Stories
Finding Associations Between Colors and Concepts
While looking at a graph about fruit, it may seem intuitive to associate a bar of blue to blueberries and yellow to bananas, but are there connections between color and abstract concepts such as driving, comfort, efficiency, or reliability? Understanding how people absorb meaning from visual features, and predicting the meaning they attribute to color in any context is filled with possibility.
Faces of Data Science
In Faces of Data Science, we meet members of the data science community in fields from business, engineering and medicine to limnology, geography and biology, including WID faculty,Stephen Wright and Michael Ferris.
Science Explains Why We Have Favorite Colors
Through a series of lab studies between 2010 and 2017, Karen Schloss, PhD and her collaborator, Stephen Palmer PhD, a researcher at UC Berkeley, set out to find out why we like certain colors more than others. They hypothesized the Ecological Valence Theory (EVT), which they describe in their 2017 paper as the theory that "...people like/dislike a given color to the degree that they like/dislike all of the objects and entities that they associate with that color."
New way to alter DNA, affect health circumvents gut bacteria
In a new study, the John Denu lab has learned that the fatty acids butyrate and propionate also activate p300, a crucial human enzyme that promotes the unspooling of DNA. This unwound DNA allows more genes to become active and expressed, which ultimately affects human health.
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