News by Subject Social & Behavior

The "mismatch hypothesis" argues that our bodies evolved to digest the foods that our ancestors ate, and that human bodies will struggle and largely fail to metabolize a radically new set of foods. This intuitive idea is hard to test directly, but the Turkana, a pastoralist population in remote Kenya, present a natural experiment: genetically homogenous populations whose diets stretch across a lifestyle gradient from relatively "matched" to extremely "mismatched" with their recent evolutionary history.

A new study realized with the contribution of the CMCC Foundation highlights the key role of cities in tackling this phenomenon and achieving the targets of the UN 2030 Agenda. A new framework for assessing urban food waste policies and initiatives, as well as their link to SDGs, that could be applied to any municipality.

COVID-19 has expedited a trend of migration into rural, western gateway communities -- a flood of remote workers are fleeing cities to ride out the pandemic, perhaps permanently. A new study using data from 2018 found that growing populations were causing urgent planning pressures, like housing affordability, in gateway communities. Even pre-pandemic, local officials felt unprepared to respond to and prepare for problems associated with rapid growth. The Utah-based GNAR Initiative aims to help.

The higher temperatures expected over the next 50 years in Europe will accelerate corrosion of buildings, and will expose infrastructure to higher stresses, thus undermining the safety of constructions. CMCC researchers and members of the scientific network established by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, co-authored two studies, suggesting a review of the EU standards for structural design.

As climate change pushes many cities towards dangerous temperatures, planners are scrambling to mitigate excessive heat. One strategy is to replace artificial surfaces with vegetation cover. In water-limited regions, municipalities have to balance the benefit of cooler temperatures with using precious water for irrigation. A new University of Utah study will make those decisions easier for the semi-arid Salt Lake Valley, the largest metropolitan area in Utah located in the northern part of the state.