Science News

MANIFESTO

And here I thought it was just me.

A group of scientists has claimed that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful ...

Based on a series of studies of physical attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in humans, researchers found the beautiful women have more children than their not so good-looking counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, when they grow up, also tend to be pretty and so repeat the pattern, according to a study released last week.

I ascribed my belief that females were looking more attractive to my advancing age. I'm glad that I can rely on scientific research to corroborate my—ahem—somewhat goatish observation.

It goes without saying that "Men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors, the study added."

And NPR is reporting that

if you eat a tomato without adding a little fat—say a drizzle of olive oil—your body is unlikely to absorb all [its] nutrients ...

Researchers [at Iowa State] put IV lines into [experimental subjects'] veins and drew blood samples before and after they'd eaten salads in order to get precise measurements of the absorption of nutrients.

"The salads all tasted the same to me," says [a subject in the study]. But when researchers went back and analyzed the blood samples they realized that people who had eaten fat-free or low-fat dressings didn't absorb the beneficial carotenoids from the salad. Only when they had eaten the oil-based dressing did they get the nutrients.

This is a little disheartening to those of us who try to watch our calorie intake under any circumstances.