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Scientific

Baby Swimmers are Better at Everything

Attention godparents: Forget Savings Bonds — you should sign the kid up for swim lessons. Science says so, in particular, a new study conducted in Iceland, which showed that babies who learn to swim before they're seven months old wind up better at pretty much everything, or at least everything involving balance and coordination. When the researchers compared five-year-olds who'd learned to swim as babies with five-year-olds-who hadn't, the swimmers walloped the other kids in everything from walking on tiptoes and skipping rope to rolling a ball into a goal and catching a beanbag. So sign them up already — heaven forbid they reach age five lacking beanbag catching skills!