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IVF babies grow up to be heavier
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NEWS & TECHNOLOGY Donate your voice to help Siri understand
IVF babies grow up to be heavier Jessica Hamzelou
of these was associated with babies that were 112 grams lighter at birth than those beginning life in the other medium. “That’s a big difference, considering babies only weigh about 3 kilograms,” says Zandstra. Now the team have followed up on these babies at the age of 9, recording the height, weight and fat mass of 136 children, as well as blood pressure and heart rate. They were surprised to find that, while children conceived
SINCE the first “test tube” baby arrived 39 years ago, an estimated 6.5 million children have been born thanks to IVF and similar techniques. But we are only just starting to learn about the longterm health of people conceived using assisted reproduction techniques (ART), who may have a higher risk of obesity in later life. “Today, 1 in every 30 babies in Japan is conceived by ART,” says Tomoya Hasegawa of Tokyo Medical University. These babies “Given that heavier children are more likely to develop are usually healthy, but tend obesity later on, the to have a lower birth weight. results are worrying” Large studies that didn’t look at conception method have previously found that low birth using each type of culture weight is linked to adult obesity medium were around the same and diabetes. height, the BMI of the group that To investigate further, Heleen had been lighter at birth was an Zandstra of Maastricht Medical average of 0.9 lower than those Centre, the Netherlands, and who had been heavier babies. her team have been comparing “There was a difference in weight the effects of using two different of 2 kilograms,” says Zandstra. culture media to support the However, both groups were growth of early IVF embryos. heavier than average 9-year-olds Earlier they had found that one living in similar circumstances, 14 | NewScientist | 5 August 2017
DOES Siri struggle with your accent? Crowdsourced recordings of people talking could help iron out kinks in voice-recognition systems. Voice-controlled assistants like Siri and Alexa are trained on huge databases of recorded speech. But if these contain too few examples of a particular accent or dialect, the assistants will struggle to understand people who speak that way. So Mozilla – the foundation behind the Firefox web browser – is turning –What’s the weight?– to crowdsourcing to help create voice-recognition systems that avoid this problem. Through Project and had more abdominal fat. Common Voice, Mozilla aims to collect Given that heavier children are more likely to become obese later 10,000 hours of spoken English from people with a wide range of accents. in life, the results are worrying, “Historically, most collections of says Zandstra, who presented her findings at the annual meeting of speech and language tend to be more male and white and middle class,” says the European Society of Human Rachael Tatman at the University of Reproduction and Embryology Washington. And while companies like (ESHRE) in Switzerland in July. At the same meeting, Hasegawa Google and Amazon are getting better at balancing their data sets, especially presented his analysis of 1830 in terms of gender, voice-recognition children in Japan. His team found systems still have a harder time that babies conceived using ART understanding Americans who were heavier than naturally speak with certain accents, she says. conceived babies when they The accents and dialects that tend were born, but there was no to be under-represented in training real difference at 18 months. data are typically associated with However, the ART children were groups that are already marginalised heavier again at 6 years old. “The in US society. One consequence is results were surprising,” says that the software sometimes has Hasegawa. What this might mean for adult lower recognition rates for African health in unknown. Louise Brown, Americans, says Tatman. At the moment, a few firms hold the first person born via IVF, is most voice-recognition data sets, only 39 – we don’t know yet what says Kelly Davis, who leads the Mozilla will happen to IVF-conceived people in their 50s, says Zandstra. project. Once Mozilla has collected enough audio clips, it plans to release But people needn’t be wary of them to allow anyone to train their fertility treatment. “We know that own voice-recognition system. IVF is safe, because we have so To add your voice to the project, many children,” says Arianna visit the Common Voice website, D’Angelo, who coordinates the ESHRE group on safety in assisted record a clip of yourself reading a preselected sentence and add a reproduction. “We shouldn’t few demographic details. You can worry, but we should be doing more to monitor children. Studies also listen to other people’s recordings to ensure they are accurate. might flag up problems later in Matt Reynolds n life,” says D’Angelo. n
