【#Tech24H】Almost everyone has experienced it: seeing someone yawn triggers an uncontrollable urge to yawn ourselves, we call this “contagious yawning”. Recently, scientists at the University of Parma in Italy discovered that contagious yawning actually begins before a person is even born. They recruited 38 healthy pregnant women between 28 and 32 weeks of gestation for an experiment. The scientists found that the probability of fetal yawning increased significantly only when the mother yawned. If the mother merely opened and closed her mouth or maintained a blank expression, the fetus did not show a similar response. Moreover, fetal yawns did not occur immediately; they typically appeared about 90 seconds after the mother’s yawn, a time interval very close to the reaction time for contagious yawning among adults. [ By Zhang Liyan | Tang Ruohan ]