were in that situation? I’d sure like to know if I had the mutations that might mean I was more likely to have cancer! It’s not so much that they could do much about it, but I’d rather know that it might be my reality than to be totally blindsided by it later on.

I suppose a lot of it has to do with our generation and any after us being much more comfortable with the whole idea. I mean, genetics was a large segment of my AP Biology class in high school. It wasn’t some science fiction concept - it was hands-on reality. To my grandparents, the idea is nearly incomprehensible, and even my parents don’t know much about genetics as a whole. Maybe that’s the difference in relative comfort levels and support for this testing.

The study’s authors admit that more needs to be done to study the potential benefits and drawbacks of early genetic testing for predisposition to cancer.

Posted by Sunshine.

Genetically modified babies? Scientists in Britain claim to have created an embryo that contains the genetic DNA of three persons. They mixed in some DNA from a third donor that replaces defective genes. The hope is that one day embryo’s can be produced that are free of inherited diseases. A quote from the hospital:

“We are not trying to alter genes, we’re just trying to swap a small proportion of the bad ones for some good ones,” said Patrick Chinnery, a professor of neurogenetics at Newcastle University involved in the research.

Maybe that is the original intention, but what is to stop it from going any further. Am I in the minority these days in still believing that things (even heartbreaking and horrible) happen for a reason. Stuff like this scares the bejesus out of me and it makes me wonder what kind of world my grandchildren will live in.

Anyone else want to weigh in here?

Preggo brain is real! Scientists have confirmed that yes, pregnant women do experience memory loss. Fortunately it tends to be lesser important things, or things that are newer or less familiar to them. And yes, forgetfulness can continue after the birth.

Let’s see… for me, pregnancy number 1 I left my purse under the table at McDonald’s. Thankfully when I went back about 10 minutes later one of the staff had kept it and it was returned to me. Pregnancy number 2, I left my brand new glasses on the McDonald’s (notice a trend here?) food tray and threw it out with the trash. When I went back, literally 5 minutes later the trash bin was just emptied. I asked the staff if I could look through the old trash bag . They went to the back of the store and came back with a compacted square cube about 10″ big. Bye bye glasses. Pregnancy 3, I don’t remember what forgetful things I did. (giggle)

The smaller the baby the sadder the adult? Researchers in Britain and Canada have released studies that show that lower weight infants have a higher risk of depression as adults. It was found that “…even people who had just mild or moderate symptoms of depression or anxiety over their life course were smaller babies than those who had better mental health.”

“Being born small isn’t necessarily a problem. It is a problem if you were born small because of adverse conditions in the womb — and low birth weight is what we looked at in this study because it is considered a marker of stress in the womb.”

Low birth weight has also been linked to diabetes and heart disease later in life.

Could anorexia be genetic? Studies on twins appear to show that male twins with a female sibling are twice more likely to become anorexic, possibly because of the exposure to female hormones in the womb. Researchers are hopeful to understand more about this so that they can work towards preventing this in the future.

“The one thing we are certain of is that there is a genetic disposition to anorexia, but at the same time this is not enough,” said Procopio, pointing out that if the eating disorder was due to genes alone, an identical twin of an anorexia patient would also have the disease, but this isn’t the case.

A magical fertility chair? Childless couples from all over are travelling to Naples, Italy where there is a church that is claiming to have a “magical chair” that will help fertility. It is the shrine of Saint Anna Maria Rosa Nicoletta Gallo, the first woman saint born in Naples over 200 years ago.

No one can explain why she helps fertility. Writings indicate that she carried the “stigmata” or wounds of Jesus. Whips on display are grim reminders of her “voluntary penance.” Buy hey, there are surely those who are trying to conceive who think “what can it hurt to give it a try…”

Do the brains of kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) mature more slowly than those of their non-ADHD counterparts?

New research suggests this is true.

Developing more slowly in ADHD youngsters — the lag can be as much as three years — are brain regions that suppress inappropriate actions and thoughts, focus attention, remember things from moment to moment, work for reward and control movement.

The sharp differences were discovered only after a new image analysis technique allowed the researchers to pinpoint the thickening and thinning of thousands of cortex sites in hundreds of children and teens, with and without the disorder.

Brain imaging is not advanced enough, however, to detect the delays characteristic of ADHD on a case-by-case basis, so it is not yet possible to use imaging to make a diagnosis.

Kids with ADHD have normal brain function; it’s just on a delayed timeframe, says Dr. Philip Shaw of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

That’s good news - and it is also perhaps reassuring that ADHD does seem to be a biological phenomenon, rather than an environmentally-created one. Although up to five percent of schoolchildren may have ADHD, most kids diagnosed with it eventually outgrow the disorder.

