Infants whose mothers had been small-for-gestational-age were 4.7 times more likely to be small at birth themselves.

Having a father who was a small infant more than triples the chances that a baby will also be born small. Furthermore, if this is the case for the mother as well, the likelihood is over 16 times greater, according to study findings reported by French and US researchers.
According to Reuters, the study results, which found the influence of both parents to be roughly equal and multiplicative, strongly suggest a genetic reason for the tendency of "small-for-gestational-age" babies to run in families.
It also raises the question of whether such a tendency should be considered a medical problem or a normal variation in growth, Dr. Delphine Jacquet of Hopital Robert Debre in Paris and colleagues said.
There has been extensive research on the effect of a mother's birth size on infant birth weight, but little information exists on whether the father's birth size has any bearing on the matter, Jacquet and her team point out.
They investigated the influence of paternal and maternal size at birth on a group of 256 infants. They found infants whose mothers had been small-for-gestational-age were 4.7 times more likely to be small at birth themselves.
The risk was increased 3.5-fold with a small-for-gestational-age father.
Having both parents who were small babies multiplied an infant's risk by 16.3.
The investigators found no significant interaction between the parents' size at birth and pregnancy factors known to increase the risk of having a small-for-gestational-age baby, such as the mother smoking or pregnancy-related high blood pressure.
It's now necessary to look further into families that tend to have small babies "to investigate whether it results or not from a normal variation in fetal growth," the researchers conclude.

The corpses of three "dead" galaxies--which to the surprise of astronomers stopped forming stars long ago - have been identified by the Spitzer Space Telescope during a survey of the distant, early universe, New Scientist said.
The find bolsters a theory that colossal black holes can starve galaxies of the gas needed to create new stars.
An infrared telescope on Earth first found the galaxies two years ago. They appeared red--a sign that most of their stars were old. But our planet's own heat clouded the observations, making it impossible to rule out whether dust was obscuring the light from younger stars.
Now, using NASA's Spitzer telescope, which trails behind the Earth in the coldness of space, astronomers have determined the galaxies are red because they are dead--no stars appear to have formed for 1.5 billion years. That arrested development happened early in the history of the universe--their distance means Spitzer is viewing them just 2 billion to 3 billion years after the big bang.
"We think galaxies form over tens of billions of years," says lead researcher Ivo LabbŽ, an astronomer at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, US. For example, he notes the 13 billion-year-old Milky Way is still forming stars today. "Surprisingly, we found galaxies that are fully formed and dead when the universe was only one-fifth its present age."

Scientists in Germany have created a Bose-Einstein condensate from a gas of chromium atoms for the first time. Unlike all the other elements that have previously been condensed, chromium has a very large magnetic dipole moment, PhysicsWeb.org reported.
Tilman Pfau and colleagues at the University of Stuttgart say that their novel condensate will therefore allow scientists to study dipolar interactions in quantum degenerate gases, and might also find practical applications in nanolithography.
Bose-Einstein condensation occurs when a gas of atoms is cooled to such ultra-low temperatures that the de Broglie wavelength of the atoms becomes comparable to the distance between them. As a result, the atoms collapse into the same quantum ground state.
The first Bose condensate was created ten years ago with rubidium atoms, and researchers have since created condensates from eight other elements, including the alkali atoms sodium, lithium, potassium and caesium.
The properties of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) depend on the interactions between its individual atoms. The strength of the magnetic dipole-dipole interaction in BECs made from alkali atoms is tiny, but the corresponding value for chromium--which is a transition metal--is 36 times higher.
This is because chromium has a unique electronic structure: the valance shell of its ground state contains six electrons whose spins are aligned parallel to one another.
As a result, chromium has a total electronic spin number of three and a very large magnetic moment of 6 Bohr magnetons.
Physicists will therefore be able to investigate not only short-range dipole-dipole interactions--using a so-called Fesbach resonance--but long-range interactions too.

Pluto is a difficult planet to find, but with a good-sized backyard telescope, it is possible. The challenge highlights the difficulty professional astronomers faced many decades ago when trying to find the elusive world in the first place, SPACE.com said.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the discovery of Pluto. Clyde Tombaugh
discovered the ninth planet in the solar system on the afternoon of Feb. 18, 1930 while he meticulously examined a pair of photographic plates he had exposed in January at Lowell Observatory. The official announcement was made on March 13.
Tombaugh exposed the photographs on the nights of Jan. 23 and 29 using the Observatory's 13-inch Abbott Lawrence Lowell Telescope. Then, as part of the carefully planned and executed planet search, Tombaugh "blinked" the two exposures using a machine called a comparator, looking for motion of objects captured on film.
This most renegade of all the planets has been an odd, mysterious world ever since. It will remain so for at least another decade, until the yet to be launched New Horizons Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission arrives at Pluto, the last planet in our solar system to be visited by a spacecraft.
New Horizons is scheduled to launch in January 2006, and is due to swing past Jupiter for a gravity boost and scientific studies in February 2007, before finally reaching Pluto and its moon, Charon, in July 2015.