Considering the relatively high level of media interest in the so-called ‘Thigh Gap’ phenomenon over the last few years, it’s perhaps surprising that very few scientific researchers appear to have looked into it. Improbable has managed to find only one experimental study, undertaken by Khyati Maheshkumar Ganatra of the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College at […]
Tag: BMI
The effect of foreign sumo wrestlers on the body-mass/human-capital relationship in Japan
This economics study suggests that allowing foreigners to work as sumo wrestlers has been detrimental to the quality of native wrestlers’ wrestling: “Is body mass human capital in sumo? Outcome of globalization and formation of human capital in Japan,” Eiji Yamamura, Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, epub November 22, 2013. The author, at […]
Body Mass Index (BMI),1901
This 1901 image, from the Scientific American Reference Book published in 1905, is in a tangential way a forerunner to the biomedical concept, refined years later, called Body Mass Index (BMI). It shows the collective body mass of several kinds of farm animals raised in the United States with that of the Eiffel Tower and […]
Coffee and Breast Size: A reply
A reply to the study we mentioned two days ago: “Of cup and bra size: Reply to a prospective study of breast size and premenopausal breast cancer incidence,” Anita Ringberg, Erika Bageman, Carsten Rose, Christian Ingva and Helena Jernstrom, International Journal of Cancer, vol. 119, 2006, pp. 2242–2243. The authors explain: “we found that the […]