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY Donate your voice to help Siri understand
IVF babies grow up to be heavier Jessica Hamzelou
of these was associated with babies that were 112 grams lighter at birth than those beginning life in the other medium. “That’s a big difference, considering babies only weigh about 3 kilograms,” says Zandstra. Now the team have followed up on these babies at the age of 9, recording the height, weight and fat mass of 136 children, as well as blood pressure and heart rate. They were surprised to find that, while children conceived
SINCE the first “test tube” baby arrived 39 years ago, an estimated 6.5 million children have been born thanks to IVF and similar techniques. But we are only just starting to learn about the longterm health of people conceived using assisted reproduction techniques (ART), who may have a higher risk of obesity in later life. “Today, 1 in every 30 babies in Japan is conceived by ART,” says Tomoya Hasegawa of Tokyo Medical University. These babies “Given that heavier children are more likely to develop are usually healthy, but tend obesity later on, the to have a lower birth weight. results are worrying” Large studies that didn’t look at conception method have previously found that low birth using each type of culture weight is linked to adult obesity medium were around the same and diabetes. height, the BMI of the group that To investigate further, Heleen had been lighter at birth was an Zandstra of Maastricht Medical average of 0.9 lower than those Centre, the Netherlands, and who had been heavier babies. her team have been comparing “There was a difference in weight the effects of using two different of 2 kilograms,” says Zandstra. culture media to support the However, both groups were growth of early IVF embryos. heavier than average 9-year-olds Earlier they had found that one living in similar circumstances, 14 | NewScientist | 5 August 2017
DOES Siri struggle with your accent? Crowdsourced recordings of people talking could help iron out kinks in voice-recognition systems. Voice-controlled assistants like Siri and Alexa are trained on huge databases of recorded speech. But if these contain too few examples of a particular accent or dialect, the assistants will struggle to understand people who speak that way. So Mozilla – the foundation behind the Firefox web browser – is turning –What’s the weight?– to crowdsourcing to help create voice-recognition systems that avoid this problem. Through Project and had more abdominal fat. Common Voice, Mozilla aims to collect Given that heavier children are more likely to become obese later 10,000 hours of spoken English from people with a wide range of accents. in life, the results are worrying, “Historically, most collections of says Zandstra, who presented her findings at the annual meeting of speech and language tend to be more male and white and middle class,” says the European Society of Human Rachael Tatman at the University of Reproduction and Embryology Washington. And while companies like (ESHRE) in Switzerland in July. At the same meeting, Hasegawa Google and Amazon are getting better at balancing their data sets, especially presented his analysis of 1830 in terms of gender, voice-recognition children in Japan. His team found systems still have a harder time that babies conceived using ART understanding Americans who were heavier than naturally speak with certain accents, she says. conceived babies when they The accents and dialects that tend were born, but there was no to be under-represented in training real difference at 18 months. data are typically associated with However, the ART children were groups that are already marginalised heavier again at 6 years old. “The in US society. One consequence is results were surprising,” says that the software sometimes has Hasegawa. What this might mean for adult lower recognition rates for African health in unknown. Louise Brown, Americans, says Tatman. At the moment, a few firms hold the first person born via IVF, is most voice-recognition data sets, only 39 – we don’t know yet what says Kelly Davis, who leads the Mozilla will happen to IVF-conceived people in their 50s, says Zandstra. project. Once Mozilla has collected enough audio clips, it plans to release But people needn’t be wary of them to allow anyone to train their fertility treatment. “We know that own voice-recognition system. IVF is safe, because we have so To add your voice to the project, many children,” says Arianna visit the Common Voice website, D’Angelo, who coordinates the ESHRE group on safety in assisted record a clip of yourself reading a preselected sentence and add a reproduction. “We shouldn’t few demographic details. You can worry, but we should be doing more to monitor children. Studies also listen to other people’s recordings to ensure they are accurate. might flag up problems later in Matt Reynolds n life,” says D’Angelo. n