The good folks at LifeScience.com bring us this little nugget of information. Makes you want to go around the office and listen to your co-workers' voices, to see if it's true.

From the story:

If you want to have lots of kids, look for a Barry White instead of a Justin Timberlake. Men with a deep voices have more offspring, a new study suggests. Previous studies conducted by David Feinberg of McMaster University in Canada have shown that women are more attracted to men with deeper voices, judging them to be older, healthier and more masculine than their higher-pitched rivals. Men, on the other hand, go for women with higher pitched voices because they find them more attractive, subordinate, feminine, healthier and younger-sounding. In the new study, detailed in a recent issue of the journal Biology Letters, Feinberg set out to see how that attraction to deeper-voiced men affected reproduction and the survival of offspring. "While we find in this new study that voice pitch is not related to offspring mortality rates," Feinberg said, "we find that men with low voice pitch have higher reproductive success and more children born to them."

Posted by Susan Abram at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the "Well, duh!" category, here comes a story about how researchers spent their summer. There's no mention of Bonds in the study.

From Reuters:

Steroids can help batters hit 50 percent more home runs by boosting their muscle mass by just 10 percent, a U.S. physicist said on Thursday.

Calculations show that, by putting on 10 percent more muscle mass, a batter can swing about 5 percent faster, increasing the ball's speed by 4 percent as it leaves the bat.

Depending on the ball's trajectory, this added speed could take it into home run territory 50 percent more often, said Roger Tobin of Tufts University in Boston.

"A 4 percent increase in ball speed, which can reasonably be expected from steroid use, can increase home run production by anywhere from 50 percent to 100 percent," said Tobin, whose study will be published in an upcoming issue of the American Journal of Physics.

Tobin, who normally studies condensed matter and physics, wondered if professional baseball players who have recently been accused of boosting their performance with steroids really would benefit from using the drugs.

"If you look at other sports, you don't see radical changes in performance. No one is running a 6-second 100-meter dash, no matter what they are taking," Tobin said in a telephone interview

Posted by Susan Abram at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A little lead with your lunch?

Lunchboxes distributed by the California Department of Public Health at health fairs are being recalled because they contain lead.

The lunch boxes, pictured here, say: "Eat Fruits & Vegetables and Be Active."
From the press release:

Dr. Mark Horton, director of the California Department of Public Health (CDPH), today urged consumers to stop using lunch boxes, which have been distributed as CDPH nutrition educational items, after testing showed elevated levels of lead in three lunch boxes.

The canvas lunch boxes that showed elevated levels of lead were green with a logo reading EAT FRUITS & VEGETABLES AND BE ACTIVE. Approximately 56,000 of these lunch boxes have been distributed throughout California at health fairs and other events.

“CDPH will no longer use lunch boxes until such time as we are assured that every lunch box is safe. In addition to lunch boxes, we are assessing all of our health promotion items to ensure that they are safe,” Horton said. “We are urging Californians to not use these lunch boxes and keep them away from infants and young children

Posted by Susan Abram at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)