Noted

The notion that regular exercise can ward off depression has been borne out in a study of more than 1.2 million US adults, the largest of its kind to date. Using self-reported survey data, collected by the Centers for Disease Control in 2011, 2013, and 2015, assistant psychiatry professor Adam Chekroud ’18PhD and his colleagues discovered that people who work out regularly—about 45 minutes three to five times per week— experienced slightly less than two days of “bad mental health” per month versus nearly three and a half days of depression in the general population. Those who engaged in team sports did the best, Chekroud reported in The Lancet. But overzealous exercisers beware: more exercise was often associated with worse mental health.

By analyzing fossilized eggshells, Yale molecular paleobiology graduate student Jasmina Wiemann and an international research team showed that the red and blue pigments that color modern birds’ eggs arose more than 100 million years ago, among the dinosaurs known as theropods. In an online edition of Nature, the researchers suggested that the pigment pattern arose when dinosaurs started leaving their eggs in open nests. That behavior, Wiemann argues, “favored the evolution of camouflaging egg colors and individually recognizable patterns of spots and speckles.”

One of the driving forces behind today’s often virulent anti-immigrant sentiments is the fear that anyone with a dual identity, from Arab Americans to fans of the local soccer team, will be disloyal to the interests of the majority group. In five separate experiments published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Yale postdoc Jonas Kunst and his colleagues showed how this powerful bias could engender bad feelings toward the minority-group member. They also found that, if a dual-identifier proved loyal to the majority, the prejudice might be muted and “improve relations across societies.”