And the Hello, welcome to the naked scientists with me Chris Smith and also with Cat Arnie.

This week why pregnant women might be at a higher risk of car crashes, a new astronomy

system that can actually see planets orbiting distant stars, and why octopuses don't tie

themselves up in knots.

Plus, we look at how bacteria and fungi can help us to clean up our act by removing toxic

chemicals from soils, attacking oil spills and even cleaning up mining waste.

The Naked Scientists Podcast is powered by UKfast. pregnancy is arguably one of the most exciting but potentially also one of the most dangerous

times in a woman's life but it's not just the threat to her health that comes from the physical demands of having a baby, because it turns out that women in the middle parts of their pregnancies, these are the so-called second trimesters, are much more likely to be involved in life-threatening car accidents.

In fact, according to a new study looking at over half a million Canadian women, the risk of ending

up seriously injured in hospital following a collision can be over 40%

higher during pregnancy.

Don Redlemyer from the University of Toronto led the study.

Pregnant women often ask me the strangest questions about scuba diving, roller coasters,

airline flights and even Gresley Bear attacks.

They almost never ask me about the everyday risks. I was never once asked

about road safety despite it being a much larger risk.

So you were interested in addressing the fact that there is very, very

little data actually looking at whether being pregnant does affect your road safety?

Absolutely right. Standard prenatal care guidelines are virtually silent about the importance of road safety and that includes guidelines in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and Canada and we thought that that was sort of a major omission

in the existing medical literature.

So what did you do to try to fill that gap? How did you approach that?

We identified every woman in Ontario, Canada who gave birth during a five-year span.

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