Mothers and babies can instantly synchronize their hearts just by smiling at each other

Mothers and their babies are often said to share a deep, intimate connection...but even so, this new discovery is weird. Simply by looking and smiling at each other, moms and babies synchronize their heartbeats to within milliseconds of each other.

Researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel found that visible affection from their mothers had tangible physiological effects on three month old infants. Previous studies in animals have shown that social interactions between "attachment partners" can actually affect the animal infants' body, but this is the first time such an effect has been observed in humans. Writing in Infant Behavior and Development, the researchers explain what they discovered:

Mothers and their 3-month old infants were observed during face-to-face interactions while cardiac output was collected from mother and child. Micro-analysis of the partners' behavior marked episodes of gaze, affect, and vocal synchrony. Time-series analysis showed that mother and infant coordinate heart rhythms within lags of less than 1 s.

Bootstrapping analysis indicated that the concordance between maternal and infant biological rhythms increased significantly during episodes of affect and vocal synchrony compared to non-synchronous moments. Humans, like other mammals, can impact the physiological processes of the attachment partner through the coordination of visuo-affective social signals.

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What babies learn before they're born

Editor's note: Annie Murphy Paul is the author of "Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives." She's now working on a book about learning, and writes a weekly column at Time.com called "Brilliant: The Science of Smart." TED is a nonprofit organization dedicated to "Ideas worth spreading," which it distributes through talks posted on its website.

(CNN) -- When does learning begin? As I explain in the talk I gave at TED, learning starts much earlier than many of us would have imagined: in the womb.

I was surprised as anyone when I first encountered this notion. I'm a science writer, and my job is to trawl the murky depths of the academic journals, looking for something shiny and new -- a sparkling idea that catches my eye in the gloom.

Starting a few years ago, I began noticing a dazzling array of findings clustered around the prenatal period. These discoveries were generating considerable excitement among scientists, even as they overturned settled beliefs about when we start absorbing and responding to information from our environment. As a science reporter -- and as a mother -- I had to find out more.

This research, I discovered, is part of a burgeoning field known as "fetal origins," and it's turning pregnancy into something it has never been before: a scientific frontier. Obstetrics was once a sleepy medical specialty, and research on pregnancy a scientific backwater. Now the nine months of gestation are the focus of intense interest and excitement, the subject of an exploding number of journal articles, books, and conferences.

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Letting Your Best Friend Have A Bad Birth

"Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing.
There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow
people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a
time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over."
~Gloria Naylor~
Have you had a natural birth? Do you have actual (and strong) opinions about things like vaccines and circumcision? Do you find yourself cornering newly pregnant women whom you have never met at social functions and dumping information on them when they mention that they want an episiotomy because "it just heals up so much better when it is a straight cut than a jagged tear"?
If so, then this article is for you!
Now- what do you do when somebody-- maybe even somebody you love, appears to be heading down the birth trauma highway?
Ahh, the humanity! Knowing that your friend/sister/neighbor/in-law is being set up for a horrid birth experience! How hard is this for the natural birth mama who simply loved her life changing birth experience? Do you keep your mouth shut? Do you offer information? Do you share your experience? Can you "let" her go down a path you don't think she should?
~/~
Questions like this are asked all the time:

"My friend is being set for an induction at 39 weeks because she is uncomfortable. What research can I give her?"

Or, as a natural birth teacher I get phone calls from the mom or mother in law or buddy trying to enroll their loved one in a Bradley natural birth class.

"I LOVED my Bradley birth! She really needs this class. When does the next one start?!"

So what DO you do?

As a woman who has actually uttered the words "You didn't need that c-section" (yes I am that tactless), I can honestly say that this is a very difficult one.

A few things that I try to remind my tactless self:

1) What you consider a good experience might not be what somebody else considers a good birth experience.

I remember telling the birth story of my first child to a woman who had a c-section for failure to progress. I had three nights of labor and had pushed for 4 hours- two hours longer than she had before they declared her unable to birth vaginally. Maybe I was thinking she would hear my story and say

"Ahh- you wonderful woman! Thank you for your wisdom! I now see that maybe, just maybe, I too am capable of vaginal birth. You have given me hope!"

This is NOT what she said. Instead she looked at me with a little bit of horror and said something about how she couldn't believe I would want to go through that. What was an empowering experience for ME just sounded exhausting and brutal to HER. She has scheduled her c-sections for her other babies, and I believe been quite happy with her births. I can only imagine that my most recent unassisted birth in my bed would have sounded equally awful to her.

So- to each his own. We don't all want the same thing from life or from birth.

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Delay cord clamping to 'prevent newborn health problems'

Maternal and newborn health researchers have recommended delaying the clamping of the umbilical cord after birth.

A study conducted by Swedish researchers and published on BMJ.com found waiting at least three minutes before undertaking the procedure can protect kids against iron deficiency during infancy.

The authors of the investigation noted there are fears not clamping the cord quickly can lead to serious health problems including neonatal jaundice, but the scientists insisted this link is not valid.

Indeed, among the 400 full-term infants assessed in the study, no adverse outcomes were seen in babies whose umbilical cords were clamped after at least three minutes, but there were fewer cases of iron deficiency at four months

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