Posted by Sunshining.

Picture this, moms: You’re making your weekly (or however often) grocery trip. Your kids are behaving for once, and things are going smoothly. You even have a cart with wheels that don’t grind, wobble, or squeak! Then…it happens. Your shopping cart reminds you that your favorite cereal is high in sugar.

Excuse me?

That’s not some kind of sci-fi reality show - it is reality. So-called smart carts already exist!

This intelligent grocery cart will contain an interactive screen which will be able to tell shoppers just about anything they want to know about the food they’re purchasing.

This means that it could alert diabetics or those with peanut allergies that a product might harm their health, and could also tell the weight conscious, by flashing a red warning, that they’re about to buy something that’s high in fat or sugar.

While many are heralding this shopping cart as an innovation that will help consumers make smarter purchases for their families, I have to draw the line at my grocery cart telling me what to eat (even if I did control the parameters). Are we really so bad at comprehending the existing nutrition labels on our food that we need further help? If I put a package of cookies in my cart, trust me - I know it’s going to blow my diet for the week! Shut up, cart, and let me have my Oreos in peace.

Thoughts?

Posted by Sunshine.

This is offensive? Facebook, the popular social networking site, issued a statement addressing the recent dust-up over its removal of certain breastfeeding photographs it deemed offensive: “Facebook does allow mothers to upload and share photos of themselves breastfeeding their babies, and those photos remain available on Facebook as long as they follow the site’s Terms of Use. Photos containing a fully exposed breast do violate those Terms and could be removed.”

Bumper Pads and Baby Safety: A new study out of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis concludes that the risks associated with bumper pads in cribs, which include accidental death, outweigh their possible benefits. In reviewing databased kept by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the team found 27 bumper pad-related infant deaths occurring between 1985 and 2005, of which 11 were caused by suffocation when babies rested their faces against the bumpers, 13 resulted from babies becoming wedged between the pads and other objects, and three were attributed to strangulation on bumper pad ties. One expert in infant deaths offered, “I don’t think bumper pads are doing any good…Although the deaths and injuries may be rare events, they are preventable by eliminating the use of bumper pads.”

Prenatal Testing Innovations: According to a report in the journal Analytical Chemistry, Stanford University researchers are developing a test for Down syndrome and other chromosomal abnormalities that will produce results in two hours. Conventional tests now take two weeks.

Chemicals and Breast Milk: Over at Huffington Post, Mary Brune of Making Our Milk Safe (MOMS) makes her case in support of The California Furniture Safety and Fire Prevention Act, which would ban the use of most toxic fire retardants in furniture and bedding. She notes that chlorinated Tris, a probable carcinogen that was phased out of children’s sleepwear decades ago, is the second most commonly used flame retardant in furniture in California. Flame retardants can be found at higher levels in children’s bodies than in adults, and it finds its way into newborns via breast milk. In Sweden, when levels of PBDEs (Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers) in breast milk were found to be doubling every five years, a voluntary phase out of the chemical resulted in a corresponding decline. Moms Rising has a petition up in support of the chemical ban.

Monkey Moms: University of Chicago researchers report that female rhesus monkeys use “motherese” when trying to get an infant monkey’s attention. “Motherese is a high pitched and musical form of speech, which may be biological in origin,” Dario Maestripieri, associate professor in comparative human development, explained in a prepared statement. “The acoustic structure of particular monkey vocalizations, called girneys, may be adaptively designed to attract young infants and engage their attention, similar to how the acoustic structure of motherese, or baby talk, allows adults to visually or socially engage with infants,” he said.

I’m always in the market for the next, cool toy…but with all the recent lead scares, we’ve pretty much ceased all toy shopping until the market settles down a bit. In the meantime, Corinne pointed out toys that I can not only get excited about but also one I can feel good about purchasing.

These toys manufactured and marketed by Green Toys are made of a substance called bioplastic. This super scientific blend of earth friendly plastic is actually made from plant starches such as corn!?!? How cool, right?

If you’re like me though, the first thing I thought is…what’s to keep them from breaking down into their original form in our toy box? No worries though, according to the FAQ page on Green Toys’ website, these toys will last a lifetime.

Even more perplexing and all the while intriguing is the fact that they have biodegradable pots for teaching your little one how to plant their first mini-garden. Too cool!

So when you’re in the market for a fun new toy, check these out, coming to an earth savvy boutique near you Fall 2007.

Posted by Dorian.