E! News Exclusive: And a Valentine’s baby is born!
Simon Cowell and girlfriend Lauren Silverman welcomed a son, their first child together, on Friday at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City after the brunette beauty went into labor early this morning, a source confirms to E! News.
The music mogul was by Silverman’s side when the couple’s bundle of joy arrived, skipping out on Britain’s Got Talent auditions in London and hopping on a private plane headed straight to NYC so he could be present for the birth of his son.
“He has had a plane on standby for a week,” a source said. Cowell’s rep was not immediately available for comment.
Lauren’s parents were also in the delivery room when the 36-year-old went into labor and her sister went straight to the hospital once she got wind of the baby news. The NYC socialite’s 8-year-old son, Adam, with ex-Andrew Silverman was not present, “as it’s President’s Day weekend and he had a pre-planned vacation with his father,” another source revealed.
So have the new parents picked out the little one’s moniker?!
Yes—but the atypically tight-lipped Cowell has yet to share the news with the public.
“Actually, we agreed on a name last night, me and Lauren,” Cowell told E! News during the X Factor finalists’ party in L.A. in November. “I’m not going to say what it is yet, but I’m happy.”
Asked if the name will have any family ties, Cowell cheekily replied, “You’ll have to wait and see!”
In the October issue of Parade magazine, the 54-year-old music exec opened up about his first foray into fatherhood, admitting he’s “not brilliant with babies” while saying that he thinks he’ll be “a good dad in terms of advice.”
“I never know what to do,” he confessed when it comes to newborns. “But [once he's older]…then I’ll get to do all the things I want to do, like go to Disneyland or Universal Studios, teach him how to drive—I love all that.”
And turns out, Cowell, who is never one to bite his tongue, is really just a big kid himself. “I love animals and cartoons,” he told the mag. “I pretty much like everything I liked as a kid—the same foods and TV programs. I still watch Scooby-Doo. I never grew up.”
News of Silverman’s pregnancy broke at the end of July. At the time, Lauren was still married to her now ex-husband Andrew Silverman, a former friend of Cowell’s.
“I am committed to sorting things out with Andrew as amicably as possible to ensure the well-being of our son,” Lauren said in a statement one day after her pregnancy made headlines. “I would hope for some space and privacy in order to work through this.”
The two finalized their divorce in December and agreed to joint custody over their son Adam.
Cowell later broke his silence on the baby drama in late August, telling BBC, “I’m proud to be a dad. It’s something I haven’t thought of before, and then, now I know I feel good about it. And she’s [Silverman] a very special girl.”
Congrats, you two! And happy Valentine’s Day!
Simon Cowell is a Dad! Lauren Silverman Gives Birth to a Baby Boy also appeard on Celebrity Magnet.
Ronan, a California sea lion at Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz, became an Internet sensation last year when UCSC scientists published a paper describing her ability to bob her head in time with rhythmic sounds and music in a variety of tempos (see video).
Ronan is the first non-human mammal convincingly shown to be able to keep the beat. Her range and versatility in matching different beats is impressive, according to Peter Cook, who began working with Ronan as a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz. Cook, now a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University, will present his research on Ronan's beat-keeping ability at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago on February 15, in a session devoted to "Rhythmic entrainment in non-human animals."
Cook noted that Ronan can move in time to a wide range of rhythmic auditory stimuli with different tempos, including music. "Along with other recent findings, this suggests that the neural mechanisms underpinning flexible beat keeping may be much more widely distributed across the animal kingdom than previously thought," Cook said.
Aside from humans, rhythmic entrainment had previously been seen only in parrots and other birds with a talent for vocal mimicry. This led some researchers to theorize that beat keeping requires a capacity for complex vocal learning. "The idea was that beat keeping is a fortuitous side effect of adaptations for vocal mimicry, which requires matching incoming auditory signals with outgoing vocal behavior," Cook said.
But sea lions are not known to do vocal mimicry and have limited flexibility in the sounds they make. "Ronan's success poses a real problem for the theory that vocal mimicry is a necessary precondition for rhythmic entrainment," Cook said.
Born in the wild in 2008, Ronan was rescued by the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito in 2009 after she was found on Highway 1 in San Luis Obispo County. It was her third stranding incident, and she didn't seem to be making it in the wild. She came to Long Marine Lab in January 2010 and joined the Pinniped Cognition and Sensory Systems Laboratory directed by one of Cook's advisers at UCSC, animal behaviorist Colleen Reichmuth.
The idea to use Ronan in a study of beat keeping was spurred partly by her facility for rapid learning. "From my first interactions with her, it was clear that Ronan was a particularly bright sea lion," Cook said. "Everybody in the animal cognition world, including me, was intrigued by the dancing bird studies, but I remember thinking that no one had attempted a strong effort to show beat keeping in an animal other than a parrot. I figured training a mammal to move in time to music would be hard, but Ronan seemed like an ideal subject."
Cook and research technician Andrew Rouse trained Ronan to bob her head in time with rhythmic sounds, then showed that she could transfer this skill to tempos and music she hadn't heard before. "Given her success at keeping the beat with new rhythm tracks and songs following her initial training, it's possible that keeping the beat isn't that hard for her," Cook said. "She just had to learn what it was we wanted her to do."
Scientists once thought that the underpinnings of musical ability were unique to humans. But human musical ability may in fact have foundations that are shared with animals, according to Cook. "People have assumed that animals lack these abilities. In some cases, people just hadn't looked," he said. "The comparative study of rhythm has undergone a renaissance in recent years, with new methods being attempted and new species tested. It's exciting to be meeting with top scientists in the field at this crucial juncture."
Contacts and sources:
This research was supported by an award from the Packard Endowment for Ocean Sciences at UCSC and a National Science Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship to Peter Cook. The Pinniped Lab works with Ronan under National Marine Fisheries Service permit #14535.
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