Our national “obesity epidemic” is spawning disease, shortening life spans and bankrupting our health care system. Or is it? Could our negative attitudes about fatness-a disease that people bring upon themselves through sloth and gluttony-be more hazardous to our mental and physical well being than excess weight? Huffington Post covers the full story
This article addresses the controversy surrounding an 107-page paper by Oded Galor of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and Quamrul Ashraf of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts that is scheduled to appear soon in American Economic Review. The paper argues that there are strong links between estimates of genetic diversity for 145 countries and per-capita incomes, even after accounting…
Until now, analysis of the environment has been the domain of social scientists, who have elaborated the correlations between environment and health or behaviour — for example, that a deprived upbringing increases the risk of deviant behaviours in adulthood. Now, biologists are starting to render visible how one aspect of the environment — stress — leaves marks on the body…
A new company called Art.sy has built an art reference system called the Art Genome Project that allows web-users to discover new art based on their rated preferences. It is for art what companies like Pandora and Spotify are for music. NYTimes has the story
Through the hard work of UCLA Profs. Dan Blumstein (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology) and Barbara Natterson-Horowitz (Cardiology), a growing Program in Evolutionary Medicine has been established. This exciting enterprise brings together faculty and students from across campus to collaborate and educate in the burgeoning field of evolutionary approaches to health and disease. Evolutionary medicine is an emerging field that combines…
Studies by the geneticist and social scientist James Fowler suggest that serotonin, the neurotransmitter connected to mood disorders and depression, is strongly implicated in voting behavior. Article covered in NYTimes Opinion by Victoria Bassetti.