News Atlas — live world news feed

Live world news feed — headlines and images as they publish

Live headlines from top outlets — open a card for a preview, then read on the publisher’s site.

1 stories · Live feed

GuardianOct 1Preview

20 fascinating facts about hair: why baldness is super-masculine – and a pubic bush could be a ‘cheating detector’

Judy Wearing has spent much of her life studying our follicles. She explains how our armpits betray our emotions, why some gentlemen really do prefer blondes and the reason we evolved to have eyebrowsAs a PhD student at Oxford studying mating behaviour, Judy Wearing was suddenly struck by a thought: what was the purpose of pubic hair? The point of armpit hair? The function of each of our body’s furry patches? When the published literature failed to produce satisfying answers, Wearing began her own investigation. Her aim was to shed light on why exactly we evolved these particular patches, with pubic hair the most puzzling of all: was it for warmth, protection … or something else?Wearing is still tangling with those questions, some 30 years after her student days. Now an author and editor (largely in the education sector), she has revisited her fascination with hair in Anxious and Hairy:

Elle HuntHealthMen's hair

You’re caught up for now.