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Inspiring Science

~ Casting light on great ideas

Inspiring Science

Tag Archives: People

Fight back against junk food marketing

24 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by sedeer in Disease, Humans, Science communication

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

Frugivoro: a board game about health foodMost 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 →

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Whose genome is it anyway?

21 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by sedeer in Discussions

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Angelina Jolie, biology, DNA, Education, Full genome sequencing, Genetic testing, Genome, genomics, Genotyping, Health, Human, People, Popular science, relatedness, science, science and society, Science in Society

Angelina Jolie at the 2010 Comic Con in San Diego (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Fifteen years ago it was the stuff of science fiction.  Now, you can just swab your cheek, send it to a company and, for only a few hundred euros, have your DNA analyzed.  You’ll find out about your ancestry and your predisposition towards certain inherited diseases or conditions (from cancer and diabetes to myopia).  You’ll also learn if you’re a ‘carrier’ — that is, if you’re carrying a gene that won’t affect you but might affect your children.  You can even get information about more light-hearted issues like whether you’re likely to have fast- or slow-twitch muscles or your ability to taste certain bitter flavours.  The technology is pretty great, but it also raises some interesting questions which I thought would be worth discussing (especially since I really enjoyed our previous discussion). Continue reading →

How are humans like ants?

15 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by sedeer in Complex systems, Humans, Language, Mind

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Behavior, brain, Cognition, Human, language, People, Popular science, science and society

Last year, I wrote about how some ants can find their way home after finding food.  They have the remarkable ability to account for all the twists and turns they made while foraging and calculate a direct path leading straight back to their nest.  A reader emailed to ask if I thought humans would ever be able to do something similar or to achieve the level of co-ordination shown by ants.  This post is based on my reply, where I pointed out several things that humans are amazingly good at doing  — in fact, we do them so well and with such ease that you might be surprised by how difficult they actually are!  I’ve spent a lot of time on Inspiring Science talking about behaviours and abilities which show that other animals aren’t just simple automata because I think it’s important to make the point that although humans are unique, we aren’t special; we’re just another species with our own particular tricks for surviving in this world.  I’ll take a different tack in this post and talk about some of the ways we stand out! Continue reading →

What makes our intelligence heritable?

26 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by sedeer in Genetics, Humans

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

biology, G factor (psychometrics), Genetics, Genome-wide association study, GWAS, heritability, Human, intelligence, Intelligence quotient, People, Popular science, science, science and society

English: Thinking, bright idea.A study from the University of Edinburgh claims to have found the basis of our intelligence in thousands of genes scattered throughout our genome. Although the discovery was made possible by a new statistical method and modern sequencing technology, how the results are interpreted hinges upon a century-old debate about what intelligence is and how we measure it. Will we ever be able to measure something so indefinable or discover the genes behind it? Continue reading →

7,000 years of cheese!

05 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by sedeer in Humans

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

anthropology, cheese, dairy, food, Human, Lactose intolerance, Linear Pottery culture, milk, People, Poland, Popular science, prehistory, science

Limburger cheeseCheese may be a gourmet’s delight and a major industry these days, but it was probably originally just a good way to keep milk from spoiling and to deal with lactose intolerance.  In a paper published in Nature last month, a team of scientists from the UK, US and Poland used evidence from pottery remains to show that this venerable art stretches back at least 7,000 years.

Continue reading →

Why do men and women want different things?

30 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by sedeer in Evolution, Humans

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Behavior, biology, evolution, gender, Gender role, partner, People, Popular science, relationships, romance, science, Science in Society, sex, sex differences

Always close. (Photo credit: Hannele Luhtasela-El Showk)Regular readers will probably have realized from the links I share (or from my twitter stream) that sexism and gender issues are subjects which matter to me. Unfortunately, a lot of my discussions about gender get sidetracked by a “pop evolutionary” story based on naïve evolutionary psychology. We “evolved on the plains of Africa”, the story goes, where our preference in partners was shaped by biological needs; modern gender roles and partner preferences reflect these ancestral adaptations. It’s a nice story which does a great job of justifying the existing patriarchal structure, but is it true? That’s a huge question which is unlikely to be settled by a single study. Nevertheless, Marcel Zentner and Klaudia Mitura, a pair of psychologists at the University of York, decided to take it on. Continue reading →

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All text and original images by Sedeer El-Showk. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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