How stress and social struggles fuel America’s obesity crisis
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 4-Sep-2025 15:11 ET (4-Sep-2025 19:11 GMT/UTC)
As obesity in America continues to rise at alarming rates, researchers are finding that diet and exercise are not the only driving factors. A new scientific review from UCLA Health explains how stress, hardship and other social challenges can reshape a person’s gut bacteria and brain performance in ways that make it harder to keep weight off.
The European Research Council (ERC) is funding the research project “SINOFANTASY – Studying Imaginative Otherworlds: Chinese Fantasy Fiction, Literary Politics, and Media Creativity” by junior professor Dr. Jessica Imbach (Institute of Chinese Studies, University of Freiburg) with around 1.4 million euros over five years.
The project examines Chinese fantasy and science fiction literature as a mirror and medium of social transformation since the 1990s.
The ERC Starting Grant enables Imbach to systematically build a research team to investigate the media, social and political dimensions of Chinese fantasy in the long term.
Tracking human behavioral patterns in cities can be used to determine urban delineations and urban land use, which has the potential to improve urban planning.
Vanessa Boese-Schlosser has been awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for her work on regime types and socioeconomic interactions. The ERC announced this today in Brussels. With a budget of €1.5 million for a period of up to five years, the ERC Starting Grant is the most highly endowed and prestigious individual grant for early-career researchers in Europe.
Motor skills, the movements produced by our muscles, are often adjusted based on an individual’s altered visual feedback. This is known as visuomotor adaptation and is influenced by the direct and systematic approaches of explicit strategies. However, cultural biases might influence these strategies. In this study, researchers compared the results of an aiming task between two groups of participants from two different cultures, trying to understand the role of cultural cognitive biases.