On November 12th, the Times of India became the latest media outlet to publish a report on a study showing a correlation between breast size and IQ. The trouble is, the study doesn't exist.

The story, in its meagre entirety, goes as follows:

A study conducted in the United States showed that women with big breasts are smarter than those who are less endowed.

Referring to a Singapore newspaper article, Sin Chew Daily revealed that the study was aimed to find out whether the size of a woman’s bust affected her brainpower.

The study, conducted by a female researcher in Chicago, involved 1,200 women.

The subjects were divided into five groups, from extra small to extra big, reports The Star Online.

The study speculated that such women were smarter due to the higher level of female hormones that could result in better development in the brain.

One of the fascinating things about the internet is that with a simple search we can track memes over time, and googling some of the details brings up some interesting results.

For example, this Norwegian newspaper story from November 28th, 2003 - that's six years ago - gives us some more details, including the name of the researcher, sociologist Dr. Yvonne Rossdale, and brilliantly manages to reference 'Einsteins relativitetsteori', which makes me wish I'd paid attention in Swedish lessons in school.

Can Einstein's relativitetsteori explain these?

By January 2004, the story had apparently made its way onto Yahoo News, although the original link appears to be broken.

"...we found that women with big busts average 10 IQ points higher than less well-endowed women," reveals lead researcher Dr. Yvonne Rossdale, herself a meager 32A.

There is tantalising evidence that the story appeared in Mens' Health magazine by 2006 (http://forums.skadi.net/archive/index.php/t-55339.html), although again the link appears to be broken. That same year, one over-excited poster on Village Voice even speculates that this phenomenon could explain why America leads the world:

"American women have the largest breasts in the world and our nation's breasts have been increasing in volume with each generation. According to a recent report, the average U.S. cup size has ballooned to an impressive C. That, the sociologists speculate, may explain why the United States leads the world in science and technology."

But the original study is nowhere to be found, which is not surprising because Yvonne Rossdale doesn't appear to exist, which is in itself not surprising because as the Swedish newspaper article reveals, the very first mention of this study anywhere comes from the November 4th, 2003 edition of Weekly World News. An edition whose front page carries the EXCLUSIVE story that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have secretly adopted a shaved monkey baby together.

That's right folks, the study was a spoof.

There are two things about this story that are genuinely fascinating, and quite important for science communication. The first is how in the name of God this study ended up in any newspaper in the first place - what kind of mind picks up an edition of Weekly World News, skips past the haunted VCR and the shaved monkey baby, and decides that they've found a real piece of science worth sharing?

The second, equally troubling question is why so many newspapers and magazines around the world are willing to simply regurgitate stories without apparently stopping to do even the most basic fact-checking. When picking up a story reporting research by "Dr. Yvonne Rossdale, a sociologist from the University of Chicago", a journalist should at the very least Google her name, and preferably actually contact her to verify the story. That is, after all, what the job of a journalist is supposed to be.

Knowledge can travel the modern world in an instant, but unfortunately, nobody thought to add any checks to ensure that the knowledge was correct. As a result, apparently half of Asia now believe that big-breasted women have higher IQs. That's quite funny, until you realize that by the same process, parents in south Africa now believe the MMR vaccine causes autism, resulting in the recent deaths of four children from an easily preventable childhood disease.

In the information age, ignorance moves at light-speed.