Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

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This is Scientific Americans' 60-second science. I'm Karen Hopkin.

In the United States, there's a holiday that goes hand in hand with romance,

so much so that nine months later, there's a spike in the number of babies born.

Valentine's Day? Wrong.

It seems that people in the U.S. and other predominantly Christian countries have been having

some very merry Christmases indeed. That's according to a study in the journal Scientific Reports.

Scientists have long wondered why, in Western countries, birth rates spike in September and early

October. The prevailing hypothesis for this phenomenon postulates that there is a

biological adaptation to the solar cycles. Luis Russia of Indiana University co-led the study. He notes

that nine months before this baby boomlet is the winter solstice. And when the days grow shorter

and the night grows long, well, humans

seem to turn to procreation for recreation. However, this hypothesis was built on observations

pretty much restricted to northern hemisphere countries and also culturally Christian countries.

And some data suggested there might be something cultural going on. So for instance,

in Israel, it was previously observed that communities associated with different religions have

birth peaks at different times of the year. To try to separate the cultural from the biological,

Russia teamed up with Joanna Gonsalvza of the Gulbenkian Institute of Science

...