Geomagnetic Field And The Sex Of A Child

Researchers from St. Petersburg have ascertained that formation of a child’s sex depends, among other things, on the geomagnetic field status at the time of conception.

Who will be born – a boy or a girl? The answer to this question that worries all parents is determined by a lot of conditions, including external ones. The scientists of the Central Scientific-Research Institute of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Ministry of Health Care of the Russian Federation (St. Petersburg) and the St. Petersburg branch of Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radiopropagation, Russian Academy of Sciences (IZMIRAN), have ascertained that the sex of a child depends, among other things, on the level of disturbances of geomagnetic field status at the time of conception.

The researchers have retrospectively analyzed the connection between more than 600 randomly chosen supposed conception instants and the geomagnetic field status within the 1914-1979 timeframe. These instants were mainly inhabitants of St. Petersburg and the St. Petersburg Region. As the exact date of conception is normally unknown, therefore the researchers subtracted 280 days from the date of the child’s birth and determined the geomagnetic field status on that day and on the dates of nearest extremums before and after the supposed conception.

Regardless of the fact that the frequency of the boys’ and girls’ births was on the whole approximately equal within the period under review, some interesting regularities were still discovered. It has turned out that in case of lowering intensity of magnetic field oscillation at the point of conception, boys were borns more frequently (approximately 16 boys per 10 girls), but in case of increasing its intensity – girls were born more frequently (approximately 15 girls per 10 boys).

Can science explain this regularity? The researchers suppose that the discovered dependence is connected with the roles which are assigned by evolution to the male and female sex: the female role is stabilization, the male one – lability, search. That means that in unfavorable environment (in this case – increased level of magnetic field distortion) preconditions for girls’ birth occur in gametal cells, and vice versa, in favorable environment (decreased level of distortion), boys are born.

Such preconditions appearance mechanism is yet unclear. However, the researchers assume that it is connected with the presence of free-radical particles in the cells, fluctuations in ultra-low magnetic fields intensity being able to influence these particles’ recombination processes, and also to affect decay of some types of blood leucocytes, for example, neutrophils, which significantly decrease in number during disturbed geomagnetic activity periods.