For the Week Ending July 31, 2022.
COVID-19 Vaccines International Pregnancy Exposure Registry (C-VIPER)
More than 8,000 pregnant vaccinated women are already participating in our survey.
Help us understand the impact of COVID-19 vaccines on pregnancy and babies. Be a part of it!
Click here to Register
Elsewhere
Speculative fiction featuring new moms is now officially A Thing. This ne entrant to the genre, by Alexis Schaitkin, has some young mothers disappearing. No one knows why or to where. Read more here.
This is important for you because good books are always important.
This AI knows as much physics as a three month old infant
Babies as young as three months old have an intuitive understanding of physical laws, like gravity. We don’t know how they know these things, they just seem to. AIs have traditionally not been able to achieve this level of understanding about the natural world. But new work is trying to figure out how to train an AI to understand these things, as an end unto itself but also to learn more about how babies do it. Read more here.
This is important for you because babies aren’t only fascinating to new parents; apparently they’re fascinating to computer scientists too.
Baby talk is universal
A study done at Harvard of people from 21 different cultures covering 18 languages across six continents has found that everyone raises the pitch of their voice when talking to babies. Read more here.
This is important for you because it is essential to talk to your baby, any way you want to!
Everything I learned about mothering I learned from grey whales
This impoverished single mother found inspiration and strength in following migrating grey whales northward. Read more here.
This is important for you because the whale mothers “fought off predators, parented and breastfed the calves, all while swimming halfway across the planet from the warm Mexican birthing lagoons to the Arctic feeding grounds. They were endurance incarnate.”
The most popular article on The Pulse this week was How to Mentally Prepare for Labor. Read it here.
