The stuff kids are made of
* During pregnancy, the uterus expands to 500 times its normal size.
* A woman's arthritic pains will almost always disappear as soon as she becomes pregnant.
* On average a baby's heart will beat about 60 million times before it is born.
* A fetus in the womb can hear. Tests have shown that fetuses respond to various sounds just as vigorously as they respond to pressures and internal sensations.
* A four month old fetus will startle and turn away if a bright light is flashed on its mother's belly.
* A baby is born every three seconds.
* A newborn baby's head accounts for about one-quarter of its entire weight.
* ""Hearing"" is the first sense to be fully developed.
* Newborn babies are not blind. Studies have shown that newborns have approximately 20/50 vision and can easily discriminate between degrees of brightness.
* Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood we have only 206 in our bodies. The reason is because some bones fuse together later.
* Babies are born without knee caps. They do not appear until the child reaches 2-6 years of age.
* A newborn baby breathes five times faster than an adult man.
* One in every 2,000 babies is born with a tooth.
* Most babies begin smiling in a social way between four to eight weeks.
* According to researchers at the University of Texas, babies like pretty faces better than plain ones.
* If one identical twin grows up without a given tooth coming in, the second identical twin will usually also grow up without the tooth.
* The daughters of a mother who is colorblind and a father who has normal vision will have normal vision. The sons will be colorblind, however.
* More in-vitro babies are born in Australia than anywhere else in the world.
* Australia also produced the world's first test-tube twins, triplets, quadruplets, baby born from a donor egg and frozen-embryo baby.
* In 1994 alone at least 79 sets of quadruplets were born in the United States.
* Sweden has the lowest birth rate in the world, 1 in 100. Malawi, in Africa, has the highest, 5.3 in 100.
* Twins are born less frequently in the eastern part of the world than in the western.
* The first child ever born on the continent of Antarctica was born in 1978.
* According to research conducted by Soviet scientists, girls born to men who are older than 50 have an average life span that is six years shorter than their brothers. They believe the X, or female, chromosome a father passes to his daughter contains the gene that determines longevity.
* A Swiss study found that a majority of women unconsciously choose mates with a body odor that differs from their own natural scents, which, as a result, ensures better immune protection for their children. Longevity magazine reported that the genes that battle disease-provoking substances also influence body odor.
* The largest number of children born to one woman is recorded at 69. From 1725-1765 a Russian peasant woman gave birth to 16 sets of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets.
-- compiled from various sources
