Shirtless for aerodynamics' sake, of course. Credit: Kiselev Andrey Valerevich / Shutterstock We all know the more attractive among us get all the breaks, but science has just shown one more benefit to being really, really, ridiculously good looking: riding a bike faster. No, really. A paper in today’s Biology Letters shows statistically that attractiveness correlated positively with performance among cyclists who completed the 2012 Tour de France, especially among women not using hormonal birth control. And you thought science was boring.
As the paper’s abstract explains, “Females often prefer to mate with high quality males, and one aspect of quality is physical performance.” So the more physically fit a human male is, the more human females might want to bang him. But how to test for this — and, specifically, how to test for this with the measure of physical performance being endurance, a trait not easily quantified? Simple. ...
