Britain's first iPhone baby due

The couple had tried for three years to conceive before they heard about the fertility app and downloaded it to her iPhone. The 30-year-old entered her body temperature daily and the app calculated when she would be most fertile.

A relative said: "She followed the advice and within two months she was expecting. We're all overjoyed." The mother-to-be does not want to be identified until after the baby has been born.

The relative said: "It's due any day. Every one's keeping their fingers crossed there are no complications. She's proud to say it will be an 'iPhone baby'. Without the app she might not have fallen pregnant."

Last week an iPhone application that claims to be able to tell parents what their baby's cries mean was launched.

The Cry Translator app, which costs INR 1600 is said by its designers to be 96 per cent accurate in interpreting cries of distress from babies.

The program uses the iPhone's microphone to receive the sound, analyzes it, and displays information about what it means on the screen.

Researchers led by Dr Antonio Portugal Ramírez, a Spanish paediatrician, developed the project after finding that babies' wails could be broken down into five separate categories.

They learned that all babies, regardless of the language they are exposed to at home, have the same distinctive cries to indicate whether they are hungry, annoyed, tired, stressed or bored.

Do It Yourself Binary

This film clip was really eye-opening and scary. I take 100+ flights a year & a regular flyer will s*^t bricks watching this!

Terminator 3

Field-Trip

The Town Devoured By Rock

Struck by a meteor? The 3,000-odd inhabitants of Setenil de las Bodegas, a city in Spain’s beautiful Andalucia region, seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. When they enter their houses, they see rock face; when they stroll through their city, they walk on rocks. Has the city been hit by a meteor and if not what caused its unusual construction?Setenil de las Bodegas, about 18 km away from Ronda in the province of Cadiz, has wedged itself between the cliffs eroded by the Rio Trejo river. The old houses especially are built under the cliff overhang and the newer ones against the hillside.
The name Setenil developed from the the Latin septem nihil – “seven times no” – which refers back to the period of the Christian reconquest, when Catholic kings tried to win back territory from the Moors, who had come from Africa and ruled the Iberian peninsula since 711. In Setenil’s case, only the seventh reconquest attempt was successful, in 1485, making the city one of the last bastions of the Moors until they were driven out of western Europe in 1492.
Regarding the second part of the name, “de las Bodegas,” at least two different stories circulate. According to one, Sentenil proudly added “de las Bodegas” to its name in the 15th century, because of the many vineyards that had sprung up. Sadly, vine pests ended this tradition in the 1860s.
According to another story, since the early 16th century, “bodegas” referred to Sentenil’s big storerooms under the rock that kept all kinds of produce cool even in the hottest of summers. Regardless of which version is true, fact is that even today, Setenil is famous for delicacies like chorizo, cerdo, olive oil, honey, jam and excellent Andalucian wine.
Other than being built into the rock, Setenil is also one of the typical White Villages of Andalucia; villages that try to stay as cool as possible in this hottest region of Spain by whitewashing their houses every year, as white reflects sunlight best.When looking at images like this, with a whole village literally living in the shadow of a huge rock, one wonders: Why, isn’t it depressing, especially in the winter?
The reason people choose to live here is pragmatism, more or less. The natural caves at Setenil proved perfect living quarters, it is believed since pre-historic times. Instead of having to build a whole house and insulating it against heat in the summer and cold in the winter, many rock caves just needed a façade and voila, there was a house in tune with nature!
Also, one shouldn’t forget that Setenil de las Bodegas is a city that is many centuries old and thus has seen its fair share of fighting. And which enemy would go for the city with rock solid defenses, literally, when the next town over has no such protection? After all, that’s why it took the Catholic kings seven attempts before they won Setenil back from the Moors…
Overall, a very minimally invasive building style. Rock on, Setenil!

Weather Warning

When you walk out the door in the morning and see this in the sky......




....just go back inside, have another cup of coffee, and stay home. It's NOT going to be a good day.

Study shows infertile men can be good IVF candidates

Men suffering from from non-obstructive azoospermia (NOA), meaning they have undetectable levels of sperm in their semen, which is not caused by an obstruction in their reproductive system, have long been considered poor candidates for IVF (in vitro fertilisation). However new research published in the online journal of Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology has reported that NOA sufferers could be just as capable of producing viable embryos as other men.

Approximately one per cent of the male population and 10 per cent of men seeking fertility evaluation have testicular failure. Previous research conducted by Belgian scientists reported lower pregnancy rates than normal (approximately 20 per cent) when using sperm from NOA patients. It has also been thought that sperm isolated from NOA patients, while able to produce embryos, is less capable of producing live births and that the incidence of genetic mutations may be higher resulting in congenitial deffects. However, new research contradicts this and gives hope that men with NOA can be just as likely to father a child.

Nina Desai and her team at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation analysed 156 ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection) cycles which used sperm taken from the testes of 44 men suffering from obstructive azoospermia (OA) and 17 men diagnosed with NOA. For their study they assessed embryonic development, implantation, pregnancy and live birth rates. They found on all counts that there were no significant differences between the groups.

Desai and her team analysed the ability for the pateranl sperm to iniate genomic activation, this is when the genome of the embryo divides and begins to arrange itself. They way to morphologically measure this is to observe the degree of cell to cell aderence as the embryo cells divide, if there is genomic activation it is thought that by the eight-cell stage there will be an increase in cell-cell adherence. The anaysis found no differences between the sperm groups suggesting that the genome activation is independent of sperm origin and type of azoospermia. They also noted that there were no cogenital abnormalities in the 115 healthy births.