Even if a woman faced no cultural pressure over the sex of her child, giving birth to a boy is more likely to reduce her quality of life than having a girl.

Researchers from France’s Nance University claim that mothers of newly-born boys were more susceptible to post-natal depression than those of baby girls.

Nine per cent of the 181 women examined during the study suffered from severe post-natal depression (PND), four to eight weeks after delivery.

The study also suggested that a mother’s attitude towards her son may be shaped by her relationship with present and past male figures.

“Depressed mothers who are often in difficult marital relationships might respond more negatively to their sons,” Daily Mail quoted lead researcher Claude de Tychey as saying.

“PND is very common and poses a major public health problem, especially if it is not diagnosed and treated,” said de Tychey.

Gender plays a significant role in reduced quality of life as well as an increased chance of severe PND, the study concluded.

Music made easy on net

You like a certain song and want to hear other tracks like it, but don’t know how to find them? Well, don’t fret.

Ending the needle-in-a-haystack problem of searching for music on the internet is a new audio software.

A team of international researchers developed the groundbreaking audio software that could help music lovers jump to the hidden beats the new Mpeg-7 specification will automatically extract and classify audio signals.

According to the researchers, such metadata, as it is called, can be used to tag audio files so they can be more accurately picked up by search engines equipped to handle this kind of information.

Bollworm gets resistance

In the past decade, dozens of varieties of corn, soybeans and cotton have been planted that were genetically modified to produce a bacterial protein, called Bt, that kills insect pests. Now a strain of bollworm, an insect that voraciously attacks cotton plants, has evolved, resistant to the genetically modified plants that are supposed to kill it.

The newly resistant bollworms arose in a dozen crop fields in Mississippi and Arkansas between 2003 and 2006.

They are the first pests known to have become fully resistant to the modified plants.

The issue of resistance to genetically modified plants has long been contentious because organic farmers also use the Bt toxin to control pests.

'Smart' traffic lights

Smart traffic lights that wirelessly keep track of vehicles may help reduce the time that drivers normally spend waiting at intersections during rush hours by over 28 per cent, say researchers.

A research team recorded peak traffic flow at a major junction in Bucharest, Romania. Based on the data thus gathered, a working model of traffic flow was created at Rutgers University in New Jersey, US.

The traffic lights in the model were fed the position and speed of all vehicles on nearby roads. They were also programmed to calculate how to phase colour changes in order to optimise traffic flow.

The model showed that in addition to reducing intersection waiting times, such traffic lights could also help reduce CO2 emissions by 6.5 per cent.

Liviu Iftode from Rutgers University believes that journey times, fuel consumption and emissions might improve further if traffic lights were enabled to transmit information back to vehicles.

If a set of lights told drivers when they were about to change, “drivers could adapt their speed accordingly to avoid useless accelerations or react faster on green”, New Scientist quoted the research team as writing in their report.