Spot the gender of your future child 26 weeks before conception

Sarah Knapton in The Telegraph


Craving sweets, early morning sickness and a watermelon-shaped stomach are all said to indicate that a woman will give birth to a baby girl.

But an intriguing new study suggests that it is possible to determine the sex of a baby months before it is even conceived.

Scientists in Canada discovered that a woman’s blood pressure at around 26 weeks before conception predicts if she will give birth to a boy or a girl. Higher systolic blood pressure signals she will deliver a boy while lower suggests a girl.

Dr Ravi Retnakaran, endocrinologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, said: “It suggests that a woman's blood pressure before pregnancy is a previously unrecognised factor that is associated with her likelihood of delivering a boy or a girl.”

The team made the connection while trying to work out what determines the ratio between girls and boys in a population.

The sex ration of a population can change depending on societal change CREDIT:GETTYIMAGES-DV1953025.JPG


Several studies have shown that stressful events such as wars, natural disasters and economic depression can change the proportion of boys and girls in a country.

The difference occurs because in stressful times one gender is more likely than the other to survive through pregnancy. So even though the conception sex ratio remains at 50:50, the birth ratio will alter depending on which sex is stronger.

In the new study the mean systolic blood pressure reading for women who had boys was 106 mm Hg, compared to 103 mm Hg for those who had girls, in the months leading up to conception.

“When a woman becomes pregnant, the sex of a foetus is determined by whether the father’s sperm provides an X or Y chromosome and there is no evidence that this probability varies in humans,” added Dr Retnakaran

“What is believed to vary is the proportion of male or female fetuses that is lost during pregnancy

“This study suggests that either lower blood pressure is indicative of a mother’s physiology that is less conducive to survival of a male foetus or that higher blood pressure before pregnancy is less conducive to survival of a female foetus.

“This novel insight may hold implications for both reproductive planning and our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms underlying the sex ratio in humans."

A simple blood pressure test could give some indication on what sex a baby will beCREDIT: ANTHONY DEVLIN


For the study, 1,411 newly-married Chinese women were recruited all who were trying to become pregnant. Their blood pressure was checked at around 26 weeks before conception and they were followed through pregnancy. Overall the women gave birth to 739 boys and 672 girls.

After adjustment for age, education, smoking, Body Mass Index (BMI) , waist, cholesterol, triglycerides and glucose, mean systolic blood pressure before pregnancy was found to be higher in women who subsequently had a boy than in those who delivered a girl.

Fertility expert Prof Charles Kingsland, of Liverpool Women’s Hospital, said: “We have been aware that more male fetuses miscarry than females and more females are born for obvious biological reasons, namely you need more women in the world to have children.

“There is also some evidence that you are more likely to miscarry a boy when you are compromised either by health or environmental issues. So I suppose, blood pressure changes in these circumstances might affect conception of different sexes.

“This study is therefore very interesting. However it does not take into account the potential physiological aspects of race. Will those changes be the same in the Caucasian or Afro Caribbean populations in the world. And what if you want a girl? Do you just go and live in Syria for a few months?”

However some experts were skeptical about the results.

Geoffrey Trew a consultant in Reproductive Medicine and Surgery at the Hammersmith Hospital in west London said: “I haven't heard anything like this before.

“I would be very surprised that a BP measurement , which is notoriously variable, could dictate sex 26 weeks before, some reptiles can have sex differences due to temperature changes at the time of early fetal growth , but not 26 weeks beforehand.”

The study was published in the American Journal of Hypertension.

Indian sport’s Forever Men

Nirmal Shekar in The Hindu

Many of the sports administrative bodies are besmirched by feudal attitudes where the top guys have reigned for long and appear to claim ownership rights over their ‘property’


The best thing that has happened to sports in India in a long, long time — longer perhaps than many of us have existed on this planet — is the laudably idealistic yet remarkably pragmatic intervention of the Supreme Court into Wild West territory — the landscape of cricket administration.
So much of what the well-meaning lay people have expected of the men who control sports has been trampled under mercilessly and maliciously, that a good majority of sports-lovers in the country have found refuge in nihilism and come to believe that nothing will change in the state of affairs.

