Fight back against junk food marketing

24 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by sedeer in Disease, Humans, Science communication

Tags

Children, crowd funding, diet, Education, food, games, Health, Human, junk food, People, science and society, Science in Society

Most people realize that our food is loaded with sugar and that our eating habits are unhealthy, but it’s very hard to change them. Rather than simply accepting the situtation or complaining about it, my sister-in-law and her mother decided to change it. Over the past several years, they’ve designed, tested, and refined a new board game, Frugivoro, that gets kids excited about healthy foods (and sneaks in some education, too!). Many of our eating habits form in childhood, so this is a create way to counter the deluge of junk food marketing kids are exposed to. Continue reading →

The Origins of Ant Agriculture

20 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by sedeer in Arthropods, Climate, Evolution, Hymenoptera, Insects

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

ants, Behavior, biology, evolution, farming, fungi, fungus, Insecta, Popular science, science

Ants have been farming for far longer than humans have existed. They discovered fungus farming around fifty or sixty million years ago in the wet rainforests of South America, and have continued tending their underground fungus gardens through countless years as the planet changed and changed, and changed again. Much more recently — just a few years ago — I wrote about the fungus-farming ants (called “attine ants”), trying to imagine how they might view human agriculture. Our imaginary attine author closed with the hope that studying humans might help the attines understand their own history, “such as how the transition from primitive to advanced agriculture occured in our own ancestors”, and now a study by a group of humans has shed light on that very question. Continue reading →

Book Review: Born Anxious

12 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by sedeer in Books, Development, Disease, Genetics, Humans

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Behavior, biology, Developmental biology, Gene expression, Health, Popular science, science, science and society, Science in Society

I enjoyed Born Anxious more than I expected to but less than I hoped. Written by Daniel Keating, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, it synthesizes over a decade of research on how stress affects the course of our lives. Keating presents an interesting and convincing case that experiences early in life — or even in previous generations — can set biological switches that have wide-ranging consequences, affecting health, social well-being, and professional success. Continue reading →

Back at last!

12 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by sedeer in Blog

≈ 2 Comments

After a longer-than-intended hiatus, Inspiring Science is back! I’m sorry for disappearing without explanation or announcement and for staying away for so long. Truth be told, I didn’t decide to put the blog on pause until I realized that it had already happened. I don’t yet know how often I’ll be posting — I guess that’s something I’ll figure out n the coming weeks — but I’ll do my best to post regularly.

I’ll start with a book review today, and I’ve already got a couple of other posts planned, one about ants farming and another about evolution and neural networks. I hope some of my (former) regular readers will return and more people will join us. Say hi in the comments, and feel free to let me know if there’s a subject you’d like me to write about!