WEIRD STUFF Woman gives birth at 54 using 22-year-old embryo

Woman gives birth at 54 using 22-year-old embryo

Out of their darkest moment, a Greek couple managed to make a new start with a baby born this week. Doing so meant using one of Cristina Rapti-Tzelepi’s decades-old embryos and racing to beat a government deadline.

Just months after their 21-year-old son died in a road crash in October, Rapti-Tzelepi, now 54, and her husband made the decision to pursue another attempt using an embryo frozen for 22 years.

Rapti-Tzelepi was running up against the Greek government’s 54-year age limit for women to complete in vitro fertilisation procedures and secure approval from a national authority. When she started, time was already running short.

“I only had a 2½-month window,” she said. “It was stressful but, with inner strength and our doctor and his whole team by our side, we got through every obstacle.”

She gave birth on Wednesday in the Greek capital, Athens, to a girl who weighed in at 3.49 kilograms (7 pounds, 11 ounces). In a hospital room brightened with pink balloons and flowers on Friday, the new parents were overcome with emotion.

“We decided to give life a second chance, to make a new start, bring new life into our home, and keep our family’s story going,” Rapti-Tzelepi said, sitting on her bed in black pajamas. “My wish for her is to grow up healthy and happy, full of joy like our first child, who filled our home with laughter.”

The child was born using the woman’s embryo that had been frozen more than 22 years ago, an unusually long time for a frozen fertilized egg to be used to produce a pregnancy.

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Vests help penguins heal

(AP): Researchers in Chile have designed an unlikely new garment for injured penguins — snug red vests threaded with copper and zinc that they hope will help the aquatic birds heal faster.

“For years, vests with microfibers containing elements like copper and zinc have been tested on pets, particularly dogs and cats, and have greatly helped in the recovery of skin wounds,” said Ignacio Idalsoaga, director of the Buin Zoo, a wildlife park on the outskirts of Chile’s capital, Santiago, where researchers took measurements of penguins to develop the first bodysuits.

“We began to wonder — why can’t this be used on penguins?” he told The Associated Press.

The experiment comes as Chile’s Humboldt penguin population declines sharply. Chilean and international researchers surveying the country’s major breeding colonies in 2024 and 2025 found a 63 per cent drop in active nests compared to the same sites three years earlier. The birds face mounting threats, including entanglement in fishing nets, plastic pollution, disease outbreaks and competition with fisheries for food.

Now Humboldt penguins also find themselves in the cross hairs of one of the world’s most disruptive weather patterns, El Niño, which brings unusually warm waters to parts of the Pacific Ocean, making the cold-water fish that they rely on harder to find. Hunger forces penguin parents to travel farther afield for food and leave their nests behind.

“Especially now, with all the problems caused by El Niño, we’re likely to see many abandoned chicks in the coming weeks, with injuries they suffer in the environment,” Idalsoaga said.

Wildlife clinics across Chile receive distressed penguins stranded along Chile’s coast, some cut by fishing nets or boat propellers, others weakened by a lack of food, said Tomás Pino, a veterinarian who runs Conservación Humboldt, a non-profit organisation that rehabilitates injured marine animals in the country’s north.