5 Insane Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Someone
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There's this magic trick that TV and movie detectives do where they glance at a stranger and suddenly know their life's story ("Burns on your fingertips, grease stains on your shirt around a clean area in the shape of an apron -- you, sir, are a short order cook!"). It's harder to do in real life, of course, but not impossible -- we know that statistically certain physical features correlate to certain lifestyles, if you just know what to look for.
It's never 100 percent, of course, but still fascinating to know that ...
Statistically, Women With Wider Hips Are More Interested in One-Night Stands
A significant part of social interaction in today's singles' scene is based around weekend casual sex. We're not judging -- it's something that Internet comedy writers just don't have a lot of experience with, so we must study it from afar, like a strange ritual performed by exotic birds. And the science says you can tell how likely a girl is to hook up with you by looking at her hips.
This comes from a study done at the University of Leeds in the UK, where participants were surveyed about several aspects of their sexual behavior, including their number of sexual partners and the age they lost their virginity. Then, the researchers measured different aspects of the women's abdomens, including hip width, hip-to-waist ratio, and bootyliciousness quotient. The results indicated that the women who had racked up the most sexual partners also rated more highly with one-night stands, and on top of that, also tended to be the women with the widest hips. In fact, those for whom one-night stands accounted for the vast majority of their sexual encounters tended to have hips almost an inch wider than those who preferred long-term relationships.
Now, sex science can be fuzzy at times (for instance, it always relies on self-reporting, so how do we know that curvy women aren't simply more likely to lie about one-night stands?), so do keep that in mind. But the theory is that women with wider hips have a lot less trouble passing those watermelon-sized, sexual side-effects we call babies, and so biology gives them the green light to go ahead and repopulate the next human generation. Women with narrower hips are inclined to be more sexually selective, because nature doesn't want you to go through that kind of pain if the father of your child is just going to be the lead singer of Nickelback or something.
So what's the equivalent trait to look for in a guy? Well, first we have to promise you that we are not making this up for self-serving reasons ...
If He's Fat, He Probably Lasts Longer in Bed
There are a lot of stereotypes on shows like Sex and the City about the perfectly sculpted male Adonis who can't last 10 seconds in bed, or at least we assume since we've never seen the show. The good news for flabby guys everywhere is that science actually backs this up. In what can only be a case of natural schadenfreude, fatter men, on average, simply last longer in the bedroom, and it's not because they get too tired after the first few thrusts.
Researchers in Turkey conducted a year-long study, published in the aptly named International Journal of Impotence Research, into sexual longevity between a group of men of varying body mass. What they found was that even after taking into account men who had pre-existing issues with premature ejaculation, dudes with a lot of junk in their trunk averaged 7.3 minutes in the sack, as opposed to an average of 103 seconds for slim guys, or just over a minute.
That means that fatter men last about three times longer, on average, than their fitter counterparts, whose bedroom longevity maxed out after about a third of a Prince song.
Now, again, the study can tell us the results but can really only speculate on the why. One theory is that it has something to do with the fact that obese men naturally produce more estrogen. It may not be true that this makes them more interested in just cuddling, but it does appear to have an inhibiting effect on the male orgasm. Like wearing two condoms, but on the inside.
Before you get too cocky (so to speak) and chow down on some hamburgers to increase your performance, obesity obviously also leads to a range of health conditions, one of which is, ironically, erectile dysfunction. So it's less of a blessing to kick the diet and more like a Faustian bargain.
Their Eye Color Can Tell You What Sports They're Good At
If you're a few inches above average height in America, you've had several thousand people ask you if you played basketball. If you're a big guy, you've probably gotten asked if you played football. Well, here's a weird, Sherlock Holmes-style trick you can do to mix it up: You can guess what sport somebody excels at by his eye color.
That's because, in a number of experiments involving a wide selection of different games, researchers have repeatedly come to the same conclusion -- people with brown eyes are usually better at sports that require fast reaction times. That is, ball games like football, tennis, or basketball, or fast-paced activities like boxing. On the other hand, those whose eyes are blue or green generally have a better aptitude for slower, more strategic and player-paced activities like golf or bowling.
