How IVF 'skews the ratio of boys to girls': Male embryos appear better equipped to survive

Certain types of IVF treatment may increase the odds of having a boy, research revealed last month.
Some methods tip the gender balance to as many as 128 boys being born for every 100 girls. The balance for natural births is 105 boys to 100 girls.
The discovery was made by Australian researchers, who believe that the IVF process may be affecting the sex ratio.
Certain types of IVF treatment may increase the odds of having a boy, research has revealed.
Although the reasons remain unclear, the researchers suggested it could be because male embryos may in some way be better equipped to survive the process.
They warned more research is needed to ensure a serious imbalance of male to female children does not develop as IVF becomes increasingly common
Study leader Professor Michael Chapman, from the University of New South Wales, said there was no question of the ratio being manipulated by IVF clinicians. Deliberate sex selection is banned in Australia, as it is in Britain except in very specific circumstances, such as to avoid gender-related hereditary disease.
Professor Chapman said laboratory methods may be responsible for the imbalance, particularly the substance in which embryos develop in the test tube.
‘It could be that fitter embryos are male and it may be the female embryos which fall away at the various hurdles,’ he added.
Some methods tip the gender balance to as many as 128 boys being born for every 100 girls.
‘If we can discover which techniques are responsible for the difference, and why, we may be able to ensure the sex ratio returns to normal.’
Researchers studied all live births following fertility treatment in clinics in Australia and New Zealand between 2002 and 2006. Standard IVF was compared with intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), an IVF variant where the sperm are injected directly into the eggs, normally because the sperm may be too weak or few in number to penetrate the egg naturally.
They also took into account exactly when the embryo was implanted into the womb – either two to three days after fertilisation when the egg splits into two cells, or after five days, when it has developed into up to 100 cells in the lab.
In total, 13,368 babies were born to 13,165 women who underwent the transfer of a single embryo, says the study, reported in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.
The overall male ratio of babies born was 51.3 per cent, not far off the figure of 51.5 per cent for the general Australian population from natural conception.
However, the study found specific IVF regimes changed the balance.
Compared with natural conception, ICSI produced a lower ratio of male babies (50 per cent) and standard IVF a higher ratio (53 per cent).
The stage at which the embryo was transferred had even more effect, with 49.9 per cent male births from embryos transferred after two days, compared with 54.1 per cent at five days.
However, the combination of the two factors led to the greatest alteration in sex ratio.
After standard IVF where the embryo was implanted after five days, 56.1 per cent of births were boys. This represents 128 boys for every 100 girls.
But when ICSI embryos were implanted at two to three days, 48.7 per cent of babies were male – 94 boys for every 100 girls.
Professor Philip Steer, BJOG editor-in-chief, said the use of IVF to help childless couples may have health and social implications.
In 2007, the latest year for which there are official figures, there were more than 13,000 babies born through IVF in the UK – around 1.5 per cent of all births.

Darpa Wants Remote Controls to Master Troop Minds

The Pentagon's research arm wants to trick out troops' brains, from the areas that regulate alertness and cognition to psychiatric well-being. And they want to do it all from the outside in, with a gadget installed inside the troops' helmets.

"Remote Control of Brain Activity Using Ultrasound," the Defense Department's Armed with Science blog promises.

It's the latest out-there project in the military's growing arsenal of brain-based research. In recent months alone, the Pentagon's funded projects to optimize troop's minds, prevent injuries and even preemptively assess cognitive ability and vulnerability to traumatic stress. Now, Darpa's funding one lab that's trying to do it all - from boosting troop smarts to preventing traumatic brain injuries.

Arizona State University neuroscientist William Tyler has been working with funding from the Army Research Laboratory for years. That neurotechnology work has now caught the eye of Darpa, which awarded his lab a Young Faculty Award to improve upon non-invasive approaches to brain stimulation.

"When people ask what this kind of device could do, I ask them what their brain does for them," Tyler tells Danger Room. "The brain serves all the functions of your body, and if you knew the neuroanatomy, then you can start to regulate each one of those functions."

Already, scientists have devised cutting-edge brain stimulation methods to treat medical disorders, like Parkinson's disease or severe depression. But current deep-brain approaches require invasive surgery to implant electrodes and batteries, and external ultrasound stimulation can't penetrate "the deep brain circuits where many diseased circuits reside," Tyler writes at Armed With Science.

Now, Tyler and his research team have created a "transcranial pulsed ultrasound" that's able to stimulate a myriad of brain circuits from the outside in. The device has already proven capable of targeting deep brain regions, unlike existing methods. And it's capable of zeroing in on extremely specific brain zones, as small as two or three millimeters. Plus, prototype devices are small enough to be fitted inside a typical helmet.

