Paper Monitor
12:31 UK time, Tuesday, 15 June 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Can any story be given a World Cup spin?
The football tournament in South Africa is the only tale in town for many of the papers, so wrapping any story up in its shiny gift paper is guaranteed to make it a more attractive prospect.
Let's take one of those "Scientists have discovered" stories that appears in several of today's papers. It's about academic research which has found people tend to mentally distort the size of their bodies.
How do we know? Because those ubiquitous scientists did an experiment which involved people estimating the size of their hands.
Can you see the World Cup angle yet?
The Guardian's science correspondent can't, .
"The work... may help explain the underpinnings of certain eating disorders in which body image becomes distorted."
The Telegraph to that of the Guardian:
"How your brain, not the dress, makes you look fat" is its headline.
Hmm, not even the faintest whisper of a vuvuzela in that headline.
"Even the slimmest women have, on occasion, stood in front of the mirror and asked: 'Does this dress make me look fat?' But according to a new study, long-suffering husbands and friends called upon for reassurance may be dealing with more than just irrational anxiety."
It all feels a little bit too Glamour magazine, rather than Four-Four-Two.
Over to the Times.
Bingo.
"As the ball skimmed his glove and rolled into the back of the net, it was a moment of head-in-hands calamity for the England goalkeeper Robert Green. For scientists, the USA's equaliser on Saturday evening may simply have confirmed the discovery that our mental representation of our hands is about two thirds wider than they really are."
Next up, what tell us about the Gulf of Mexico oil slick.
The 