When you think that something has been transformed for the better, very soon you realise it is nothing more than chimerical and it might be foolish and useless to bravely make your way through the haze.

If sports politics is even more Machiavellian than Indian politics in general, then that should come as no surprise. For we resign ourselves to the fact that sport is not a matter quite as important as electing the country’s Prime Minister.


Sliver of hope

But just when we thought that it is a tunnel without an end, the Supreme Court, headed by its upstanding, noble Chief Justice Mr. T.S. Thakur (who retired recently) has offered us a sliver of hope here or there — in fact much, much more than what we may have come to expect 70 years after the country’s Independence.

A popular, veteran Indian sportsperson, who tried to get into the administration of his sport not long ago, put it succinctly the other day when I asked him what was wrong with sports administration in the country at a time when the nation’s richest, and perhaps one of the world’s wealthiest sports bodies, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), was making front-page news for all the wrong reasons every day.

“You tell me what is right with it. It stinks. I shudder to think that such mismanagement, corruption, nepotism and chaos can exist in 2017,” he said.

Most well-meaning people in the world of sports, when asked the same question, not surprisingly come up with the same answer: “a total lack of professionalism.’’


Reasons for lagging

This is an over-arching judgement that seems to ignore the nuts and bolts of everyday affairs in major sports in the country. From experts down to lay fans, almost everybody has an opinion on why such a huge nation should not be among the leading performers in the world of sport. Infrastructure, money, attitude, culture…you can think of dozens of reasons why India does not stand tall in the world of sport.

Says Joaquim Carvalho, Olympian and hockey administrator “Sports governance in India lacks transparency and accountability. Most officials are not passionate about sports at all. They use this platform to keep themselves in the news and also indulge in corruption.

“I have a poor impression of sports governance because I have seen these officials as a player and later I as someone connected with the conduct of the game. They have vested interest and development of sport is never a priority for them. Basically, it helps them stay in the news, build connections and enjoy junkets. Sports governance in India is absolutely unprofessional.”

While it will be unfair to make a sweeping generalisation — there are a few sports that benefit from modern management where the administration is totally transparent in its business. But most are besmirched by feudal attitudes where the top guys have been the same since the days of your childhood, and they appear to claim ownership rights over their ‘property.’

‘Honorary’ positions are not ones manned by individuals with perfectly altruistic intentions. To even expect it is ridiculous. Even saints do what they do to get into the good books of the big, all-knowing, all-powerful man up there.


On an upward swing

There is a flip side to all this. Adille Sumariwala, IAAF executive council member and president, Athletics Federation of India, says, “Sports is on the upward swing in India. Television and the leagues in virtually all sports have increased the fan following. Children know the names of kabaddi players, not only cricketers. Television has brought sports to people, there is more awareness. It’s a matter of time before sports emerges much stronger. There are opportunities to make sport a career in life. And so sports is on the upswing’’.

But here is the catch. Do we have honest officials with a long-term goals in mind? It is indeed boom-time in Indian sports. But the launching pads, corporate support and fans’ enthusiasm may quickly evaporate if the quality of administration remains the same.

How many of our present sports administrators come in with a clear mandate and then move forward stridently to carry it out? Do they go through the same strict annual evaluation process as do brilliant business school graduates?

Success as sports administrators demands a few basic skills in areas such as communication, organisation, decision making, value system and team building.

“Indian sports administrators are special. I must admit that. They are in a category of their own,” said the late Peter Roebuck, my best friend among foreign journalists visiting India frequently, during one of our post dinner conversations.

What Roebuck referred to was mainly cricket but he was curious enough to want to know more and more about other sports. Leadership skills can be either cultivated or learned but the men and women who run our sports are keen on only one thing — staying where they are with a great love for being in the spotlight.

How many times have we seen sports bosses appearing prominently in photographs of athletes who return after world-beating success at airports across the country?

Long ago, a top Indian sportsman returning after winning the world championship told me something that was shocking. I asked him who the gentleman who was hugging him in the front page of a leading Indian English language paper? “I swear, I have never seen the guy before,” he said of a man who was a senior administrator in the sport.

Of course, the nameless one is part of the Forever Men club.

