Bob CollinsVeteran News Cutters recognize I have a penchant for offbeat studies.
Fortunately, every day brings another fix.
Fertile Women Have Sexier Voices, the headline on the BBC Web site screams today.
Scientists have suggested that very subtle changes caused by the rise and fall of different sex hormones can be detected by men, who then perhaps find a woman more attractive without necessarily even realising why.
The latest research, from the State University of New York at Albany and originally published in the journal Human Evolution and Behavior, involved taking recordings of women counting from one to 10 at four points during the menstrual cycle and then played them back to male and female students.
“The missing link here is finding out how this works in plain conversation – in a bar, for example,” says Dr David Feinberg, from the McMaster University in Canada.
And why do we need to know that?