"Going deep beneath the skull and having extremely specific spatial resolution are two huge advantages over existing approaches," Tyler says. "Depth and specificity are what allow the ultrasound to do what other methods can't."

With Darpa's funding, Tyler plans to expand the uses of the ultrasound and improve the device's spacial resolution even more, making it a veritable all-in-one brain stimulation device. Using a microcontroller device, the ultrasound would stimulate different brain regions to boost troop alertness and cognition, relieve stress and pain, and protect them against traumatic brain injuries.

"The really damaging part of a TBI isn't the initial injury," Tyler says. "It's the metabolic damage, the free radicals and the swelling that are happening in the hours afterward. If you can flick your remote and trigger an immediate intervention, you'd be curbing what might otherwise be lifelong brain damage."

Police shut down California street as Octomum Nadya Suleman holds yard sale in fight to keep her family together

Octomum Nadya Suleman held a yard sale on Saturday in a desperate attempt to raise enough money to keep a roof over the heads of her 14 children.The sale drew a crowd of more than 150 people and police were forced to shut off her street in La Habra, California, because more kept arriving. Miss Suleman, 35, is reportedly more than a month behind on her mortgage payments and says she is facing foreclosure. But she insist she has turned down lucrative offers to strip off for Playboy or to appear in an adult movie .
‘I’m just trying to put my best foot forward and do what’s best to save my home and feed my children,’ she told RadarOnline. ‘I will never pose nude to save my house. ‘I’m a good mother and my kids come first. We will get through this,’ she added.
The cash-strapped mother put everything up for sale, from an autographed nursing bra costing Rs 1000 to the ‘Octofridge’ that went for Rs 40000. Also up for grabs were fourteen tiny devil costumes the octuplets were dressed up in last Halloween, which sold for Rs 2500, a signed sonogram of the babies and the red bikini their mother wore for a magazine photo shoot showing off her post-pregnancy body.
Other items on the auction block included the sofa she sat on when she announced she was pregnant and a baby-sized ‘time-out’ chair given to her by Oprah Winfrey after she appeared on the daytime talk queen’s show.For Rs 500, visitors could have their photos snapped with Ms Suleman, but it cost Rs 5000 for the babies to be in the shot, as well. Boyd Beaman, from La Habra, paid Rs 1000 for a photo with the mother and two of his workmates so he had a keepsake ‘for nostalgia and for history.’
‘It’s just a matter of survival,’ said Ms Suleman. ‘Food, shelter and clothing. There are financial troubles.’ She was helped at the sale by radio personality Tattoo, of the Rick Dee's morning Internet Top 40 show. Ms Suleman said she has ‘maybe a week’ before the house owner launches eviction proceedings. ‘We’re destitute right now, we’re not doing well at all,’ she said before the sale. Although she will almost certainly have to go on welfare, she said she will try to remain independent for as long as possible. ‘I’m going to do everything I can possibly do not to go on welfare,’ she told RadarOnline. ‘I believe in my mind wholeheartedly that there’s always a way.’ The babies, the world’s first set of surviving octuplets, are now 19 months old. Miss Suleman already had six older children when she gave birth to another eight in January last year.

The Rise of the Revolutionary ‘Riding Car’

His machine looks like a motorcycle with training wheels. But under the strictest etymology - the Greek auto means "self" and the Latin mobilis means "mobile" - the riding car was the first automobile. The car as we know it arrived in 1886 when Daimler built the four-wheeled Motor Carriage and Carl Benz built the three-wheeled Patent Motor Car. But Daimler set the stage for the automotive era when he filed his patent for the riding car on Aug. 29, 1885.

Daimler and Benz, who had developed their automobiles independently, later founded Daimler AG. The giant German automaker marked the anniversary of the riding car by calling it "the most important precursor to individual mobility." It proved an internal combustion engine could power a vehicle and a human being could control it. It was a glimpse of what could be achieved.

In today's tech world, it would be called Automobile V1.0.









What made the machine possible was the "Grandfather Clock" engine, so named because it resembled a clock. Daimler developed the single-cylinder four-stroke engine with Wilhelm Maybach in 1884. It displaced 265cc, produced 0.4 horsepower at 600 rpm and was remarkable for its relatively light weight

Daimler built the riding car to test the engine. The wood frame rode on wood wheels wrapped with iron bands. The engine drove the rear wheel via a belt. According to Daimler, a contemporary publication (which Daimler did not name) described the riding car like this:

"To start the engine, one must first light the small flame beneath the hot ignition tube and crank the engine once using the crank; these preparations take only a minute. The engine runs smoothly, since the silencer dampens the exhaust gases entering the exhaust pipe. To set the vehicle in motion, the driver climbs aboard, takes hold of the steering bar and connects the engine to the bicycle. This is done by means of a lever, cord and tension pulley, which shifts the drive belt onto the pulley."

