Women's magazines influence decisions to have a more 'natural' childbirth or not, with most stories in favor of epidural or potentially a Cesarean section.

Scholars writing in Women&Health decided to assess the effect of communicating the benefits of more natural birth. Kate Young, lead author from Monash University's School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, said popular media was biased towards things like epidurals even in low risk births, though the authors say it leads to preventable maternal and infant morbidity.

"We wanted to look at how women's decisions might be influenced by communicating the alternative benefits of non-medicalized birth," Young said.

Male job applicants are perceived to have high levels of leadership potential and are rated as a better employment prospect than a female applicant with proven leadership track record, according to a presentation at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference in Liverpool which discussed how 98 participants (39 women) participated in an online hiring simulation.

Each participant was shown four potential applicants for a managerial role with roughly the same age. The applications differed by varying the applicant's gender and assessments of leadership potential and leadership achievement. Participants evaluated each applicant for how successful they thought each would be in their career and which had the most impressive CV.

A previously unknown dual mechanism slows peat decay and may help reduce carbon dioxide emissions from peatlands during times of drought, according to a new study. The naturally occurring mechanism was discovered in 5,000-year-old pocosin bogs in coastal North Carolina. Preliminary field experiments suggest it may occur in, or be exportable to, peatlands in other regions as well. 

It took human culture millennia to arrive at a mathematical formulation of non-Euclidean spaces - but that was not because of a limitation of our brains. 

Instead, it's likely that even the brains of rodents get there very naturally every day.

A new study examined the relationship between mandatory nap times in daycare and children's night-time sleep duration concurrently and then 12 months later and found children who were exposed to more than 60 minutes mandatory sleep at childcare slept worse at night which continued when they started school.

A sample of 168 children, aged between 50-72 months of which 55 percent were male, was observed during the study. A year later the children were observed in their first year of school.

In a new paper, researchers address the "uncomfortably close" occurrence of the Chicxulub impact in the Yucatán and the most voluminous phase of the Deccan Traps flood basalt eruptions in India.  Specifically, the researchers argue that the impact likely triggered most of the immense eruptions of lava in India -- that it was not a coincidence but was a cause-and-effect relationship.