Study finds it is 'barely possible to identify a beautiful scrotum'

Aesthetic scrotums

Surprises abound in “The scrotum: A comparison of men’s and women’s aesthetic assessments”, a study done by plastic surgeon Carolin Eimer in Hamburg, Germany, and two colleagues at the Medical School of Hamburg.

It begins by citing a 27-year-old psychology paper called “Gender and attractiveness biases in hiring decisions: Are more experienced managers less biased?”

It avers that “studies have yet to investigate aesthetic preferences as regards the scrotum”.

It states several hypotheses and remarks about one of them: “Our sixth hypothesis suggested that men would rate their scrotum significantly more positively than women their vulva… However, we were unable to identify any significant difference in ratings by gender.” It presents four data tables, the last of which bears this label: “Descriptive statistics for evaluation of each scrotum and each variation, by gender, in order of perceived attractiveness of the scrotums.”

It includes exactly 36 close-up, black-and-white photographs of scrotums. It also includes this plaintive, 18-word conclusion: “Ultimately, it was barely possible to identify a ‘beautiful’ scrotum; we must instead speak of the least ugly.”

Feedback won’t deprive you, treasured reader, of the opportunity to experience firsthand the other surprises prepared for you by the three creators of “The scrotum”.

Workaday experiment

What would two scientists discover by adding some small requirements to a person’s work day, then later removing one requirement?

Here are the added requirements. (1) Eat nothing overnight or in the morning before coming to work. (2) Arrive at work more than an hour earlier than usual. (3) Prior to beginning the day’s work, sit quietly for 15 minutes while technicians prepare to wire you up so they can record electrical activity from your brain and heart as you do some mental tasks (in which you look at visual images and decide whether to press a button).

Then, (4) fill out a 24-item survey designed to get at the question “How do you feel right now?” Then, (5) let the technicians extract a small amount of your blood. Then, (6) eat a special breakfast. Then, (7) do your “standard 7-h working day with 10-min breaks every 50 min”. After the day’s work is done, (8) let technicians wire you up again, to record some more brain and heart data. Then, (9) eat a special dinner.

A week later, each person did all those things again – with one exception. Instead of working for 7 hours, the participants treated the 7 hours as “free time” during which “strenuous physical and cognitive activity were forbidden”.

Marius Brazaitis and Andrius Satas, both at the Lithuanian Sports University, did this experiment, then wrote it up in the International Journal of Psychophysiology. They report that the day filled with work and short breaks “induced mental fatigue and impaired cognitive function”. But the day of continuous free time did not. That difference, they say, taught them a lesson: “regular short breaks during the working day do not protect against exhaustion caused by mental work”.

Me-in-a-museum

Have you discovered, in a museum, some non-human exhibit that looks startlingly like you? A taxidermied bird, perhaps, or a rock sample, or a historic old shoe? A waxwork flower? A fossil? Maybe a painted or sculpted depiction of some animal, vegetable, microbe or molecule?

If so, we would love to hear about it. Please provide a description of the item in no more than 25 words, along with a photograph. Specify which museum has “you” on display. We will artfully select some of the very most utterly display-worthy offerings, and tell about them here in Feedback. Send your entry to “Me-in-a-Museum”, c/o Feedback. But please take care: this new collection is about NON-HUMAN items that resemble people.

And if you know of existing, well-curated collections of non-human/human doppelgangery, please point us to them. Two we know about already. One is the Hall of Curious Stones in Chichibu, Japan, which houses many rocks resembling human heads (one pictured above).

The other is also in Japan, which has a small history of rocks and rocklike objects that resemble humans or other species. The smallest collection – well, smallest if you consider the size of the items, but largest if you consider the quantity of items – was gathered by palaeontologist Chonosuke Okamura. He took microscopic photos of thousands of mini-creatures: fossilised mini-fishes, mini-reptiles, mini-mammals, mini-plants and even mini-dragons, each less than a centimetre in length. He published them in a series of books and was awarded the 1996 Ig Nobel prize for biodiversity for “discovering the fossils of dinosaurs, horses, dragons, princesses, and more than 1000 other extinct ‘mini-species'”.

Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.