In the case of sports that require players to have a variety of skills depending on the task, like baseball or cricket, your eye color says a lot about where you're best suited on the field. For example, batters perform better if they have dark eyes, but if you have a sparkling set of baby blues, you're much better off pitching.
The best explanation has to do with the way your eyes handle light. In particular, light eyes are more susceptible to glare, in much the same way as light-skinned people are more susceptible to sunburn. Dark pigment in either case is the body's defense against the furious assault of the sun, so if you have light eyes, the world is simply brighter and more oppressive.
This means that light-eyed people have more trouble with tasks that involve split-second visual decision-making, such as determining whether the pitcher just lobbed a fastball or a curveball. On the other hand, they're much better off if they're doing the pitching, a task which enables them to take their time and strategize, and in which a sudden glint from someone's watch won't result in a broken nose.
As shown in this scientific film from the '70s.
"Wait, Cracked, I got the distinct impression from the start of this article that these were all going to be genitalia-based. What the hell?" OK, we'll throw you one more of those ...
If He Has Small Testicles, He's Probably Better at Childcare
Ladies, if you want to figure out whether your potential husband is the nurturing type, or whether he's more inclined to run off with the secretary and saddle you with the responsibility of child-rearing, there's now a scientifically approved way of doing it -- grab a pair of calipers and pull down his pants. Research has shown that the smaller a man's testicles are, the more interest he has in raising his kids.
Scientists at Emory University recruited 70 fathers who currently lived with the mothers of their children and had them fill out questionnaires to self-report on how closely involved they were with the everyday lives of their kids (the mothers were asked the same questions about their partners, to filter out those guys who might be tempted to talk themselves up). Then they got the guys to strip down and took careful, intimate measurements of their berries.
The next part of the test involved hooking their brains up to a computer and showing them a series of pictures of their kids with different facial expressions such as happy, sad, and neutral, as well as pictures of other people's kids making the same expressions. The tests -- which had to have left the men thinking they'd accidentally joined a weird cult -- found that guys with more titanic nuts showed consistently less brain activity in the parts of the brain that deal with parental bonding, and it didn't matter much whether they were looking at their own kids or those of strangers.
It's theorized that the results give credence to the theory that men are biologically driven more toward spreading their seed far and wide than actually taking care of the spawn of their efforts, given that bigger balls means more testosterone production, and more testosterone means more stereotypically macho instincts. As a result, those men carrying a couple of peanuts in a teabag are probably more likely to take the kids to their doctor appointments and actually change a diaper once in a while.
If They Have a Wrinkle in Their Earlobe, They're More Susceptible to Heart Attacks
Heart disease is a leading cause of death in the world, and your doctor has memorized about a thousand warning signs that you might be en route to a heart attack based on your lifestyle, diet, and substance habits. But there's another, much more bizarre indicator of whether your ticker is going to turn against you at some point down the road -- if your ear looks like this:
That innocuous wrinkle across the earlobe is known among ear professionals as "Frank's sign," and though it sounds about as scientifically legitimate as palm reading, real scientists with actual degrees swear by its ability to predict cardiovascular trouble. In one study, scientists analyzed 303 autopsy reports of people who died of some form of heart disease and found that 72 percent of males and 67 percent of females had the devil's ear crease.
Annnnd 100 percent of you are frantically rubbing your lobes right now.
If the distinctive odor of bullshit seems to hang over this result, other studies have taken a more rigorous attitude to getting to the bottom of the phenomenon, including adjusting the test results for people who wear earrings, sleep in a particular way, or any other obvious factor that might contribute to the shape of your ear folds. Even here, researchers are forced to admit that there seems to be a positive correlation between your chances of having a heart attack and whether or not you have this particular ear crease. We know a bunch of you are rushing off to find a mirror right now, so we'll wait.
If you're hoping for some intuitive explanation about how the shape of your ear is connected to the health of your heart, then we're sorry to disappoint you -- science has no goddamned idea. Discovering facts is the easy part, actually explaining them is where scientists have to put in the really long hours. Suffice it to say, if you have the wrinkle, you might want to look at the amount of cholesterol in your diet.
Though removing the wrinkle entirely is also an option.
For more parlor tricks you can surprise people with, check out 6 Intimate Details You Can Tell Just By Looking At Someone and 5 Personal Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Someone.
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