SOAS students have a point. Philosophy degrees should look beyond white Europeans

Tom Whyman in The Guardian

We all know what students are like nowadays, don’t we? Special snowflakes who can’t cope with the real world, who refuse to venture out of their safe spaces to learn anything, who are so achingly PC they won’t even let their institutions serve sushi in the cafeteria. When they’re not wasting their lives on social media or fighting for a fairer world for all, these mewling, overprivileged babies like to spend their time policing their academic superiors on their curriculum choices.

The latest scandal? Step forward SOAS, University of London students’ union, which has outraged basically every outlet in the rightwing press by calling, astonishingly enough, for such great philosophers as Kant, Plato and Descartes to be banned from the curriculum, just because they are white.

As part of a wider campaign to “decolonise” the curriculum, the union has proclaimed, “the majority of philosophers” taught at Soas should be from Africa or Asia, and – when the great names of European philosophy are taught, which is something that should only happen when absolutely necessary – it should be from a critical standpoint, accounting for (for instance) the colonial context in which Enlightenment thought arose.

Read the news articles on this story and you’d be convinced that some great act of intellectual barbarism was about to take place. But in truth, the notion that anything untoward is going on here is mostly nonsense.

Allow me to explain. First, it must be noted that despite the headlines no one, at any point, has actually called for white philosophers to be dropped from the curriculum at SOAS. Even at its most extreme, all the SOAS students’ union demands (and note that their demand has no binding force whatsoever) is that European philosophers only be taught in preference to African and Asian ones when necessary. Adopting this principle, if it turns out that say, Kant, has expressed some insight that is vital for understanding some aspect of reality, then he should be allowed to remain in the curriculum.

This seems fair: there’s only so much thought one can study as an undergraduate, and students should have a right to not waste their time on any second-rate thinkers who happen to have snuck themselves into the western canon. If we’re going to teach philosophy at a university, then it seems more than worthwhile to critically reflect on which philosophers we’re focusing on, and why. Indeed, this is something that Kant himself, whose mature work is pitched against dogmatism in all its forms, would welcome.

Second, philosophers should also welcome the demand that European philosophy be studied in its appropriate social and historical context. This doesn’t just mean PC hand-wringing: it can be used to actively enrich our understanding of these texts. Consider an example such as Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes – one of the founding documents of western political thought. Hobbes argues that we need a state authority invested with absolute power – because otherwise society would collapse into what he calls “the state of nature”, where no one has any security and life is nasty, brutish and short. The state of nature is often called a fiction, but if you read Leviathan closely you’ll notice that Hobbes is actually getting it from early anthropological accounts of Native American civilisation, which he describes as being devoid of any understanding of law. This of course is deeply problematic – and it’s exactly the sort of point that, if we understand it in its proper context, can allow us to get a better, richer understanding of Hobbes (and obtain a better understanding of our social world in general).

Third, even if the SOAS students had demanded that all white philosophers be banned from the curriculum, it’s still unclear to me how much would actually be lost. You wouldn’t know it from reading any of the other news articles on this topic, but SOAS doesn’t actually have a philosophy department – and nor does it offer a BA degree in philosophy. Rather, SOAS offers a BA in world philosophies, which is run by the department of religions and philosophies. Given the nature of this course and the nature of SOAS as an institution, it makes complete sense for the students to want to study more African and Asian thought at the expense of European. Of course if nearby Birkbeck decided to purge its curriculum of European thought, that would be an entirely different issue. But these matters are context-sensitive, and diversity across curricula should be welcomed.

Finally, the stereotype of students as easily “triggered” special snowflakes who use political correctness to police their teachers is one I simply don’t recognise. Most of the students I’ve encountered as a university lecturer are bright, engaged and want to be challenged. And to be honest, that’s something I recognise in the statement issued by the SOAS students as well. This oh-so-scandalising statement reads to me like it must have been produced by students who are deeply invested in their course and care passionately about what they study. As educators we have a duty to respond to and nurture this passion.

