Little India
Condoms have an alarmingly high failure rate in India, and a group of scientists may have just figured out why. The Indian Council of Medical Research studied 1,400 men from around the country and found that the penises of Indian males may just be too small for regulation-sized condoms. Whereas most condoms that conform to international standards are between 150 mm and 180 mm, 30 percent of Indian men studied measured between 100 and 125 mm in length. Another 60 percent of the subjects measured from 126 mm to 156 mm. While the findings are preliminary—the ICMR is still collecting and analyzing the data—some scientists, like ICMR's National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health director Chander Puri, are already attributing the nearly 20 percent failure rate of condoms in India partly to "condom slippage or tear, which is associated with the size of the condom in relation to an erect penis." These scientists acknowledge that improper usage is also a factor in condom failure. The ICMR is expected to recommend new standard sizes for condoms sometime in the next few months and publish its results in early 2007. In the same time period, countless Indian-American boys are expected to be mocked in their middle schools. Luckily for them, they can send the mockery right back at their German classmates.
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You Can't Always Give What You Want
The holiday season is nigh, and I hope you're getting excited for the unthoughtful and wildly off-base gifts you are about to receive from your friends and loved-ones. When Aunt Madge gives you yet another set of ThunderCats sheets—she remembers you told her you loved them ... 19 years ago—you can bask in the knowledge that her horrible present may indicate that she loves you dearly. A new study published in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that people are better at shopping for strangers than they are at shopping for their loved ones. Researchers asked couples who had been together for more than six months to pick bedroom furniture they thought their significant other might like. They found that people tended to base their decisions on their preconceived notions of their partners' likes and dislikes and ignore actual cues about what the other person wanted. When subjects got information about strangers, however, they had a higher success rate; the researchers suggest that more stereotypical information may be a better indicator of a person's tastes. Luckily, my family doesn't have to worry. I know they're all going to love their copies of I Can't Believe It Was Science: Strange Studies From 1864-1913.
Green Victoria
Do you feel guilty after spending a lonely evening looking at pictures of nearly naked women decked out in sexy lingerie? Well, assuming your concerns are environmental, you can rest easy. The publisher of the Victoria's Secret catalog has announced that it will no longer print on paper produced from trees living in the habitat of threatened Canadian caribou. Victoria's Secret sends out upwards of 350 million catalogs annually (nearly 2,000 for every surviving woodland caribou) and the environmental group Forest Ethics has accused the company of poor paper-purchasing policy. Parent company LimitedBrands said it has agreed to up both the percent of recycled paper it uses and the rigor of its environmental standards. In addition to housing precious caribou and other wildlife, the boreal forest from which the paper is harvested stores lots of carbon, and logging in the area can release the carbon back into the atmosphere, environmentalists say. Forest Ethics had waged an involved PR campaign against Victoria's Secret that included over 700 protests. But the group says the new move by LimitedBrands shows that people who care about the Earth and people who care about profit can come together to achieve their goals.