A short list of hyperbolic parenting, safety, and science news to freak you out over the weekend:

• If pollution caused premature births, it would be enough. If preeclampsia occurred more frequently in Long Beach, it would be enough. But holy crap, the actual headline is, "L.A. Traffic Causing Premature Births: Study" [discovery.com via dt reader dt]


• That's what she said: That tree that Manhattan mom's telling her kid to pee behind is just too small! [nyt blogs]


• According to a new Australian study, "Daily sex (or ejaculating daily) for seven days improves men's sperm quality by reducing the amount of DNA damage." Whether this is enough improvement to increase pregnancy rates or to help fertility treatments is not known; obviously, much more research is needed. sciencedaily]


• A U of Minn study [?] paper [?] says that delaying having kids improves their relative position in the gene pool. But wait. In March, a different study found kids born to older dads do worse on cognitive tests. So does that mean that the dumber kids of older parents are dragging the average down even more? [sciencedaily]


• Because of communistical health systems in some countries like England, fertility tourism is the new hotness in Europe. [sciencedaily]


• And in completely related news, in 2007, 20% of British survey respondents admitted to having sex with a new partner while traveling abroad. Half of all those new hookups were with fellow expat Brits. [sciencedaily]