

Having Frequent Diarrhea as a Child Shapes Your Adult Mate Choice - lkrubner
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/2014/08/12/this-queasy-love-how-having-frequent-diarrhea-as-a-child-shapes-your-adult-mate-choice/

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anigbrowl
This is one of the worst-written articles I have ever encountered - I feel
like I'm trapped in an elevator with an annoying 12 year old. Scientific
American continues its long sad decline into tabloid dreck.

What actually matters:

 _The hypothesis for de Barra and his colleagues’ study was therefore pretty
clear-cut. Adults who are sickly in childhood grow up to prefer opposite-sex
faces displaying exaggerated sex-typical features: testosterone-forged faces
in men, that’s to say, and ultra-feminine faces in women._

They used a longitudinal study from Bangladesh where diarrhea is closely
monitored because it's a leading cause of mortality in children as the source
data and found that people who suffered badly from illness as children
developed a strong preference for hypertypical gender features compared to a
control group. Diarrhea was selected as a proxy for childhood malaise because
of its commonality.

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lotsofmangos
I thought the part informing us that men cannot be inseminated was
particularly educational and reflects the high levels of experimental research
being conducted on behalf of this fine publication.

Though it does perhaps lack a certain rigor, as surely there is nothing to
stop men being inseminated. It is merely that they are unable to then become
pregnant after insemination, as other visitors to this planet can surely
attest from their long running experiments on unlucky country folk. Which will
no doubt be the subject of next months exciting issue.

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anigbrowl
Exactly. I have a chip on my shoulder abot this because up to about 15 years
ago SA used to be incredibly good- a solid digest of non-specialist science
education for about $100 year. I would happily have paid more, I considered
the time and dollar cost involved well worth it for the intellectual exercise
it provided.

Then they went downmarket in search of a circulation boost and it's been in
decline ever since. I stopped reading the month I noticed that I had consumed
the new issue in 3 hours rather than the usual 6, and took out an issue from a
few months earlier to compare - turned out that they increased the font size
and line spacing to produce a magazine with the same number of pages and the
same price but about 30% less text. I hope an asteroid lands on their offices
and reduces them to a smoking crater in the ground.

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lotsofmangos
I stopped bothering with it ever since they cut the amateur scientist column.

I remember they used to cover stuff like sonoluminescence in there -
[http://techmind.org/sl/](http://techmind.org/sl/) \- it was awesome.

Let me know if you ever want help working out candidate asteroids and how to
achieve the required trajectory adjustments.

just found this though :) -
[https://archive.org/details/TheAmateurScientist](https://archive.org/details/TheAmateurScientist)

~~~
anigbrowl
Good finds! Feel free to drop me a line via (same name) at gmail - nice to
find a fellow spirit.

