21st May: Twins

Gemini zodiac sign begins today. How much do you know about twins? 

1. About one in 30 babies born in the USA, one in 63 in the UK and one in 80 in Australia is a twin. The number may be even larger, since scientists believe as many as one in eight pregnancies start out as twins, but in many cases, only one foetus survives. One may die before the mother has any scans and is reabsorbed into her body or that of the other twin so many of us could be twins and not even our mothers ever knew.
2. A woman is more likely to have twins if: she is Yoruba - the diet the Yoruba people eat contributes, it's thought, to stimulate more eggs to be released; lives in Linha São Pedro, a tiny Brazilian settlement in which as many as one in five pregnancies has resulted in twins; lives in the US states of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey; is tall; eats a lot of dairy products or has twins in the family. Women who live in New Mexico or Hawaii, or who are vegans are less likely to have twins.
3. How many types of twin are there? Most people can only think of two or three - identical twins, non-identical (fraternal) twins and co-joined (Siamese) twins. There are several more: half-identical, mirror image twins, mixed chromosome twins, superfecundation, and superfetation. Though the latter types are rare.
4. Even if twins are truly identical there are ways to tell them apart. They'll have different fingerprints, as fingerprints aren't genetically determined. Nor are belly buttons, so a quicker way to distinguish identical twins from each other would be by looking at their navels.
5. Identical twins share 99.99% of their DNA - so there are tiny, tiny differences, but not enough to figure out which twin committed a crime. For example, in 2009, $6.8 million worth of jewellery was stolen in Berlin. Police extracted DNA from the scene and tracked down two people, Hassan and Abbas O., who were identical twins. They both said the other one did it. Because police couldn’t identify which of the twins the DNA belonged to, both ended up walking free.
6. If two sets of identical twins marry each other, their children are genetically all full siblings, although society would see them as cousins.
7. Twins are much more likely to be left handed than the general population. 22% of twins are left handed, compared to 10% of singletons.
8. 40% of twins make up their own languages. This is possibly because they are as likely to model each other when learning to talk as they are adults or older siblings. It can happen, too, when two babies who are not twins are around each other a lot and develop at a similar rate. The phenomenon is called “idioglossia” and most twins grow out of it, although there was a case in the 1980s of twin girls, known as "The Silent Twins" only ever spoke to each other in their own private language.
9. Twins who are separated at birth and never know each other often live eerily similar lives - they have the same type of pets and give them the same names; drive the same type of car, smoke the same brand of cigarettes and even marry spouses with the same names.
10. Famous twins include Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Ross and Norris McWhirter (Guinness World Records), Robin and Maurice Gibb (Bee Gees), Matt and Luke Goss (Bros), Ronnie and Reggie Kray, Angela and Maria Eagle (British MPs), Carol and Mark Thatcher, and John and Edward Grimes (Jedward). Some famous people are twins but their twin isn't as famous. These include Kiefer Sutherland, Scarlett Johansson, Kofi Annan, Keith Chegwin, Henry Cooper, Vin Diesel, Duffy, Jerry Hall, Linda Hamilton, Ashton Kutcher, Alanis Morissette, Olly Murs and Jason Orange. Liberace, Philip K. Dick and Elvis Presley all had twins who died soon after birth. Twins in fiction include Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, Cersei and Jaime Lannister, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, and Jade and Gloria, characters in my own novel, From A Jack to A King.

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