Day: 11/22/2014

People Magazine’s 2014 Sexiest Man Alive Is Chris Hemsworth: What Does Science Have To Say?

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Is Chris Hemsworth really the sexiest man alive, scientifically speaking? Photo courtesy of Reute

Older Men May Be More Accurate

The very first sexiest man alive was Mel Gibson in 1985. Since then, we have met a wide array of magazine-labeled sexy men, but most seemed to share, more or less, being in their mid-to-late 30s. With People’s target reader being a 38-year-old woman, scientifically speaking, the magazine might be more accurate to award an older man with “Sexiest Man Alive” title.

An older man marrying a younger woman is seen in nearly every culture, and scientists may have an explanation for this. According to New Scientist, women may be biologically programmed to be more attracted to older men because this combination has been proven to yield the most offspring.

According to the study, done at the University of Vienna and the University of Veterinary Medicine, also in Vienna, couples in which the male was older than the female tended to have more offspring. More specifically, the data showed that the most children were found in couples where the man was four to 5.9 years older than the woman. However, the same study showed that in Sami people, an indigenous group native to the arctic, the optimal age gap was even more significant. Data showed that Sami males who were 15 years older than their partners had the most children.

“I don’t know why the optimal age differences were so much bigger among the Sami people, but it might be related to culture,” one of the lead researchers, Samuli Helle, explained to New Scientist. “Perhaps those huge lifestyle differences are important.”

Are Beards Not Sexy?

Another trait which the vast majority of the Sexiest Men Alive share is a clean-shaven face. So the question persists, according to science, is this portrayal of attraction accurate?

One 2011 study polled more than 200 women of both European and Polynesian background on what facial appearance they found most attractive. Results showed that the majority of women tended to associate bearded faces as being more aggressive and having a higher social status than shaven faces, but as for being more attractive: “Women … do not rate bearded faces as more attractive than clean-shaven faces,” the researchers wrote in their study, which you can find published in the journal, Behavioral Ecology.

Another study begged to differ, finding that, in general, women tended to prefer whatever was least common. “The mean attractiveness of a suite of faces is altered by the frequency of beards,” the researchers wrote, finding that beards were most alluring in areas where facial hair is rare, and clean-shaven faces are most popular in areas where a hairy face is the norm. The researchers compared this to the male preference for blonde-haired ladies.

“With female hair color, there has been speculation that red, brown, and blonde spread via their novelty, but the evidence is very ambiguous,” Dr. Rob Brooks, one of the authors of the study, told the BBC.

A third study proved the two previous wrong, finding it was actually heavy stubble that females found the most attractive, although they did observe that female preference tended to change according to a woman’s menstrual cycle.

Are Muscular Bodies Really That Important?

Chris Hemsworth, best known for his portrayal of Thor, is defined by his extremely muscular body and manly facial features. But according to science, when given the choice, women could choose a thinner physique over the classic Macho man. A masculine physique and strong jawbones are caused by high testosterone and, unfortunately, high levels of this hormone can interfere with the immune system, Live Science reported.

A recent study found that women are more cued by fat content, since, according to Vinet Coetzee, it’s a more accurate marker of health.

“We found that a man’s weight serves as a better indicator of the relationship between immune response and attractiveness than masculinity does,” Coetzee explained. “It is therefore more likely that Latvian women use weight, rather than masculinity, in their subconscious judgments of a man’s immunity.”

White Men?

In 1996, Denzel Washington became the first black man to ever win the title of People’s Sexiest Man Alive. To this day, he remains the only black man to have ever received this “honor.” Although evidence shows that most people tend to date and marry within their own race, there might be a reason that white men so often snag this title.

Data from the Facebook app “Are You Interested” found that race is particularly importantamong online daters, and some races receive incredibly disproportionate amounts of interest. According to data taken from 2.4 million heterosexual interactions reviewed, all women, except black women, are drawn most to white men.

A similar review from OkCupid found that, once again, white men got the most replies from almost every group. While researchers expected that white women would prefer white men, they were surprised to find that Asian and Latina women preferred white men “even more exclusively.”

“Most men (except black men) are unlikely to initiate contact with black women. All men (including Asian men) are unlikely to reply to Asian women, and although women from all racial backgrounds tend to initiate contact with men from the same background, women from all racial backgrounds also disproportionately reply to white men,” Kevin Lewis, a researcher on the OkCupid study, told Popular Science.

The reason for this strange disproportion of attention, however, is unclear.

