They've got to be kidding:
Women can work out whether a man will make a good father just by looking at his face, research shows. ... By studying what appealed to women, they concluded that the ideal partner should have a symmetrical face, large deep and expressive eyes, with a straight nose and soft jaw.No, they are serious (pdf file here) and were supported in part by your tax dollars via the NIH.
What a bunch of gobblety goop. I wish they'd do a study on the percentage of studies that are made up jibberish.
Check this out:
Scientific Research and Modern Day Fables
I would bet that the most people accept the results of scientific investigations that are published in peer reviewed journals as fact. But can published research in scientific journals be trusted and should it be used to change public policy and impact our society in the profound manner that has become commonplace? In a recent publication, one investigator asserts that the answer, at least to the first question, is "no".
"There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims," says researcher John Ioannidis in an analysis in the open access international medical journal PLoS Medicine.
As reported in the Corner, "This work follows on from a recent publication of his that found that a third of medical research articles published in major scientific journals and then cited over a thousand times in the literature are later contradicted or have major questions raised over them."
In his analysis, Ioannidis, of the University of Ioannina School of Medicine, Greece, and Tufts University School of Medicine, United States, identifies the factors that he believes lead to research findings often being false. One of the factors is that most research studies are small.
"The smaller the studies conducted in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true," says Ioannidis.
However, a second reason is that "financial and other interests and prejudices can also lead to untrue results." And "the hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true," which may explain why we sometimes see "major excitement followed rapidly by severe disappointments in fields that draw wide attention."
The implications of the report (if correct) are somewhat sobering, considering the legislation related to the environment and social concerns that has been motivated on the basis of �scientific evidence�.