If you've got a tribal tattoo on your arm we can safely assume you are in fact a douchebag.
If you're wearing socks and sandals you're most probably a professor.
And if you've got both, why you're a professor of douchebaggery of course.
But what about the things you can't control?
What does your hair, your blood and your smell say about who you are and what lies ahead
in your future?
Let's find out, in our list of 5 Mysterious Ways Your Body Reveals Things About You.
Number 5: Blood Types Hands up if you know your blood type?
I sure don't, but after all that candy I ate over Christmas I'd wager mines more like a
syrup right now.
But why do we even have different blood types, and what does your individual type say about
you as a person?
First off, there are as many blood types as there are genders, sexualities andflavours
of Gatorade.
For every pansexual cherry burst Apache helicopter there's a blood type to match, 35 at the time
of writing, with the A, B, AB and O types the four principle ones.
But then you can also categorise people using the RH blood group system, the Kell system,
the MNS system, the Duffy group et cetera.
Just trust us, there's a lot, and each one has its own unique properties, but let's focus
on the main four for now.
Have you got Type A blood?
Congratulations, you're less attractive to mosquitos, but you are also more likely to
get heart disease and become a drunk with OCD - you win some you lose some.
Type B folks are more prone to e.coli and ovarian cancer, but you do have more than
50,000 times as many friendly bacteria than A and O people.
AB peeps can donate plasma to anyone, but you've also got a higher risk of cognitive
difficulties.
And finally those with type O have a lower risk of pancreatic cancer, and have a strong
resistance to malaria.
But for some reason you are more attractive to mosquitos, and you're more likely to develop
ulcers, bust your Achilles tendon and get stressed.
Well that last one's no surprise, if I was getting stung by mosquitos with a crocked
ankle and stomach ulcers I'd be pretty narked too.These traits are just the tip of the iceberg,
with resistance and susceptibility to many other diseases and conditions linked to various
types of blood.
Some people have even tried matching personality types to blood groups, but while we know this
to be junk science, we're still not sure why we have so many blood types, and exactly what
they all do.
Number 4: Pheromones Pheromones are chemicals which are secreted
by animals in order to trigger a response in another member of their species.
Whenever a kitty cat rubs its face on your leg, a dog takes a whiz up a telephone pole,
or an ant goes for a stroll, each of these actions involves the release of pheromones,
and their uses range from marking territory and signalling alarm, to letting your partner
know it's time to get nasty.
But do humans release these chemicals too?
And if so, what do we use them for?
Human beings do possess the olfactory organ necessary for pheromone detection, but we've
yet to determine whether or not it is active.
The problem in testing this is that we also rely heavily on smells to guide us, particularly
our social and sexual behaviours, so you'd need a completely odourless human in order
to judge the effect of pheromones accurately.
It's like eating a hot dog smothered in ketchup - did I like it because it was a good hot
dog, or because it was smothered in delicious tomato gloop?
Despite this uncertainty, a few potential pheromones have been detected, and they have
some rather interesting effects.
Androstenol could be a candidate for a female pheromone, and exposure to it has been shown
to make humans think people and places are more attractive than they actually are.
Androstenone is released by men and might serve a similar purpose in women, and it even
makes their skin more conductive to allow for heightened physical sensations.
There is also some evidence to suggest that, if pheromones do exist, they may act like
a medical report, giving a potential partner a quick rundown of how strong your immune
system is.
But despite the fact we have evidence that humans are affected by pheromones, we've yet
to confirm how this works, and what other information our stink glands are giving out.
I hope it's not my Dropbox password.
That's where I keep all my dankest memes.
(meems) Number 3: Your Smell As we discussed in the previous entry, smell plays an important
role in human social and sexual interactivity.
But did you know that your body odour can also give off information about how stressed,
dominant and healthy you are?
We humans all have our own personal scent - it's called our odourprint - but unlike
Britney Spears' Curious and Donald Trump's Empire it doesn't come in fancy packaging.
No, your odorprint comes from a combination of the smells produced by sweat glands, oil-producing
sebaceous glands and those stinky apocrine glands found in your armpits and your groin.
After removing factors such as what you've eaten or how much CK One you've drenched yourself
in, forensic chemists can use your odorprint to identify you in the same way your fingerprints
or DNA can.
And with careful investigation they can also identify smells which indicate if you're lying,
whether you're scared or stressed, and what kind of person you are.