Philosophy can teach children what Google can’t

Charlotte Blease in The Guardian


At the controls of driverless cars, on the end of the telephone when you call your bank or favourite retailer: we all know the robots are coming, and in many cases are already here. Back in 2013, economists at Oxford University’s Martin School estimated that in the next 20 years, more than half of all jobs would be substituted by intelligent technology. Like the prospect of robot-assisted living or hate it, it is foolish to deny that children in school today will enter a vastly different workplace tomorrow – and that’s if they’re lucky. Far from jobs being brought back from China, futurologists predict that white-collar jobs will be increasingly outsourced to digitisation as well as blue-collar ones.

How should educationalists prepare young people for civic and professional life in a digital age? Luddite hand-wringing won’t do. Redoubling investment in science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) subjects won’t solve the problem either: hi-tech training has its imaginative limitations.

In the near future school-leavers will need other skills. In a world where technical expertise is increasingly narrow, the skills and confidence to traverse disciplines will be at a premium. We will need people who are prepared to ask, and answer, the questions that aren’t Googleable: like what are the ethical ramifications of machine automation? What are the political consequences of mass unemployment? How should we distribute wealth in a digitised society? As a society we need to be more philosophically engaged.

Amid the political uncertainties of 2016, the Irish president Michael D Higgins provided a beacon of leadership in this area. “The teaching of philosophy,” he said in November, “is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal to empower children into acting as free and responsible subjects in an ever more complex, interconnected, and uncertain world.” Philosophy in the classroom, he emphasised, offers a “path to a humanistic and vibrant democratic culture”.

In 2013, as Ireland struggled with the after-effects of the financial crisis, Higgins launched a nationwide initiative calling for debate about what Ireland valued as a society. The result is that for the first time philosophy was introduced into Irish schools in September.

A new optional course for 12- to 16-year-olds invites young people to reflect on questions that – until now – have been glaringly absent from school curriculums. In the UK, a network of philosophers and teachers is still lobbying hard for a GCSE equivalent. And Ireland, a nation that was once deemed “the most Catholic country”, is already exploring reforms to establish philosophy for children as a subject within primary schools.

This expansion of philosophy in the curriculum is something that Higgins and his wife Sabina, a philosophy graduate, have expressly called for. Higgins’ views are ahead of his time. If educators assume philosophy is pointless, it’s fair to say that most academic philosophers (unlike, say, mathematicians, or linguists) are still territorial, or ignorant, about the viability of their subject beyond the cloisters. If educators need to get wise, philosophers need to get over themselves.

Thinking and the desire to understand don’t come naturally – contrary to what Aristotle believed. Unlike, say, sex and gossip, philosophy is not a universal interest. Bertrand Russell came closer when he said, “Most people would rather die than think; many do.” While we may all have the capacity for philosophy, it is a capacity that requires training and cultural nudges. If the pursuit of science requires some cognitive scaffolding, as American philosopher Robert McCauley argues, then the same is true of philosophy.

Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job


Philosophy is difficult. It encompasses the double demand of strenuous labour under a stern overseer. It requires us to overcome personal biases and pitfalls in reasoning. This necessitates tolerant dialogue, and imagining divergent views while weighing them up. Philosophy helps kids – and adults – to articulate questions and explore answers not easily drawn out by introspection or Twitter. At its best, philosophy puts ideas, not egos, front and centre. And it is the very fragility – the unnaturalness – of philosophy that requires it to be embedded, not just in schools, but in public spaces.

Philosophy won’t bring back the jobs. It isn’t a cure-all for the world’s current or future woes. But it can build immunity against careless judgments, and unentitled certitude. Philosophy in our classrooms would better equip us all to perceive and to challenge the conventional wisdoms of our age. Perhaps it is not surprising that the president of Ireland, a country that was once a sub-theocracy, understands this.

Fatah ki Fatwa

Tarek Fatwa's TV program

How to keep your resolutions (clue: it's not all about willpower)

Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian

The only way is up.  

It’s hard to think of a situation in which it wouldn’t be extremely useful to have more willpower. For a start, your New Year’s resolutions would no longer be laughably short-lived. You could stop yourself spending all day on social media, spiralling into despair at the state of the world, yet also summon the self-discipline to do something about it by volunteering or donating to charity. And with more “political will”, which is really just willpower writ large, we could forestall the worst consequences of climate change, or stop quasi-fascist confidence tricksters from getting elected president. In short, if psychologists could figure out how to reliably build and sustain willpower, we’d be laughing.