Two gears were available, selected using a lever while at a standstill. First gear was good for 6 km/hr (3.7 mph) while second gear brought the machine to twice that. The brakes were activated by tugging on a cord.

In November 1885, Daimler's son Adolph Daimler drove the riding car along a three-kilometer stretch of road between Caanstatt and Untertürkheim and back. The patent was awarded on Aug. 11, 1886.

The automobile age was officially under way.

Variations in IVF laws fuel market for 'fertility tourism'

A global survey of fertility treatment covering more than 100 countries has revealed wide variations in international laws governing IVF, which are fuelling the growth of "fertility tourism".

At least 10,000 people go abroad each year to seek help to have a baby because the laws are too restrictive in their home country or the cost of treatment is too high.

No other field of medicine is subject to such wide differences in clinical practice, which are driven by social and religious attitudes rather than scientific evidence.

Experts at the World Congress on Fertility in Munich announced a code of practice on cross-border care, to be published by the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) and the International Federation of Fertility Societies (IFFS) later this year.

Professor Ian Cooke, education director of IFFS, said: "What is considered acceptable varies from country to country. How carefully do they screen donors? How do they screen for multiple pregnancies? Do you want to come back with quadruplets? That's madness."

Both international organisations support the right of patients to go abroad. But they call for the harmonisation of national standards to increase safety.

In Britain, the chief reason for patients travelling is the shortage of egg donors, with waiting lists of up to two years in some clinics. Favoured destinations are Spain and the Czech Republic, where egg donors are paid €900 ($1600) and €800 respectively.

In Britain, regulations limit clinics to paying a maximum of £250 ($528) in compensation for lost earnings to egg donors.

Sperm donors are also in short supply in the UK, since donor anonymity was ended in 2005. Some couples travel abroad to obtain anonymous sperm. Cost is also a factor, with an average price of more than £3000 per cycle of IVF treatment in London. "It may well be cheaper to go to Barcelona or Prague and have a cycle of treatment there," Cooke said.

Dr Francoise Shenfield, co-ordinator of the ESHRE committee on cross-border reproductive care, said multiple pregnancy posed the biggest threat to patients. The UK restricts clinics to replacing at most two embryos in women up to the age of 40 but other countries allow up to four. Evidence shows multiple pregnancies carry higher risks for mother and babies.

"There is a striking difference between patients who had been abroad and those treated at home in terms of multiple pregnancies. Every clinic should have a strategy to reduce them," Shenfield said.

The survey revealed the rapid expansion of fertility treatment with more than 500 clinics in India and more than 600 in Japan.

Facebook Is Trying To Register The Word “Face” As A Trademark

First Facebook didn't want anyone else to have the word "book" in the name of his or her online community and now it doesn't want anyone to have the word "face" either. Facebook has apparently taken over the trademark application for "Face" from a company who operated a site called Faceparty.com and is trying to pursue the trademark. It won't be an easy task though, because Aaron Greenspan—the fellow who took Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to court over the creation of Facebook—is opposing the application according to TechCrunch: Greenspan now has his own company, Think Computer, which is behind the mobile payments app called FaceCash.

If Facebook gets the trademark for the word "Face," that could spell trouble for FaceCash. "The possible registration has implications for my company (not to mention hundreds of others, including Apple, Inc.), so I've decided to ask the USPTO for an extension of time to oppose it," he explains in an email. Apple, of course, owns the trademark to "Facetime," the video calling feature on the latest iPhones.

Although Greenspan owns the trademark to "FaceCash", he wants to protect his ability to use the word "face" in future products. He also wants to make sure Facebook won't go after him. Given it's track record of vigorously defending its trademarks (which it is encouraged to do by the law or else risk losing them), that could become a very real possibility.

Can't wait to see how this drama plays out.

Researchers Successfully Translate Brainwaves Into Words

In a recent study, researchers at the University of Utah successfully translated brainwaves into words, a huge breakthrough that could eventually give paralyzed patients a new way to communicate.

The trials, which involve placing a grid of electrodes directly on an epileptic subject's brain, are preliminary—only that one individual has been tested, and when the entire pool of words, ten in all, were used, they were only identified with 48% accuracy. But when limited simply to "yes" and "no," researchers were able read the brainwaves accurately 90% of the time.

Those results are extremely promising. Bradley Greger, a bioengineer at the University of Utah who worked on the studies, explains:This is quite a simple technology … based on devices that have been used in humans for 50 years now...We're pretty hopeful that, with a better design, we'll be able to decode more words and, in two or three years get approval for a real feasibility trial in paralyzed patients.

With some paralyzed patients' means of communication limited to blinking their eyelids or wiggling their finger, this research has profound potential.