She's a Perfect .36 to .46 by Scott LaFee - Eureka! on Creators.com

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She's a Perfect .36 to .46

If you want to know whether you're beautiful, walk away from the mirror and find a ruler. According to a study by researchers at the University of San Diego and University of Toronto, beauty can be measured in the distance between a woman's eyes and the distance between her eyes and her mouth.

Pamela Pallett and Stephen Link of UCSD and Kang Lee in Toronto asked university students to make paired comparisons of attractiveness between female faces with identical facial features, but different eye-mouth distances and different distances between the eyes.

The research turned up two "golden ratios" for length and width. Female faces were judged more attractive when the vertical distance between eyes and mouth was roughly 36 percent of the face's length, and the horizontal distance between the eyes was approximately 46 percent of the face's width. The scientists note that the study used only images of white females so it's possible different ratios apply to other ethnicities.

"People have tried and failed to find these ratios since antiquity," said Pallett, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at UCSD. "The ancient Greeks found what they believed was a 'golden ratio' — also known as 'phi' or the 'divine proportion' — and used it in architecture and art. Some even suggest that Leonardo da Vinci used the golden ratio when painting his 'Mona Lisa.' But there was never any proof that the golden ratio was special."

And maybe it isn't. It turns out the preferred ratios identified by Pallett and colleagues are, in fact, the proportions of the average face.

QUIRKS OF NATURE

Light moves at a fixed speed and behaves either as a wave or a particle, all of which sometimes creates strange paradoxes of physics.

Add one more: Researchers have discovered that if you make holes in a film of gold so thin that it's semitransparent, less light actually gets through.

'TRUE FACTS'

Scientists in a submarine who went looking for the Loch Ness monster instead recently found thousands of golf balls.

PRIME NUMBERS

300 — Width, in miles of the Shiva basin off India's western coast, which is posited to be an impact crater from an asteroid 60 times more massive than the one that created Mexico's Chicxulub crater, which is credited with leading to the demise of dinosaurs

Source: Harper's

BRAIN SWEAT

Translate the following rebuses:

1. WINEEEE

2. TIMING TI MING

3. . ____ range

PATENTLY ABSURD

Contrary to appearances, fishing can be quite exhausting, what with having to reel in all those struggling fish.

This device, patented in 1972, removes even that bit of effort. When the fisherman feels something take his hook, he pushes a button on his specially equipped rod, sending helium gas down a flexible tube to an attached balloon floating on the water. The balloon inflates and rises, lifting the hooked fish out of the water while the angler comfortably sits back and watches.

Once the fish is clear of its natural element, it's hardly any task at all to reel the dangling catch back to earth and the dinner plate.

BRAIN SWEAT ANSWER

1. Win with ease

2. Split second timing

3. Point blank range

WHAT IS IT? ANSWER

A squid embryo squirting ink. Photographed by Rachel Fink of Mount Holyoke College, it is a winning entry in the 2009 Olympus Bioscapes competition.

To find out more about Scott LaFee and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.