Free Stripping Down Science by Chris Smith, Dr Christorpher Smith

Consequently, they were inadvertently exposed to huge doses of radiation.
In an official report commissioned to investigate conditions at the factory, Harvard professor Cecil Drinker 30 wrote, ‘Dust samples collected in the workroom from various locations and from chairs not used by the workers were all luminous in the dark room. Their hair, faces, hands, arms, necks, the dresses, the underclothes, even the corsets of the dial painters, were luminous. One of the girls showed luminous spots on her legs and thighs. The back of another was luminous almost to the waist.’
Not surprisingly, large numbers of these women subsequently developed horrific symptoms, including the loss of all of their teeth, jaw bones that crumbled like spongeand disfiguring cancerous growths arising from the facial bones. The bones were the major manifestation of the radiation exposure, because radium behaves chemically a bit like calcium in the body, meaning that it tends to build up in bony tissue, which is why the teeth and jaws of the women were most affected.
It’s not clear how many workers died as a result, but US Radium employed thousands. They were eventually taken to court on occupational health grounds and some of the women received small amounts of compensation, although most didn’t live long enough to spend it. Their graves, however, remain radioactive to this day.

As anyone who has ever kept a female dog knows, at certain times of the year she becomes the focus of affection for any male canine within sniffing distance. It’s because she is ‘on heat’, which is another name for the mammalian oestrus, a time when animals advertise their fertility and attractiveness to the opposite sex. So does this happen to us? Prevailing wisdom says not and that evolution has abandoned the process in humans. After all, we’re far too civilised to be obsessed with women’s rear ends, aren’t we? Apparently not, because thanks to a team of lap dancers in Albuquerque, it looks like the human oestrus is a myth no more.
    Geoffrey Miller and his colleagues at the University of New Mexico 31 hypothesised that if women do subconsciously advertise their peak fertility in some subtle way, then men ought to find them most attractive at this time. If that’s the case, then in a setting where men have to buy alady’s attention, such as in a lap-dancing club, the woman’s earnings from tips ought to peak in line with her fertility during her menstrual cycle. This fertile time is at ovulation, midway through their 28-day cycles between days 13 and 15. Critically, this is when, if a woman has sex, her prospects of pregnancy peak.
    To test their theory, the New Mexico team recruited 18 local lap dancers and asked them to keep a daily tally of their earnings over a 60-day period. At the same time, the women recorded the stages of their menstrual cycles and whether or not they were using the oral contraceptive pill. The pill works by fooling a woman’s body into believing that she is pregnant, which prevents ovulation and the other hormone changes that accompany the process, so it could have an effect on how attractive men find women to be.
    The results of the study were ‘sit up and take notice’-ably amazing. The earnings of the normally cycling (non-pill-using) lap dancers nearly doubled to US$350 per shift around the times when they ovulated and were therefore at their most fertile. Then, as they approached menstruation and their fertility fell, their earnings declined to a baseline of about US$200 per shift.The pill users, by comparison, fared less well. They earned a flat average of US$200 per shift throughout their cycles. Why? Were the pill-using women just less attractive than their non-contraceptively compromised counterparts?
    â€˜No,’ say the researchers, because both groups earned approximately the same amounts at the beginnings and ends of their cycles, indicating that the effect was not