Unfortunately, though, 2016 was the year in which psychologists had to admit they’d figured out no such thing, and that much of what they thought they knew about willpower was probably wrong. Changing your habits is certainly doable, but “more willpower” may not be the answer after all.

The received wisdom, for nearly two decades, was that willpower is like a muscle. That means you can strengthen it through regular use, but also that you can tire it out, so that expending willpower in one way (for example, by forcing yourself to work when you’d rather be checking Facebook) means there’ll be less left over for other purposes (such as resisting the lure of a third pint after work). In a landmark 1998 study, the social psychologist Roy Bauermeister and his colleagues baked a batch of chocolate cookies and served them alongside a bowl of radishes. They brought two groups of subjects into the lab, instructing each to eat only cookies or only radishes; their reasoning was that it would take self-discipline for the radish-eaters to resist the cookies. In the second stage of the experiment, participants were given puzzles to solve, not realising that they were actually unsolvable. The cookie-eaters plugged away at the puzzles for an average of 19 minutes each, while the radish-eaters gave up after eight, their willpower presumably already eroded by resisting the cookies.

Thus was born the theory of “ego depletion”, which holds that willpower is a limited resource. Pick your New Year resolutions sparingly, otherwise they’ll undermine each other. Your plan to meditate for 20 minutes each morning may actively obstruct your plan to learn Spanish, and vice versa, so you end up achieving neither.

Except willpower probably isn’t like a muscle after all: in recent years, attempts to reproduce the original results have failed, part of a wider credibility crisis in psychology. Meanwhile, a new consensus has begun to gain ground: that willpower isn’t a limited resource, but believing that it is makes you less likely to follow through on your plans.

Some scholars argue that willpower is better understood as being like an emotion: a feeling that comes and goes, rather unpredictably, and that you shouldn’t expect to be able to force, just as you can’t force yourself to feel happy. And, like happiness, its chronic absence may be a warning that you’re on the wrong track. If a relationship reliably made you miserable, you might conclude that it wasn’t the relationship for you. Likewise, if you repeatedly fail to summon the willpower for a certain behaviour, it may be time to accept the fact: perhaps getting better at cooking, or learning to enjoy yoga, just isn’t on the cards for you, and you’d be better advised to focus on changes that truly inspire you. “If you decide you’re going to fight cravings, fight thoughts, fight emotions, you put all your energy and attention into trying to change the inner experiences,” the willpower researcher Kelly McGonigal has argued. And people who do that “tend to become more stuck, and more overwhelmed.” Instead, ask what changes you’d genuinely enjoy having made a year from now, as opposed to those you feel you ought to make.

Lurking behind all this, though, is a more unsettling question: does willpower even exist? McGonigal defines people with willpower as those who demonstrate “the ability to do what matters most, even when it’s difficult, or when some part of [them] doesn’t want to”. Willpower, then, is a word ascribed to people who manage to do what they said they were going to do: it’s a judgment about their behaviour. But it doesn’t follow that willpower is a thing in itself, a substance or resource you either possess or you don’t, like money or muscle strength. Rather than “How can I build my willpower?”, it may be better to ask: “How can I make it more likely that I’ll do what I plan to do?”

One tactic is to manipulate your environment in such a way that willpower becomes less important. If you don’t keep your credit card in your wallet or handbag, it’ll be difficult to use it for unwise impulse purchases; if money is automatically transferred from your current account to a savings account the day you’re paid, your goal of saving won’t rely exclusively on strength of character. Then there’s a technique known as “strategic pre-commitment”: tell a friend about your plan, and the risk of mild public shame may help keep you on track. (Better yet, give them a cheque made out to an organisation you hate, and make them promise to donate it if you fail.) Use whatever tricks happen to fit your personality: the comedian Jerry Seinfeld famously marked an X on a wallchart for every day he managed to write, and soon became unwilling to break the chain of Xs. And exploit the power of “if-then plans”, which are backed by numerous research studies: think through the day ahead, envisaging the specific scenarios in which you might find yourself, and the specific ways you intend to respond when you do. (For example, you might decide that as soon as you feel sleepy after 10pm, you’ll go directly to bed; or that you’ll always put on your running shoes the moment you get home from work.)