Dominant, extroverted and anxious people all give off certain unique smells, and while
it's hard for me and you to distinguish these unless someone has literally messed their
pants, a forensic chemist with the right equipment can do exactly that.
Many diseases also give off a scent, with cancer and diabetes both known to have distinct
smell signatures.
That's why dogs can often detect the presence of cancer way before the symptoms present
themselves, and right now there are doggie bio-detection devices in development to refine
this cancer-identification method even further.
In future, your doctor's assistant could be a dog.
How awesome is that?
But there's also a more sinister side to this technology - smell surveillance.
In 2007 the German authorities took scent samples from activists protesting the G8 summit,
despite the fact that the technology didn't exist back then to make such activity accurate
or worthwhile.
But in the future this may change.
Your scent can linger for days, and you can do nothing about it, so as well as using smells
to find out who's the most nervous or who's got the most tumours, we may even use it to
solvecrimes.
And you know what this means?
That script for The Fifth Sense starring DolphLundgren would actually make sense.
You know the world's getting weird when It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia starts predicting
the future.
Number 2: Your Hair The colour of your hair is determined by the melanin present within
it, and despite the fact that we see the influence of melanin in skin colour and eye colour as
well as the pigment of your hair; we still don't understand much of the chemistry behind
these processes.
But what we have noticed is that certain hair colours are linked to medical conditions in
the same way blood types are.
For example, the correlation between redheads and sunburn isn't just something to taunt
ginger kids with; it's actually based on a genuine scientific link with a genetic basis.
A study published in Nature in July 2016 showed that the gene variation which causes red hair
and freckles is also associated with skin cancer mutations, causing red-heads to develop
melanomas 42% faster than normal.
The paper claims that this is the equivalent of spending 21 years longer in the sun than
those with non-red-hair...but don't worry ginger kids, at least you can comfort yourself
with the fact that you're also more resistant to anaesthetics.
Oh wait, that's a bad thing isn't it.
The same genetic variation which gives you red hair also makes you metabolise anaesthetic
chemicals differently, meaning you'll need way more Novocaine than
most when you visit the dentist.
And you're at a higher risk of Parkinson's too.
Sorry, just thought I'd throw that in there.
Although there's one small crumb of comfort for red-heads in the form of Vitamin D, which
you're able to produce in higher levels than anyone, so not only are you less prone to
skeletal deformities and seasonal affective disorder, but you never have to eat bananas
ever again.Let's give the red-heads a break now and move on to brunettes and blondes.
If you're dark-haired you may be less likely to develop acne or skin cancer, but you're
far more prone to hair loss and nicotine addiction.
Meanwhile, blondes are pretty high up on the skin cancer chart, if not as high as red-heads,
but you guys and girls are also at risk of vision problems.
However, the old dumb-blonde trope has now been conclusively disproven with the discovery
that blondes have a higher average IQ than any other group.
And this last one has really got us stumped, because we've yet to figure out why this might
be.
Number 1: Righty or Lefty Left handed people make up only 10% of the population, but they
are far more likely to be creative or genius thinkers, with lefties disproportionately
represented in the arts, the Nobel Prizes and even the American Presidency.
However, studies show that as well as making for a tricky boxer or tennis player, Southpaws
are also more at risk from a range of serious diseases.
In a study by Yale University, 40% of schizophrenic patients were found to be left-handed, and
another investigation by a UK team found that left-handed women who had passed the menopause
were also more prone to breast cancer.
Further studies have also noted higher instances of multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease and
sleep disorder in left-handed people, who are statistically more likely to earn lower
salaries and work menial jobs.
Science cannot explain many of these strange correlations at the moment, but we do know
that left-handed and ambidextrous people process language differently, so this disruption may
be the source of both the positive and negative aspects of being a leftie.
And with such varied company as Bill Gates, Oprah, Aristotle, Napoleon and Jack The Ripper
amongst your left-handed ranks, any worried lefties out there shouldn't fret too much,
because you'll clearly make an impact in some way...but whether it's for good or for bad
depends on what you smell like too.
And that's our list.
But if you want to know more about us fleshy old meat bags then why not watch one of our
two recent videos on the Mysteries of Men and theMysteries of Women?
Because some of those old stereotypes about bad driving and boob obsession may not be
as true as you think.