The review, which examined 11 studies published since 1994, found that programs such as nutrition education and diet/exercise counseling generally worked. Those in “higher intensity” programs such as frequent face-to-face counseling saw the best results, with an average loss of 2.2 pounds to nearly 14 pounds. Given the high costs of obesity for employers—not to mention the government—this is some pretty heartening news.

Unfortunately, there’s more.

Over at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, researchers have found that weekends are the enemy of weight loss, with adults eating an average of 36 percent of their total calories from fat on Saturdays alone, compared to less than 35 percent of fat calories consumed during the five workdays combined.

The study followed 48 adults between the ages of 50 and 60, two-thirds of which were enrolled in diet or exercise regimens. After tracking the subjects for a year, the researchers found that weekends were responsible for a “dramatic” slowing of weight-loss for the majority of participants.

So there we have it: Just as employer programs are helping you drop pounds, in swoop the weekends to keep you fat. Which might be a good incentive for employers to start incorporating “weekend awareness” into all those face-to-face counseling sessions. Either that or make Saturday the new Monday.

Image: iStock

Kushnir’s point is neither incorrect nor new, for scientists or the rest of the working world.

Universities have been openly addressing the gender disparity in their faculties since MIT’s decisive study on gender was released in the late ’90s, followed by a quorum of universities agreeing to start gender equity reviews for female science faculty. Fixing the problem of unequal professional advancement is complicated by the fact that women themselves are divided over whether they should stay in the workforce once they become mothers. Employers are left with the tricky position of neither discouraging women from staying nor penalizing them if they leave to raise children.

Online discussions of the gender parity issue are typically met with a mixture of defensiveness, aggression, and scorn. But rather than simply toss the issue out for the rabid hounds to pounce—and pounce they do, as the comments she received shows—Kushnir also offers a few practical suggestions:

Let women make their own decisions whether to stay or to go. Remove as many obstacles and pressures as possible and let the choice be theirs…. Institute reasonable day care at universities. Allow for extended maternity leave and the option of paternity leave.

Still, while these changes might help female professors accommodate child-rearing in the short term, they do little to address the larger problem that women in academia have reported: Those who reach higher levels are consistently seeing their work and ideas downplayed or ignored. With so many women “dropping out” of the game, it simply perpetuates the “fewer women in higher positions, so less support for the younger ranks” cycle. Of course, it could also be that the salaries are so abysmal.

“Today…new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory”.  —Pope John Paul II

I can’t write a series of posts on science and religion and ignore Darwin’s birthday. Not when the theoretical structure whose foundations he laid remains one of the principle fronts on the war between science and religion. I have written before about the sullen – the scriptural literalists and intelligent design advocates. They have been the principle provocateurs on the religious side of this unfortunate chasm between science and the domains of human spiritual longing. Today it’s worth noting what they miss in their demand that the process and methods of science cleave to their preconceived ideas about the world.

The Pope really hit the nail on the head: “The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.” That’s it! That is the mojo that makes the theory of evolution, the idea of evolution, so extraordinary.

Like Copernicus’s De Revolutionbus and Newton’s Principia, Darwin’s Origin of the Species stands as monument, a turning point, in human thinking. There is a difference between Theories and theories in science. The paper my group just had accepted about stars and winds and turbulence is a theory with a small “t.” It’s a “Colonel Mustard in the Kitchen with a Candlestick” kind of theory. But evolution and relativity and quantum physics, etc.—these are Theories that truly straddle worlds. They draw together lifetimes of experience, experiment, and investigation, and in doing so they allow us to see an infinite web of unseen order, pattern, and—taken in the broadest sense—purpose. It is the grand theories of science that connect it with our most ancient mythological longings to draw closer to and become woven within the palpable powers that animate the world—the longing to draw closer to our experience of the world as sacred. (Yikes, I just used that word again!)

What an absolute bummer that fundamentalists miss this. By literally refusing to allow themselves the sweet vertigo that evolution’s vision of life, order, and change offers, they cut themselves off from the very old roots of their own religious feeling. It’s like sitting in a concert of celestial music with your fingers stuck in your ears because someone told you are only allowed to listen to Abba. As the Pope’s quote demonstrates, there are clearly Christians (big ones) who reconcile their religion with evolution. What is the stinking big deal!

The vision that scientific investigation offers us is grand and sweeping and beautiful and terrifying. Evolutionary theory is vital part of that vision. There is nothing lost to those who respond to the world with spiritual longing to embrace that vision as one aspect of the full range of human experience.