The Science Of Lethal Injection: How Most Capital Punishments Work

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You’re escorted into the small, windowless room that contains only a pale-turquoise gurney and two metal tables up against the wall. One table is neatly set with a pair of scissors, a small red bin, and strips of gauze. The stark cleanliness of the room is oddly disturbing and gives off a feeling of faux-comfort. A clock directly above the gurney hangs in the center of the white wall, its ticking an ominous premonition.

 

The next thing you notice is the large, cold mirror on the other wall facing the gurney. As you lie down on the gurney, you find yourself staring at this mirror, which is really a one-way mirror. Behind it sit the witnesses of the execution — some of your relatives, possibly several of the relatives of your victims. They’re able to watch you through that window, but you can only see the reflection of yourself lying there, like a specimen.

The prison officials strap you into the gurney and swab your arms with alcohol, then insert two IVs into each arm (one is the main line of execution; the other is a backup, just in case the first line fails). You see yourself in the mirror, lying helpless and strapped to the gurney — this is it. You’re about to be “put down.” They then start the saline drops, to make sure the IVs aren’t blocked throughout the process. You’re attached to a heart monitor so the prison officials will know when you’re dead.

Anesthesia

The intravenous injection will involve a set sequence and several different drugs, given to you step-by-step. First, some form of anesthesia begins to get pumped into your veins — usually sodium thiopental or pentobarbital, meant to reduce pain and significantly decrease your breathing. This drug is technically not an analgesic or something that numbs pain nerves, but rather is meant to put you into unconsciousness that would, theoretically, prevent you from feeling pain. Within seconds, you begin to feel tired and heavy and you begin to doze off — into sleep or unconsciousness, you’re not sure.

Paralysis

Once you’re unconscious, the pancuronium bromide, or paralytic agent, begins to enter the IV — inducing paralysis of your muscles and lungs, which stops your breathing. Pancuronium bromide is a neuromuscular blocker that stops a nerve messenger, acetylcholine, from reaching the muscles. This ultimately causes muscular paralysis and respiratory arrest, which could lead to death by asphyxiation if the third drug isn’t administered.

Cardiac Arrest

And then, with potassium chloride, a salt substance, they stop your heart. This surge of chemicals impairs the heart by messing up its electrical signaling, ultimately inducing cardiac arrest, or complete stopping of the heart. The total amount of time it should take for you to die shouldn’t be more than 10 minutes.

Lethal injection is used primarily in situations of capital punishment, when a prison inmate is sentenced to death. It began as an attempt by governments to make the death penalty slightly more “humane.” The method was first proposed in 1888 by a New York doctor who claimed it would be cheaper than hanging, but it didn’t yet became implemented in the states. Some 50 years later, the method was used in Nazi Germany as euthanasia before being re-introduced in America in 1977. In that year, Jay Chapman, Oklahoma’s state medical examiner, proposed this “less painful” execution method: “An intravenous saline drip shall be started in the prisoner’s arm, into which shall be introduced a lethal injection consisting of an ultra-short-acting barbiturate in combination with a chemical paralytic.”

The law allowing lethal injection was passed in Oklahoma and is currently used by 35 states (though each state uses a different drug protocol). Traditionally, most states used the three-drug combination for lethal injections, involving an anesthetic, a paralytic agent, and potassium chloride. But ever since there has been a lethal drug shortage due to the EU ban, many states have had to adopt different methods, including “one drug,” “pentobarbital,” and “propofol.”

Indeed, getting a lethal injection is by far better than electrocution, hanging, or decapitation, like used in the old days. But research has shown that lethal injection isn’t devoid of pain. For example, a 2005 study found that four out of 10 prisoners might receive inadequate anesthesia, making the process far more painful than previously believed.

It seems smooth enough and should only take a few minutes, but recently several botched executions have taken place in the U.S., where it took up to two hours for some inmates to die. Their deaths were drawn out and often painful, involving burning sensations, convulsions, and gasping for breath. This is why some states have begun to debate whether lethal injection is truly “humane” (assisted in part by the 2011 European Union export ban on lethal drugs to the U.S., due to the fact that the EU calls for “universal abolition” of the death penalty). Otherresearchers have argued that not enough data or research exists on the current three-drug protocol (anesthesia, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride) for it to be entirely safe. But it will be quite some time before the U.S. will decide whether to follow in Europe’s footsteps and abolish lethal injection, or even the death penalty completely.