10 Facts About Babies That Will Break Your Reality

Looking at a newborn, things seem pretty straightforward. We understand conception, that gender is random, and that post-birth influences shape a baby’s development. The truth is more flexible and bizarre.

Robotics and AI are now playing an important role in creating human embryos, famine brings more daughters, and sun-soaked mothers produce taller kids. Scientists are also beginning to answer unsettling questions about space pregnancy and humanity’s last baby.

Related: 10 Amazing Facts about Heartbeats That You Will Hardly Believe

10 The IVF Club Is Huge

IVF stands for “in vitro fertilization.” This technique, which involves fertilizing an egg with sperm in a test tube, is a godsend for people struggling to fall pregnant. The first IVF baby was born nearly 50 years ago in 1978. The technology might be old, but due to its highly effective nature, IVF remains an evergreen choice for hopeful parents. Indeed, a “test tube” baby is born every 35 seconds.

So, how many people owe their existence to IVF? Over 13 million. A team of international researchers arrived at this estimate by looking at the health data of 101 countries. However, the head count is incomplete. The first IVF registry only started in the early 1980s in Australia, and even today, many countries and clinics do not report IVF statistics. As a result, as many as 4 million additional children could be added to the final tally.^[1]

9 Winter Babies Are Crawling Champs

In 2014, the University of Haifa in Israel posed an interesting question. Does the season of birth influence when a baby starts to crawl? The study looked at 47 healthy children divided into two groups: those born during summer/autumn and winter/spring. Parents had to report on certain milestones, and the university team also assessed the kids at home. The winter kids started crawling at 30 weeks old, a whopping five weeks earlier than their summer counterparts.

Experiments in Japan and Colorado produced similar results, but a study in Canada detected no difference between summer and winter kids. This could be due to Canadian home temperatures staying roughly the same all year round, where indoor winter heating keeps families warm until summer comes.

In places like Israel, Japan, and Colorado, seasons pass in greater contrast. Summers might be hot or dry, while winters are freezing or wet. It remains unknown why contrasting seasons, and colder months in particular, supercharge a baby’s ability to crawl.^[2]

8 But Summer Babies Are Healthier

In 2015, a British study examined almost 500,000 people. The goal was to see what influence, if any, a baby’s month of birth had on a newborn’s weight, the onset of puberty, and, finally, adult weight. Researchers found that summer babies had heavier birth weights and grew taller as adults. Girls also started puberty later, which is an indicator of better health in later life.

Nobody knows why summer seems to be the best time to drop a new baby. However, some experts have a sunny theory. They suggest that mothers who soak up more sunlight in the second trimester of their pregnancy absorb more vitamin D. This nutrient might help to build healthier children in the womb.

If this “sunlight effect” is real, more research could one day unravel the mechanism behind it, and maybe even harness it to offer all babies a better start in life.^[3]

7 The First Remotely Created Baby

Scientists are always looking to improve reproductive technology. More effective methods hasten parenthood and spare people from the heartache of failed IVF sessions. A fascinating new tool is remotely operated IVF (IVF that is controlled in one country but performed in another).

The idea is to automate the entire process of an IVF type called intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). This procedure has 23 steps and focuses on injecting one sperm into an egg. This extremely delicate operation often damages or destroys eggs, something researchers are hoping will end with automation. It can also lighten the labor burden, as ICSI is a time-consuming task performed manually on hundreds of eggs every day.

In 2025, the first baby was born via this treatment. Experts in New York remotely controlled AI and robots in Mexico to choose the optimal egg and sperm, and initiated each step to ensure fertilization. Once the embryo was created, doctors implanted it in a 40-year-old woman, who successfully carried the pregnancy to term.^[4]

6 Older Moms Are Now Having Smarter Kids

Ask, “Do younger or older women have smarter children?” and most will lean towards mothers in their twenties rather than middle-aged moms. A 2017 study supported this view, but it also revealed a fascinating evolution in modern mothers that completely flips the story around.

When given cognitive tests, kids born to older mothers today outperform those with younger mothers. This is a dramatic shift from 40 years ago, when the study found that the reverse was true. So, what’s going on?

In industrialized countries, more older mums are now better off and having children at a later stage in life—and this seems to benefit their offspring greatly. These women tend to be more educated, established in professional careers (so, more money to spend on their children’s development), and avoid smoking during pregnancy. All of these factors were not necessarily true a couple of decades ago.

