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Pregnancy and Lactation Weekly Digest

For the Week Ending January 24, 2021. 

More than 12,000 pregnant and recently pregnant women are already participating. Help us understand the impact of COVID-19 on pregnancy and babies. Be a part of it!

Click here to Register.

Raise kids who aren’t… um, raise kids who are good

Melinda Wenner Moyer has parlayed her parenting column in Slate into a parenting book about raising kids who are just good people. Read about it here, and about her process here

This is important for you because we certainly need the adults of tomorrow to be kinder and more compassionate than the adults of today.

Not quite identical twins

Fraternal twins are formed by two different egg cells fertilized by two different sperm cells at the same time. They are genetically just as similar as any other siblings, they just share a womb. Identical twins are formed when one fertilized egg cell splits and forms two embryos, so they have identical genes. It had always been known that their genes could diverge slightly because of random genetic mutations that occur as each embryo develops. But it was thought that these random mutations were rare and had negligible effects on the twins’ later development, so any observed differences between them must be due to environmental factors. New work has shown that these random mutations may play a larger role than previously realized. Read more here.

This is important for you because everyone is unique, twin or no.

Baby megaladons

Megaladons–giant prehistoric sharks–were among the largest predators ever to live on Earth. They were not to be trifled with, and neither were their progeny. New work just published in the journal Historical Biology indicates that the babes were over six feet long, and that they cannibalized any siblings that shared their womb (although most shark babies do that). Read more here.

This is important for you because you thought velociraptors were scary!

Exploding vagina (candle)

Soo… one of GOOP’s vagina scented candles exploded in someone’s house. That’s it. Read more here.

This is important for you because it’s a flaming reminder to not buy stuff on GOOP.

The  most popular article on The Pulse this week, by a long shot and not surprisingly, was Vaccination Against COVID-19 Won’t Harm the Placenta Nor Cause Infertility. Read it here.

Diana Gitig
Dr. Diana Gitig has a Ph.D. in cell biology and genetics from Cornell University, and has been writing about issues in biology – from molecular biology to cancer to immunology to neuroscience to nutrition to agriculture - for the past fifteen years. She has three teenaged children.

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