Science News

Mark Oppenheimer, a part-time stay-at-home father of two young girls, is used to stares. “When I’m walking down the street with one baby strapped to my chest and the other in a stroller--and the kids all look happy--and I walk by a group of mothers, they’re just blown away,” he says. “The easiest way in the world to get a smile is to be a man with a baby.”

Fatherhood has undergone a profound change in the past half a century. In 1965 fathers were spending 2.6 hours a week on child care; by 2000 that figure had reached 6.5 hours. There are three times as many stay-at-home fathers as there were a decade ago, and families headed by single fathers are the fastest-growing household type in the U.S. “When I started studying American mothers and fathers, the majority of the fathers I studied had never bathed their children. Many of them had never changed a diaper,” says developmental psychologist Michael Lamb of the University of Cambridge. That was in the 1970s. “Now,” he says, “men would feel embarrassed to say they hadn’t changed their children.”

In the 1922 poem The Waste Land , T. S. Eliot writes, cryptically: Who is the third who always walks beside you?/When I count, there are only you and I together /But when I look ahead up the white road/There is always another one walking beside you.

In his footnotes to this verse, Eliot explained that the lines “were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions [Ernest Shackleton’s] ... that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.”

The number of deaths and hospitalizations caused by prescription drugs has risen precipitously in the past decade, with overdoses of pain medications, in particular opioids, sedatives and tranquilizers, more than doubling between 1999 and 2006, according to a new study. [More]

The problem with generating electricity by harnessing the wind is that it doesn't always blow (though it may seem that way at times). And, typically, consumers remain intolerant of power interruptions. [More]

The ability on the part of researchers to manipulate sound waves has led to the development of critical technologies, for example, enabling ultrasonic transducers to image the interior of the human body (aka "ultrasound"). A team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena think they've found a way to make sound waves even more powerful with the help of a new type of acoustic lens. Caltech researchers Alessandro Spadoni and Chiara Daraio describe how they create "sound bullets" in a study published in the April 5 issue Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences . [More]