The most important boost to your habit-changing plans, though, may lie not in any individual strategy, but in letting go of the idea of “willpower” altogether. If the word doesn’t really refer to an identifiable thing, there’s no need to devote energy to fretting over your lack of it. Behaviour change becomes a far more straightforward matter of assembling a toolbox of tricks that, in combination, should steer you well. Best of all, you’ll no longer be engaged in a battle with your own psyche: you can stop trying to “find the willpower” to live a healthier/kinder/less stressful/more high-achieving life – and just focus on living it instead.

I'm a junior doctor in the NHS, and I'm terrified for this winter

Aislinn Macklin-Doherty in The Guardian


Widespread concerns that the NHS will face the “toughest winter ever” are not exaggerated or unfounded – just look at the terrible news today from Worcestershire. We really should be worried for ourselves and our relatives. As a junior doctor and a researcher looking after cancer patients in the NHS, I am terrified by the prospect of what the next few months will bring. But we must not forget this is entirely preventable.

Three patients die at Worcestershire hospital amid NHS winter crisis


Our current crisis is down to the almost clockwork-like series of reshuffling, rebranding and top-down disorganisation of the services by government. It’s led to an inexorable decline in the quality of care.

I have also become aware of an insidious “takeover” by the private sector. It is both literal – in the provision of services – and ideological, with an overwhelming prevalence of business-speak being absorbed into our collective psyche. But the British public (and even many staff) remain largely unaware that this is happening.

Where the consultant physician or surgeon was once general, they now increasingly play second fiddle to chief executives and clinical business unit managers. Junior doctors such as myself (many of whom have spent 10-15 years practising medicine and have completed PhDs) must also fall in line to comply with business models and corporate strategy put forward by those with no clinical training or experience with patients.

It is this type of decision-making (based on little evidence) and seemingly unaccountable policymaking that means patient care is suffering. Blame cannot be laid at the feet of a population of demanding and ageing patients, nor the “health tourists” who are too often scapegoated.

The epitome of such changes is known as the “sustainability and transformation plans”. These will bring about some of the biggest shifts in how NHS frontline service are funded and run in recent history, and yet, worryingly, most of my own colleagues have not even heard of them. Even fewer feel able to influence them.

Sustainability and transformation plans will see almost a third of regions having an A&E closed or downgraded, and nearly half will see numbers of inpatient bed reductions. This is all part of the overarching five-year plan to drive through £22bn in efficiency savings in the NHS. But with overwhelming cuts in social services and community care and with GPs under immense pressure, people are forced to go to A&E because they quite simply do not have any other options.

I have been on the phone with patients with cancer who need to come into hospital with life-threatening conditions such as sepsis, and I have been forced to tell them, “We have no beds here you need to go to another local A&E.” Responses such as, “Please doctor don’t make me go there – last time there were people backed up down the corridors,” break my heart.

According to the Kings Fund, our NHS leaders are choosing to spend less year-on-year on healthcare (as a proportion of GDP) than at any other time in NHS history and yet we are the fifth richest economy in the world. Simultaneously private sector involvement increases and astronomical interest rates from private finance initiatives must be paid, with hospitals such as St Bartholomew’s in London having to pay up to £2m per week in interest alone. No wonder nearly all hospitals are now in dire straits.

This is all the result of intentional policies being made at the top with minimal consultation of those on the frontline. With such policies accumulating over the years we are now seeing the crisis come to a climax. The UK has fewer beds per person and fewer doctors per person than most countries in Europe. Fewer ambulances are now able to reach the highest-category emergencies, which means people having asthma attacks, heart attacks and traffic accidents are being left to wait longer in situations where minutes really matter.

The sustainability and transformation plans for my local area in south-west London show that they plan to cut 44% of inpatient bed stays over the next four years . This is dangerous. It is likely that St Helier hospital in Sutton, which takes many emergencies in the area, will close and patients will then not only have access to critically reduced services, they will then have to travel longer to hospital, having waited longer for the ambulance to get to them.

This will be the straw that broke the camel’s back. I cannot stand by while patients’ lives are put at unnecessary risk this winter. And neither should you.