Early Thursday morning, Kayli Shoff’s 2-year-old twin boys were playing in their home in Orem, Utah. Wearing matching blue pajamas, the boys climbed onto a dresser, the nearest thing to climb on in their bedroom.
As twin Brock wedged himself inside a drawer and twin Bowdy hung from the edge, disaster struck and the dresser toppled, trapping Brock underneath.
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In a state of shock, Bowdy looks around for help. His mother hadn’t yet noticed the incident on her bedroom baby monitor. Shoff later told NBC News that nobody in the house heard any thuds or cries.
After some hesitation, Bowdy decides to climb on top of the furniture, applying more pressure onto his crushed twin, and his attempts to lift the dresser fail. Then, in a heroic feat of leg strength, he successfully pushes the dresser off Brock, allowing him to roll out and escape.
As video of the incident has spread online this week, Shoff has used the opportunity to preach the importance of anchoring furniture to walls to prevent tipping. The dresser that fell on Brock is made by Ikea, which recently paid $50 million to the families of children crushed and killed by tipped Ikea dressers.
“I think we’ve made a big impact on people wanting to secure their dressers,” Shoff said. “You need to tie your dresser down today because honestly, if you wait a day or two, you’re just not going to get it done.”
This finding, based on my team’s synthesis of six decades of research, may come as a surprise. Gender differences in adults’ social sensitivity are famous. Women outperform men at recognizing faces and emotions, and they score modestly higher on measures of empathy. They are likelier to take jobs working with people, such as in teaching and health care, whereas men are likelier to choose jobs working with “things,” such as in engineering or plumbing.
But how early do these differences emerge, and are they a matter of evolution or social learning? For years, some theorists have argued the former: that the difference is innate, built into the brain hardware of girls and boys through Darwinian selection. But this perspective relies almost exclusively on just one high-profile, yet deeply flawed, study of 102 newborns.
Mining the neonatal research trove
Realizing that psychologists have been studying newborns’ social orientation for decades, my team of neurobehavioral researchers and I set out to collect all the data – every published study that has compared boys’ and girls’ attention to social stimuli in the first month of life. Our goal was to better test the hypothesis of an inborn gender difference in attention to, or interest in, other people.
Our study was a systematic review, meaning we searched through every published report indexed in both medical and psychological databases from the 1960s onward.
We cast a wide net, looking for any research that measured newborns’ attention to or preference for human faces or voices and that reported the data separately by gender. Importantly, we did not limit our search to the terms “gender difference” or “sex difference,” since these would bias the collection by potentially excluding studies that failed to find boy-girl differences..
As expected, we unearthed dozens of studies comparing newborn boys and girls on social perception: 40 experiments reported in 31 peer-reviewed studies and involving nearly 2,000 infants. The majority of studies measured the amount of time newborns spent looking at faces, either at a single face or comparing a baby’s preference between two faces of differing social value, such as their own mother versus a woman who was a stranger.
Our data collection was large enough that we were able to carry out meta-analysis, which is a statistical method for combining the results of many studies. Meta-analysis essentially turns many small studies into a single large one. For studies measuring neonates’ looking time at faces, this included 667 infants, half of them boys and half of them girls.
The result was clear: nearly identical social perception between baby boys and girls. There was no significant difference between genders overall, nor was there a difference when we focused only on studies measuring babies’ gaze duration on a single face, or only on studies measuring babies’ gaze preference between two different faces.
Our search also netted two other types of studies. One focused on a remarkable behavior: newborns’ tendency to start crying when they hear another baby cry. An early study found this “contagious crying” to be marginally more common in girls. But when we performed meta-analysis on data across nine contagious-crying experiments, including 387 infants, there was again no solid evidence for male-female difference.
The last dataset we analyzed compared babies’ orientation to both social and inanimate objects using a newborn behavior assessment scale developed by legendary pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton. Across four studies involving 619 infants, girls did pay somewhat greater attention to the social stimuli (a human face or voice), but they also paid more attention to the inanimate stimuli (a ball or the sound of a rattle).
In other words, girls in this test seemed a bit more attuned to every type of stimulus, perhaps due to a general maturity advantage that they hold from fetal development through puberty. But there was nothing special about their interest in people, according to the Brazelton assessment.
Boys, too, prefer faces
Our findings align with other well-designed studies, including one finding that 5-month-old boys and girls equally prefer looking at faces over toy cars or other objects, and another finding that 2-month-old boys actually perform better than girls at detecting faces. So taken together, current research dispels a common myth that girls are innately “hardwired” to be more social than boys in early life.
The truth is that all babies are wired for social engagement at birth. Boys and girls are both primed to pay attention to human faces and voices, which, after all, belong to those who will keep them fed, safe and comforted.
Despite their best intentions, most parents cannot help but stereotype their infants by gender and begin treating boys and girls differently early on. Presuming that sons are already less social is not a recipe for remedying this bias. Our research can help dispel this myth, giving every child, male or female, the best possible start for connecting with and caring about other people.
