James Fishman | Sunstone Online

Baby Talk…Is It Good for the Kid Or Not?

Is baby talk hurting your child? Is it helping him? These are the questions that researchers from the Laboratory for Language Development at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Tokyo asked recently. And their results are quite surprising. Moms may actually speak less clearly to their infants when they use baby talk.

The researchers looked at 22 Japanese moms talking to their children who were aged 18-24 months. Then spent five years annotating these 14 hours of speech that they captured. As the researchers said, “To our knowledge, this is one of the most finely annotated large corpora of child-directed speech in the world.” They went on to look at acoustic similarities between two syllables like “pa” and “ba.”

They found that the moms spoke slightly less clearly when they were talking to their child than they did to an experimenter. As Alejandrina Cristia, a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, said, “This finding is important because it challenges the widespread view that parents do and should hyperarticulate, using very robust data and an analysis based on a study of 10 times as many syllable contrasts as previous work.”

As researcher Andrew Martin, a member of the Tokyo team, said “Our results suggest that, at least for learning sound contrasts, the secret to infants’ language-learning genius may be in the infants themselves — the fact that they are able pick up sounds from input that is less clear than that used by adults with each other makes this accomplishment all the more remarkable.”

If You Think You’re Fat…It Just Might Become True

A new study sheds some fascinating light on body image and what it can do to your actual body. Study authors Angelina Sutin, a psychological scientist at Florida State University, and Antonio Terracciano found that teenager show perceive themselves as overweight are actually more likely to become obese as adults. Certainly, skewed body image is understood to be a warning sign of anorexia and bulimia. But researchers now think that it could also be tied to obesity.

Those who falsely feel that they are overweight may be more likely to eat in unhealthy ways and to use unhealthy weight-control behaviors like using diet pills and bulimia.

Interestingly, boys were more at risk than were girls in the study. Boys had an 89% increased risk of later obesity when they perceived themselves to be overweight as teenagers. As Sutin explained, “Our research shows that psychological factors are important in the development of obesity. Misperception is typically taken as a sign of an eating disorder, such as anorexia or bulimia, but our research shows that it may also signal a long-term risk of obesity.”

They used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. With this material, they were able to look at the height, weight and body image thoughts of more than 6500 young people when they were 16 and then 28. When compared to those who had an accurate view of their weight, young people with misperceptions had a 40% greater risk of becoming obese adults.

As the researchers explained, “Adolescents who misperceive themselves as being overweight may not take the steps necessary to maintain a healthy weight….[as] they gain weight, they physically become what they have long perceived themselves to be.”

They do not yet have an answer as to why this is more evident in boys than it is in girls.

Is Your Gum Keeping Your Mouth Clean?

Some people find it distasteful to be around gum chompers…but that gum that they are chewing just might help them with their teeth. A study which appeared in the journal Plos One, and led by researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, has found that gum can be effective in getting rid of bacteria in the mouth.

They discovered that the first thirty seconds of chewing were the most effective and that the gum worked only if it was sugar free. They used two types of un-named spearmint gum for their study. They gave it to the participants and asked them to chew their gum for ten minutes. They found that about 100 million bacteria were detected on just one piece of the chewed gum. Chewing one piece of gum can remove as much as 10% of the oral microbial load in saliva.

They did note, however, that “Continued chewing changes the structure of the gums, decreasing the hardness of the gum due to uptake of salivary components and release of water soluble components. This presumably affects the adhesion of bacteria to the gum, causing a release of initially trapped, more weakly adhering bacteria from the gum. Such a change in composition of trapped bacteria is supported by the observation that the diversity of species trapped in chewed gum increases with chewing time.”

Their research could be used for companies that want to develop gum that can selectively remove specific disease-related bacteria.

Valentine’s Day Ideas

You may think you have plenty of time, but Valentine’s Day really is approaching soon. Here is a clever idea to tell that someone you love them. More will be coming so watch the space for further ideas.

Never Lose Your Luggage Again…

Everyone knows the frustration of losing your luggage on the way to a great vacation. Now, Delsey has come to the rescue with the Pluggage that they showcased at the CES Innovation awards this month in the US. What makes this suitcase so different is that it can charge your mobile phone and let you know if your suitcase made it onto the flight with you.l

In addition, if you want to know if your luggage is overweight, you can synch your case with a smartphone app that can tell you how heavy the case is. Similarly, by synching with your app, you can get a notification if your suitcase has made it to the plane.

Other options are still up for discussion including an inside lighting system that will switch on when the suitcase opens, a fingerprint ID that protects you and more. They are also discussing a check lock facility that can tell you if the suitcase has been opened without your knowledge and an app weather forecast that tells you what type of weather to expect at your destination.

How Often Do YOU Wash Your Pajamas?

How often do you wash your pajamas? Interestingly, the memory-foam mattress company Ergoflex took a recent poll to see how people answer this question. They polled 2410 British couples between the ages of 18 and 30 to look at their habits.

And the results were startling. On average, men wear their pajamas for more than two weeks before washing them. Women wear one set for 17 days, on average.

Why do we change our pajamas so infrequently? According to the women, they alternate between pairs and forget how long it’s been since a pair has been washed. This was the top excuse for 54% of those polled. 51% explained that they only wear their pajamas for a few hours each night, so they didn’t want to wash them too often.

The men tended to point the finger at the women in the house, with 73% saying that they aren’t in charge of the wash. 61% of the men also said that they don’t have many pairs from which to choose.

Professor Sally Bloomfield of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine has looked into this issue and has been shocked by the results. She urges people to wash their pajamas at least once a week. As she said, “Washing should get rid of most microbes, but not all if you have worn them for two weeks. The clothes won’t be hygienically cleaned because the microbes will have built up. So they will be transferred to underwear and other clothing that comes into contact with the skin.