The Chinese postal service is releasing a special edition of sweet and sour pork flavoured stamps to celebrate the year of the pig, which begins February 18.

The stamps feature a cutesy cartoon of a sow an her suckling piglets. Scratching and sniffing reveals what said piglets would smell like slow roasted and then covered in sugar, rice vinegar and monosodium glutamate.

Also, Slim waists have been the mark of attractive women throughout history, says a US scholar who has analysed thousands of ancient texts

I am becoming increasingly wary of articles that refer to journal publications that you can only study the abstract of without vast fees to subscribe. Especially when the author has been almost exclusively fixated on researching waist to hip ratios for the last 14 years.

The BBC article says he studied British and US 16-18th century texts and 'a small selection of Indian and Chinese romantic and erotic poetry dating from the 1st to the 6th century of the Christian era.' How small? It isn't news that western societies are fixated on women with a certain waist to hip ratio and large breasts. It sounds rather poor research, considering waistlines were found only 66 times in 345,000 texts. Given that breasts were 'the most-often mentioned feature' surely a better conclusion would be that breasts are a prime point of female attractiveness?

This isn't rocket science. Anthropologists have existed for centuries and have studied societies all over the world. Surely there must be some consensus on what drives human attraction, and whether it varies based on culture, education, civilization level or environment without resorting to studies like this? Alternatively, am I being unfair?