The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists doesn't like births outside expensive hospitals and recently issued a statement disapproving of the practice. Regardless, mothers, Caucasian at least, are not listening and a new analysis shows that home births, common throughout history but declining since 1990, jumped up again after 2004. An increase of 20 percent.
28,357 home births occurred in 2008 - 0.67 percent of the approximately 4.2 million births in the United States, which may sound negligible but it is the highest reported proportion since 1990. This change was largely driven by a 28 percent increase in home births for white women, for whom more than 1 percent of all births now occur at home.
Saturn may look like a nice place to visit through a telescope but once each Saturn year (that's 30 years to you and me) 'spring' arrives in the northern hemisphere of the giant planet and things go nuts.
The Earth's inner core is a ball of solid iron about the size of the Moon. This iron core is surrounded by a dynamic outer core of a liquid iron-nickel alloy - along with other, lighter elements - a highly viscous mantle and a solid crust that forms the surface where we live.
That inner core is simultaneously melting and freezing due to circulation of heat in the overlying rocky mantle, according to new research . Over billions of years, the Earth has cooled from the inside out causing the molten iron core to partly freeze and solidify. The inner core has subsequently been growing at the rate of around 1 mm a year as iron crystals freeze and form a solid mass.
A new paper in Nature says the most widely used methods for calculating species extinction rates are "fundamentally flawed" and overestimate extinction rates by as much as 160 percent.
A team of scientists say they have uncovered the basis for drug resistance in acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common form of childhood cancer. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia accounts for about 23 percent of all cases of cancer in children under the age of 15, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Whole body computerized tomography (CT) scanning has helped diagnose the earliest confirmed case of coronary artery disease in history.
The Egyptian princess Ahmose-Meryet-Amon, who lived in Thebes (Luxor) between 1580 and 1550 B.C., lived on a diet rich in vegetables, fruit and a limited amount of meat from domesticated (but not fattened) animals. Wheat and barley were grown along the banks of the Nile, making bread and beer the dietary staples of this period of ancient Egypt. Tobacco and trans-fats were unknown, and lifestyle was likely to have been active.