East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, New York is “home” for dozens people who’ve been laid to rest. However, it is not just the home for departed humans. It is also the underground burrow housing over five million bees.
While there have been records of bees emerging from the grounds of East Lawn Cemetery since 1935, it wasn’t until 2023 that a study of its scale was measured. In April of that year, a team at Cornell University began fieldwork by setting up 10 emergence traps made of tents over the bees’ nest. These traps collected insects in a plastic jar with a 70% ethanol solution.
There Are 5.6 Million Bees Living Beneath This Cemetery Beneath a quiet cemetery in New York, scientists discovered millions of bees living underground, building tunnels, pollinating, and surviving completely unnoticed for decades. While everything above changes, generations come and go, this hidden world continues without interruption, a reminder that life moves forward with or without us. #NatureMystery#DidYouKnow#HiddenWorld#ScienceFacts#creatorsearchinsights
By analyzing the number of bees caught in these traps along with other data, they calculated that as many as 5.56 million bees live in the cemetery’s ground. To put it in perspective, the typical honeybee hive contains around 30,000 bees.
“I was completely floored when we did the calculations,” Cornell University entomologist Bryan Danforth said to Scientific American. “I have seen published estimates of bee aggregations in the hundreds of thousands. But I never really imagined that it would be 5.56 million bees.”
Many might be puzzled about bees living underground rather than in a typical hanging hive. In actuality, though, the majority of bees live underground. The miner bees (Andrena regularis) found in the cemetery actually live solitary lives within burrows. They nest there during the winter months and emerge in the spring to pollinate, mate, and dig burrows for their larvae. For New Yorkers who enjoy apples and blueberries, these bees are responsible for helping them bloom and grow in the spring.
“This species overwinters as adults, which is relatively rare, and that’s part of the reason why they come up out of the ground so early in spring, timed to the apple bloom,” said study author Steven T. Hoge.
What are bees doing living at a cemetery?
But why is the cemetery a popular living space for these bees?
“The peacefulness, the lack of pesticides, and the fact that, overall, the ground is rarely disturbed, all make cemeteries good habitat for bees,” Danforth told Science Alert.
Given the huge population, the Cornell University researchers state that the cemetery is actually very important for the area’s ecosystem. Should the cemetery grounds be disturbed or altered, it could impact the vegetation and crops in the surrounding areas. In fact, there are some cemeteries partnering up with beekeepers and other bee conservationists.
Keeping the bees (and the dead) in peace
Danforth and his colleagues have encouraged a global community science project to help the bees. The purpose is to study, protect, and conserve these ground-dwelling bees and their habitats.
“These populations are huge, and they need protection,” Danforth said. “If we don’t preserve nest sites, and someone paves over them, we could lose in an instant 5.5 million bees that are important pollinators.”
If you notice a bee coming out of the ground, leave it be and spread the word. It could be helping restock your grocery store or farmers market with quality produce.
Ashley Jackson (@themossycactus) spent twenty years in Texas before packing up and moving to South Manchester, England with her British husband and their two kids. The decision, she told Newsweek, came down to practical realities: affordable healthcare, family support, safer gun laws, and the kind of walkable community life that’s harder to find in Texas, where she said “you drive everywhere and these opportunities aren’t there.”
Truth number one: the weather. “It’s cold, it’s rainy, it’s hot… there is no AC, and sometimes it’s all in the same day,” Jackson said. Coming from Texas, where the sun is a reliable constant, the erratic grey of northern England takes getting used to. Interestingly, Jackson said she has actually come around on the weather personally, but she still complains about it, because complaining about the weather is practically a requirement of British social life.
Truth number two: the humour. “You are never going to be as funny or sarcastic as they are,” she said. “You can strive, but they will probably always be one up.” British sarcasm is its own dialect, and Jackson said you just have to accept that you will never fully master it.
Truth number three: the cereal aisle. “You won’t have 99 choices of cereal, but your life will be better for it. You’ll get about a quarter of that.” The American supermarket experience complete with, wall-to-wall options and twelve varieties of the same thing doesn’t really exist in the same way in the UK, and Jackson said adjusting to less choice is actually a net positive once you stop expecting it.
The habits she picked up to blend in
To go with the harsh truths, Jackson shared three habits she’s adopted to blend in: eating a sausage sandwich once a week, using understatements as a communication style, and moaning about the weather even when she secretly doesn’t mind it.
She’s not alone on this
Jackson’s experience reflects a broader trend. A Harris Poll survey found that 52% of Americans believe they can achieve a higher quality of life abroad, with 49% citing lower cost of living, 48% citing dissatisfaction with the political climate, and 35% citing security concerns as reasons to leave.
For Jackson, the surprises weren’t all hard ones. “In many ways, it was better than I expected,” she told Newsweek. “I wasn’t expecting the community support we have found.”
She tried to prepare for everything. The sausage sandwich, nobody warned her about.
