Are baby girls more sociable? Super El Niño, meningitis outbreak explained
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This is the Guardian.
Girls, on average, learn to talk earlier than boys. Some social skills develop quicker too. But why? Is it all down to how we're socialized or is biology playing a role too? Scientists recruited some of the youngest possible study participants to try and find out. Today we're looking at some of the science that's caught our eye this week, including a jaw-dropping El Nino that's set to keep growing, and an answer to why the UK's meningitis outbreak earlier this year was so big. From The Guardian, I'm Madeline Finley and this is Science Weekly.
Ian, when it comes to the differences between the sexes, there's always this question, and sometimes quite an uncomfortable question, about what role our biology is playing and how that compares to our socialization, other external factors. And this week you reported on a study that was trying to get at this influence. influence of nature and nurture so tell me a bit about this.
That's right. So I think as long as there have been scientists or people who would sort of nowadays be class as scientists, they've looked at at s at differences between the sexes. Okay. And these can be like really obvious things like on average men will be taller than women, and on average women tend to live longer than men. And you know, there are also differences that you can see in meeting different sort of developmental milestones in In in sort of toddlers and things like that. And you know, there's some work out there, there's a lot of bad research out there, I've got to say straight away. But you know, there are studies out there that will say, well, there are they report small differences in, say, personality traits.
And there's always this question of is it all down to the experiences we have, or are there differences that come from our biology? Are there things that are genetic? Are there things that are to do with our hormone level exposure in the womb and so on? So, one way you can try and disentangle nature and nurture is to study people who haven't really been shaped by society. So, newborn babies, right? Problem with newborn babies is: well, what are you gonna get them to do? Because they're newborn babies. You can't really much. Deliver. They don't do very much. But this study was looking at newborns and These researchers in Cambridge they recruited 130 newborns to take part in this study. These newborns were aged between eight hours and three days.
On average, they were just over one day old. Okay. And the babies were s were seated on their parents or their carer's lap and had a laptop in front of them. They have the baby. watch a video on a laptop and that video is kind of a split screen. So on one side you have a young woman making sort of pleasant expressions. On the other side of the screen is a video of a Newton's cradle. You know that sort of mechanical toys that I think they were probably popular in the eighties. Just metal balls that clang about, right?
I always think of those on sort of uh office desks.
Yeah, exactly. Your sort of nineteen eighties, office desk, a lot of black, a lot of chrome, um, city view through the windows. And yeah, anyway, so the the babies were watching these videos as their um gaze was being tracked by an eye tracker. And so th the point of this experiment was to really look at attention. Where are these babies paying attention? Are they paying more attention to the woman's face? Are they paying more attention to the to the mechanical toy.
What a way to start off life straight into a science experiment. Um, so what did these researchers find?
So, first up, all of the babies paid more attention to the face than they did to the Newton's cradle. Okay. So they're more interested in the person than the mechanical toy. But there was a difference that came about in their attention when you look a bit deeper. And basically, the baby girls were devoting proportionally more of their time looking to the face than the toy relative to what the boys were doing. Okay. So is this small and it's a subtle difference?
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