Wissenschaft.

"Now researchers believe that improvements in health care in wealthy western countries mean women do not have to worry so much about the quality of their offspring – and so are picking more feminine looking men.

The researchers at the University of Aberdeen came to the conclusion after studying the preferences of 4500 women from 30 different countries.

They found a direct correlation between the quality of health care and the choice of male.
In countries with better health care, the more likely women would pick a feminine looking man and visa versa."

From The Telegraph, March, 2010 (via this). For a number of reasons, I find this ridiculously funny. The sweeping appeal to "a direct correlation" is absolutely hilarious.

"Dr DeBruine said: “We found that women from countries with poorer health, which have higher mortality and increased incidence of communicable disease, were more attracted to masculine faces than women living in countries with better health."

"Women were shown two images of the same face side by side, but one picture was very subtly altered so it had more masculine traits, for example a bigger jaw and heavier and lower brow line, and the other was oppositely altered so it had more feminine traits.
Researchers then matched preferences to health statistics from the World Health Organization."

I have no words to describe how absurd this is. The only thing I can say is that newspaper articles like this, straight-faced, "serious", "interesting", defies any attempt at parody. Anyway, in projects like this (if the article doesn't distort it) the role of the IMAGE is very interesting, and very unclear.