Source: The Mercury, 22 July, 1999, p.2 Source: The Mercury, 22 July, 1999, p.2
IT'S not how you do it or even how often. It all comes down to the weather. According to new scientific research, the sex of your child can be determined simply by the temperature during conception. Quite simply, sex during unusually hot spells will produce boys while more committed partners can expect to conceive a girl during a cold spell. The research, published in New Scientist magazine, revealed that there are distinct seasonal variations in the ratio of boys to girls. They have even gone as far as to suggest that climate change-the slow warming of the planet's atmosphere - may further increase the number of boys conceived in the future. German biologists, studying data from 1946 to 1995 and making correlations between sex ratios and data from the US National Climate Data Centre records, showed that hot summers or unseasonably high temperatures yielded more boys while the reverse was true of cold spells. It is now thought that hot spells may damage sperm carrying an X chromosome more than sperm carrying the Y chromosome - which are also faster - hence more boys are conceived. However, it doesn't mean people from warmer climates have more boys because people adapt to the general climate in which they live. It is extremes of temperature impacting on the testes, that are responsible for genetic determination.
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