weight
dr. dolittle | February 6, 2016 By Hollingsworth John and Karen, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Researchers are spending a lot of time exploring how the microbes living in our guts impact our health. In a new study published in Cell Reports, researchers wanted to know how the gut microbes of wild brown bears changes between summer and hibernation. They discovered that during the summer, the microbial species present in the gut are more diverse and are of the type that helps store energy. In fact, when the research team gave the microbes to rodents, the rodents gained weight. This…
razib | September 1, 2009I have recently mentioned an analogy between the heritability of height & weight. That is, the proportion of variance of the trait which can be explained by variance in the genes. How closely do parents resemble offspring. A new paper in PLoS ONE, How Humans Differ from Other Animals in Their Levels of Morphological Variation, look at how this variation among human populations compares to other animals:
Animal species come in many shapes and sizes, as do the individuals and populations that make up each species. To us, humans might seem to show particularly high levels of morphological…
edyong | August 25, 2009Gravity affects not just our bodies and our behaviours, but our very thoughts. That's the fascinating conclusion of a new study which shows that simply holding a heavy object can affect the way we think. A simple heavy clipboard can makes issues seem weightier - when holding one, volunteers think of situations as more important and they invest more mental effort in dealing with abstract issues.
In a variety of languages, from English to Dutch to Chinese, importance is often described by words pertaining to weight. We speak of 'heavy news, 'weighty matters' and 'light entertainment'. We weigh…
cwilcox | May 27, 2009When I interned at Florida Aquarium I had the pleasure of working with two screech owls. Sure, there were bigger, more impressive looking raptors that I could hold and show people, but those pint-sized versions were my favorite. It wasn't just that they were small (though that totally helped). It was that when you'd go to take them out of their cage to walk around with, they would puff up and try to act all big an menacing - which, frankly, just made them look like giant brown cotton balls.
What the birds were aiming to do was make themselves look bigger and more important. All kinds of…
sheril | March 18, 2009A couple weeks back, I composed a post entitled 'Science Reveals How To Lose Weight And Keep It Off'. The results weren't surprising... research out of Harvard found that calories are the most significant part of the equation. However, what really resonated with a number of readers turned out to be a different topic related to this point:
Weightwise, my take is that we humans have an interesting habit of coming in all shapes and sizes and the most beautiful tend not to fit a particular mold. That said, being healthy--inside and out--is everything.
I received several emails in agreement, and…
sheril | March 16, 2009Curiously Laura Ingraham is supposed to be someone who 'stands up for conservative women'. Yet when Meghan McCain criticized Ann Coulter, the best Ingraham could do was to make fun of the 24-year-old's body, joking that she didn't get a 'role in the Real World' because 'they don't like plus-sized models.'
Memo to Ingraham: This kind of neanderthal behavior is not all that becoming of a 'positive role model'. The message we should be all sending to women everywhere--right, left, and across the spectrum--is the truth: Our worth is defined not by how we look, but who we are.
So if that's…
cwilcox | January 21, 2009Everyone knows that dieting and losing weight is hard, especially for women. It's like our bodies are hard-wired to fail - and, perhaps they are. At least that is one interpretation of a new study coming out of the Brookhaven National Laboratory this week, set to be published in PNAS shortly.
The researchers looked at the PET scans of men and women after 20 hours of fasting at rest, when looking, smelling, and drooling over their favorite food, and when that food is presented to them but they are told not to think about it. All of the subjects reported feeling less hungry for the food when…
awild | January 21, 2009I know you're terribly bored with ants, ants, ants all the time here at Myrmecos Blog. So that's why we're bringing you something different. It's an ad from the 60's letting you know about an exciting new product for putting on a few pounds:
For some reason it was lying around the entomology office this morning. Entomology leads to emaciation? Thin people don't attract enough insects? I can't figure it.
(h/t Suarez)
cwilcox | November 10, 2008About a couple weeks ago, you might have heard about a study out of the University of Hawaii that found overweight and obese women (BMI>25) had 'more sex' than normal-weighted ones. The study was all over the news because it challenged what we would generally believe - after all, 'skinny' women are hotter, so they should have more sex.
The study surveyed over 7,000 women aged 15-44 about their sexual habits, and a higher percentage of the larger women reported having had sex. The researchers admitted they were surprised. "These results were unexpected and we don't really know why this is…
cwilcox | November 6, 2008Everyone knows that the way women are portrayed in our culture - sexy, skinny, tall - makes the average woman feel a bit like the gum I had to peel off my shoe this morning. When we look at magazine ads or watch TV shows, we women feel inadequate - and it's no wonder, when the average woman model weighs up to 25% less than the typical woman and maintains a weight at about 15 to 20% below what is considered healthy for her age and height. But the 40,000 or so ads the average American is exposed to a year aren't just affecting the girls. A new study coming out of the University of Missouri…
rallain | October 26, 2008The fun part about exploring the physics of [Fantastic Contraption](http://fantasticcontraption.com/) is coming up with new setups to test ideas. Torque is not too difficult to set up. Here is what I did:
In this setup, I have a "turning ball" with a wood stick attached to the side. I increased the length of the stick until the ball does not turn. At this point, the torque from the gravitational force on the stick is equal to the torque from the ball. I can use [Tracker Video Analysis](http://www.…
zooillogix | October 1, 2008A report published yesterday by the Wildlife Conservation Society shows that black bears living in urban areas weigh more, get pregnant at a younger age, and are more likely to die violent deaths.
The study tracks 12 bears living in Lake Tahoe over a 10 year period and compares them to 10 bears living in surrounding "wildland" areas. The urban bears weighed an average of 30 percent more because their diet was delicious, fatty, garbage - basically the same stuff you eat. While the bears in the wildlands typically gave birth between 7-8 years of age, some of the skanky city bears first…
rallain | September 23, 2008In my classes, I like to bring up the question:
*Why do astronauts float around in space?*
The most common response to this question is that they float around because there is no gravity in space. Some people take this a small step further and say that there is no gravity in space because there is no air in space. This is why they claim there is no gravity on the moon (even though there is - more on this later).
I like to start off with the concept of gravity. Gravity is an attractive force between any two objects with mass. Your pencil and your dog both have mass so there is a force pulling…