Forget meat and moons. To give birth to a boy you need a live-in man

The old wives' tale has it that women who want to have sons should eat meat and salty food or make love standing up during a quarter moon. But the real answer for women could be a lot simpler than that: just make sure you are living with your partner. An American doctor has found that women are more likely to give birth to boys if they are married or living with a man at the time of conception. The results are the first evidence that living arrangements can affect the human sex ratio at birth, and could explain the fall in the number of boy babies in some developed countries in the past 30 years.