Disney Offers Refunds for Failed Baby Einsteins

Really, what do they do all day? Not much.

(NEWSER) - When John R. Barry’s sister started a blog for her baby, friends and family looked at him accusingly. “My son has been alive for about 9 months, and I never started a blog in his honor. It never occurred to me,” he writes on Salon . It made him wonder: Does his baby really need a blog? After all, Barry did keep a private diary of his child for a while—and “immediately ran out of things to write about.” More»

(USER SUBMITTED) - It seems listening to Mozart just doesn't do what many hopeful mothers thought it would: Make their babies more intelligent. University of Vienna researchers now present quite definite results on the so-called "Mozart effect" in the US journal Intelligence. Their findings suggest no evidence for specific cognitive enhancements from merely listening to classical music. Relax, moms! You can go back to listening to music you actually enjoy. Read the full article on Science Daily. More»

6-month-olds prefer 'good' to 'evil' characters

(NEWSER) - Knowing right from wrong isn't just a product of social conditioning as Freud claimed—babies are born with a sense of morality, writes Paul Bloom in the New York Times magazine . Bloom, one of just a handful of baby morality researchers, recounts one of his experiments, in which babies as young as six months watched a scene in which a yellow square helped a red ball try to climb a hill, while a green triangle tried to push the ball back down the hill; when presented with the two shapes, the babies overwhelmingly preferred the helpful shape to the unhelpful one. More»

It could be possible in 3 years

(NEWSER) - UK researchers have grown embryos that combine the DNA of one man and two women, a development that could help babies avoid genetic defects. In broad strokes, it works like this: Parents at risk of passing on a genetic disorder fertilize an egg, and the healthy material is extracted and put into the "shell" of an egg from another woman. Junior would still look like his two natural parents. More»

But cash alone might not be enough to raise birth rate

(NEWSER) - With Japan’s aging, pension-collecting population eating away at the country's coffers, its leaders have decided they need more kids who can in turn support the elderly—and they’re willing to pay for them. They’re proposing a program that would pay new parents $3,300 a year for every new child until age 15, along with offering less direct incentives, like state-supported daycare and tuition waivers, the Wall Street Journal reports. More»