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Your butt does not exist in a vacuum. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Your shapely derriere alone isn’t what makes you attractive, or so suggests a new study. “Most previous work on attractiveness focused on the effect of isolated features,” explains Canada’s Queen’s University professor Nikolaus Troje. As he and two German researchers explain in a study published in Evolution & Human Behavior, “evolutionary psychology states that sexual attractiveness has evolved to assess the reproductive qualities of a potential mate"—and as such, past studies have looked at individual traits that have ties to things like fertility. 

In their study, the researchers set out with the hypothesis that attractiveness doesn’t just stem from those parts but from "the consistency of the whole appearance.” A press release explains the set-up: Participants viewed “schematic point-light displays that depict a person using 15 moving dots." 

The dots gave participants a sense of both the person’s body shape and their movements; that allowed the researchers to grade both the most attractive shapes and movement styles. They then made super-attractive hybrids by pairing the most attractive in both buckets. But participants found the hybrid walkers to be less attractive than the two individual walkers who made up the hybrid, Troje explains in a blog post. 

"We found that attractiveness depends on internal consistency — whether the movement and the shape match each other or not.” If they don’t, our visual system will respond negatively. One practical application of the results: “to formulate advice to people who are working on improving their own appearance,” says Troje, who observes that what makes someone else good-looking may not work for you. (Here’s what attractiveness has to do with love at first sight.)

In this July 7, 2015 file photo, Jared Fogle leaves a mobile evidence-gathering lab outside his home in Zionsville, Ind. (Image via Charlie Nye/The Indianapolis Star via AP)

Jared Fogle had something for minors, but it wasn’t money: Turns out his foundation to help battle childhood obesity did little but raise the Subway pitchman’s profile, USA Today reports. According to tax records, the Jared Fogle Healthy Lifestyle Nationwide School Grant Program spent an average of just $73,000 annually between 2009 and 2013 and never issued a grant. This despite Fogle’s promise to give schools and community organizations $2 million to battle the condition that so affected his own life. 

“My goal is to help children avoid the physical and emotional hardships I went through living with obesity,” he said at the time, per a press release. The 2008 release outlined a plan to offer $20,000 grants to up to 50 schools (for a total of $1 million) in that same year. 

Seems 60% of the non-profit’s documented expenditures went to executive director Russell Taylor, 43 (now jailed on child pornography charges), and 26% went who knows where. What’s more, records show that his organization hadn’t paid a $5 yearly registration fee to the State of Indiana since 2008, when the non-profit was slated to begin operations. In fact, Indiana dissolved the Jared Fogle Healthy Lifestyle Nationwide School Grant Program three years ago, although it’s still recognized by the IRS. 

“As with a lot of celebrities, the charity appears to be more about image-enhancement than charitable deeds,” says a charity analyst. Fogle, who has apparently pleaded guilty to child porn charges, was outed by an ex-journalist who secretly recorded him for years.