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Holiday Cheer Leads to Birth-Rate Spike¹

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 in other predominantly Christian² countries have been having some very merry Christmases indeed. That’s according to a study in the journal Scientific Reports.

在美国有一个浪漫的假期。九个月过去后，婴儿出生人数急剧上升。那这个节日是情人节吗? 不是的!看来，美国和其他主要基督教国家的人们，确实有非常愉快的圣诞节。这是根据科学报告杂志的一项研究结果得出的结论。

Scientists have long wondered why, in Western countries, birth rates spike in September and early October.“The prevailing³ hypothesis for this phenomenon postulates⁴ that there is a biological adaptation to the solar cycles.”Luis Rocha 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.

科学家们一直很想知道，为什么在西方国家，9月和10月初出生率出现了上涨趋势。“这种现象的普遍假设，对太阳周期有生物适应性。”印第安纳大学的Luis Rocha共同领导了这项研究。他注意到，这个婴儿是冬至前九个月受孕的。而当白天越来越短，夜晚越来越长的时候，人类似乎转而以生育为目的。

“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 previously⁵ observed that communities associated with different religions have birth peaks at different times of the year.”

“然而，这个假设是建立在几乎局限于北半球国家和文化上的基督教国家的观察基础之上的。”一些数据显示，可能有某种文化正在发生。“例如先前观察到在以色列，不同的社区宗教，在一年的不同时间出生高峰也不同”。

To try to separate the cultural from the biological, Rocha teamed up with Joana Gon?alves-Sá of the Gulbenkian Institute of Science in Portugal. Together, they combed through data on a planetary level…comparing countries in the Northern and Southern hemispheres…and countries with predominantly different cultures, in this case Christian and Muslim.

为了将文化与生物学分离，Rocha与葡萄牙古尔本基因科学研究所的JoanaGon?alves-Sá合作。他们一起梳理了全球范围内的数据......比较了南北半球的国家......和文化差异较大的国家，这些国家是基督徒和穆斯林居住的地方。

But they didn’t look at when babies are born. They looked to see when, during the year, people around the world Google the word “sex.” Joana Sá:“What we found, first, was that Google…searches for sex on google…are a very good proxy⁶ for sexual appetite and sexual, offline sexual interest. And when we looked at close to 130 countries around the world, what we saw is that each country has a particular signature with peaks and valleys of interest in sexual content.”Sá says that those patterns were most similar for countries that shared a similar culture…

但是，他们没有观察婴儿何时出生这一问题。他们希望看到在这一年中，世界各地的人们都会用谷歌的词语“性”。JoanaSá“我们发现，首先是在谷歌上搜索性......是一个非常好的性欲代用品-性-离线性兴趣。而当我们看到全世界近130个国家的时候，我们所看到的是每个国家都有一个特殊的签名，对性内容有兴趣的高峰和低谷时出现的特殊签名。Sá说，那些共享相似文化的国家，这些模式是最相似的。

“This means that if you live in a culturally Christian country, whether you live in the Northern Hemisphere or the Southern Hemisphere, you are more likely to have an increase in sexual appetite around Christmas. But if you live in a Muslim country, you are much more likely to conceive around Eid-al-Fitr, than at a different, at another time of the year.”

“这意味着，如果你生活在一个基督教文化的国家，无论你居住在北半球还是南半球，你都可能在圣诞节前后提高性欲。但是，如果你生活在一个穆斯林国家，那么在一年中的另一个时间，你更可能在开斋节前后怀孕，而不是在另一个时候怀孕。”

Now, if you’re still wondering what’s so special about these holidays…Rocha says interest in sex coincides with a particular mood…a finding he made with the help of Twitter.“We collected close to 50 billion tweets and showed that, independently of the geography and independently of the particular culture, when we observed the surge of interest in sex we also observe the appearance of a particular mood that can best be classified as calm and happy and de-stressed mood that is maximized around Christmas for Christian countries and maximized at the end of Ramadan with Eid for Muslim countries.”All of which makes the following year’s holiday family gathering⁷ just a little bit bigger.

现在，如果你仍然想知道这些假期有什么特别之处的话...... Rocha说，对性的兴趣恰好与某种特定的情绪相吻合...他在Twitter的帮助下发现了一个结果：“我们基于地理位置和独立于特定文化的视角，收集了近500亿条推文，当我们观察到对性的兴趣激增时，我们也观察到一种特定的情绪的外现，可以最好地分类——为基督教国家在圣诞节前后的平静、快乐和减压情绪， 在斋月结束时是穆斯林国家的开斋节。”所有这些都使得下一年的家庭聚会会略微大一些。