More mothers also welcome their first child when they are older. Firstborns are known to perform better on cognitive tests, likely because they get all the parental attention and resources while there are no siblings. In the past, older women already had several children and divided their resources between them, something that did not afford the kids the same cognitive opportunities as one child with all the attention.^[5]

5 Breech Births Run in the Family

Inheritance is mostly a good thing. You get the family home, some heirlooms, or perhaps a hefty check. But what you might not expect to inherit from your parents is the position in which you were born.

Most babies arrive in the world head first. But one in twenty infants comes out backwards, an event referred to as a “breech birth.” Since this position is linked to serious health complications and even death, it’s critical to better predict which babies are at risk.

In the past, a low birth rate or going into premature labor were identified as causes. However, something was missing. Weight and early delivery only accounted for one in seven backwards babies. Then, in 2008, a massive Norwegian study discovered that genetics play a huge role. Incredibly, they found that a firstborn child was twice as likely to be born bottom first if one or both of their parents had been a full-term breech baby.^[6]

4 The Oldest Baby Born Was 30

During 1994, Linda Archerd and her husband underwent IVF and became the proud parents of a baby girl. The procedure produced three other embryos, but the Archerds decided to freeze them. Decades later, Linda put them up for adoption.

Lindsey and Tim Pierce happily accepted one of the embryos. Even though they just wanted to start a family, they unwittingly became part of an amazing story. The egg was successfully thawed and implanted, and on July 26, 2025, the Pierce couple welcomed a son into the world. Here’s what makes him so special—he was frozen for 30 and a half years, and this makes him the “oldest” baby in the world.

In the US, cryo-banks hold roughly 1.5 million frozen embryos. Many are adopted years after conception, so it’s not uncommon anymore for kids to be decades younger than their siblings. For instance, the Pierce boy and his sister were conceived in 1994, but due to him being in a freezer for longer, she is 30 years older.^[7]

3 More Girls Are Born During Famine

Human births lean towards more boys. This might be nature’s way of correcting for the fact that men have higher death rates than women. However, when times are hard, especially during famines, female births dominate the scene.

One theory suggests that girls improve the odds of their mother’s DNA surviving such a prolonged calamity. Experts argue that only a few strong males tend to reproduce in survival situations. At the same time, almost all females do, even when they are malnourished and stressed by famine themselves.

Even if this is true, the question of how hunger affects an unborn baby’s gender remains a mystery. The answer might lie in another study that found male embryos are often lost when a mother’s blood sugar remains low. In all likelihood, a normal number of boys and girls are conceived during famine, but more female than male embryos survive their starving, hypoglycaemic mothers.^[8]

2 Space Kids Are Pure Fantasy (for Now)

Few people understand how lucky a successful birth is. For example, three-quarters of all embryos are lost before the woman even knows that she is pregnant. For the pregnancies that continue, certain milestones must be reached—something space can complicate. Scientists aren’t even sure how children will develop once they are born and gravity is missing.

One thing is for sure, though. Since everything floats in space, a starship’s labor ward will be incredibly difficult to run and keep clean during a birth. Heck, if the doctor accidentally loses their grip on the slippery newborn, Junior might sail through the air and collide with something. Cosmic rays and radiation can also wreak havoc with the infant in the womb and after birth, risking cell damage, developmental issues, and cancer.

Since humans are determined to settle on Mars, understanding how to safely conceive, carry to term, deliver, and raise an infant in space is important. There are a lot of details to iron out. At least one question has been answered by experts. Are we currently ready to have space babies? No. Just no.^[9]

1 The Last Human Baby

Modern society has birth rate angst. When too many children are born, people are convinced that overpopulation will strain resources to the point where Earth degrades into a dystopian desert world. When the birth rates plummet, some are convinced humans are rushing toward extinction.

Let’s imagine the worst-case scenario—Earth had just suffered a calamity that erased our fertility. If the last baby was born right before this event, how long would the human race last? As it turns out, a sorry 70 years. Maybe even 60.

People are living longer, but our longevity is mostly medicine and security-driven. As this last child grows older, the shrinking population won’t be able to maintain food, drinking water, or medicine production. Societal order will collapse. If violence doesn’t kill the last human, then a life without proper nutrition and health care will limit their existence—and the countdown to our extinction—to about 60 or 70 years.^[10]