This TED talk from Nicholas Christakis explores how social networks can be applied to understand many aspects of people’s lives. To illustrate this point, Christakis shows that close network ties with people who are obese increases someone obesity risk by 45%. The effect scales up to 3 degrees of separation. This means that people you may not even know or even interact with my have an impact your physical health – i.e. if a friend of a friend of a friend is obese, your risk of obesity is 10% higher than that expected by random chance. Christakis points the the underpinning phenomenon of homophily – birds of a feather flock together. For obese people, it could be that people of a similar body size tend to communicate or that people that have a common exposure to a certain health plugs communicate with one another. Further, if your friend adopts a behavior, the chances that you adopt that behavior too are much higher.

Listen to the full talk HERE.

John Bohannon of Science News reports on a recent study by Yury Kryvasheyeun, a research at Australia’s National Information and Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence in Melbourne.Kryvasheyeun’s team demonstrated that twitter data collected during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 can be a better predictor of damage that FEMA’s models for a fraction of the cost. Their predictions were robust even accounting for confounding factors the millennial bias of twitter users and the existence of twitter bots. This approach to data analytics could be a major step in the modernization of fast and effective disaster relief efforts. Kryvasheyeun hopes to scale up the potential of social media in this realm by incorporating a richer Facebook data set.

Read the full article HERE.

Check out this Superbowl 50 Twitter data interactive created by Luis Natera of cuidadpixel. Interestingly, Lady Gaga trends higher than either team that participated in the game. Natera highlights the differences between the people who tweet about artists vs about athletes as well as the powerful reach of advertisements for companies like Doritos and Esurance.

You can play around with the interactive HERE.

NOTE: The original article is written in Spanish. If you are not a Spanish speaker, we recommend using Chrome to view the article in order to take advantage of the translation feature.

Rafi Letzter of Tech Insider reports that Facebook Messenger has a feature capable of sending information about when other users are online to your computer in plain text. Soren Louv-Jansen used this to write a program that checked Facebook every ten minutes and recorded these timestamps. With that data, he could tell when his friends put turned on their phones in the morning and logged off at night, resulting in a database of his friend’s sleeping schedules. This news is particularly interesting in the wake of Lab Director, Noshir Contractor‘s recent article in PLOS One “Circadian Rhythms in Socializing Propensity.” His team found that the time-of-day that people use social media has a significant effect on the connections the forge. Though most people socialize online in the evenings, the most meaningful communications and friendships occur late at night, when not many people are awake. The research suggest that the presence of oxytocin at that point in the human circadian cycle encourages this deep bonding.

Read the full Tech Insider article HERE.

Read Noshir’s full article HERE.

Adam Pearce and Dorothy Gambrell of Bloomberg Buisiness scanned data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2014 American Community Survey to maps the most common professional pairings across 3.5 million households. Their interactive highlights the five most common occupation/relationship matchups as well as the top male-male and female-female job matchups for each occupation within 435 professional silos.  They note the divergent choices made by opposite genders in the same professions, some cliché and some quite surprising.

Check the interactive here: http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/

A recent New York Times article by Sally McGrane discusses the ecology put forth by German forester Peter Wohlleben in his recent book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries From a Secret World. Wohlleben’s writing is marked by the use of emotive language  – e.g. “trees suckle their children” – to discuss the relationships of forest flora. His style of writing may be evocative, but Wholleben’s ideas are not novel. The book popularizes what environmental scientists have know for some time – that trees negotiate cohabitation through a system of chemicals, roots, and symbiotes that constitute what Wholleben terms the “wood wide web”. Paying attention to these networks might help us change the way we manage forests as a natural resource. Wholleben also hopes it will affect the way conceptualize nature in general if we see the complex communities of individuals rather than stands of ‘oxygen producing robots.’

Read the full article here: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/30/world/europe/german-forest-ranger-finds-that-trees-have-social-networks-too.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1&referer

In a paper released in Royal Society Open Science, Robin Dunbar, a psychologist at Oxford University talks about the number of social relationships an individual can maintain. Known as the Dunbar’s number, 150 is the number of people an individual can maintain relationships with. Then the question of whether modern social media changes that number needs to be addressed. Dunbar surveyed 2,000 people (first national scale random sample study) of regular social media users and 1375 adults who may or may not use Facebook. Studies prove Dunbar’s number. Other numbers that came out of this testing was most people had 5 friends who they could turn for an emergency and 15 friends they call close friends. It gives more evidence to the theory that there is a cognitive limit on how much the brain can handle, despite Facebook’s ability to expand the network.

Read the full article here: http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21688846-online-social-networks-do-not-change-fundamentals-friendship-done-bar

The more social ties people have at an early age, the better their health is at the beginnings and ends of their lives, according to a new study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The study is the first to definitively link social relationships with concrete measures of physical wellbeing such as abdominal obesity, inflammation, and high blood pressure, all of which can lead to long-term health problems, including heart disease, stroke and cancer.

Read the full article here: http://uncnews.unc.edu/2016/01/04/social-networks-as-important-as-exercise-and-diet-across-the-span-of-our-lives/

Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research(link is external), London, compared proteins inside cells to members of an enormous social network, mapping the ways they interact. This allowed them to predict which proteins will be most effectively targeted with drugs.The team found that there are many molecular pathways that interact to affect the development of cancer. Cancer-causing proteins that have already been successfully targeted with drugs tended to have particular ‘social’ characteristics that differ from non-cancer proteins.

Read the full article here: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-us/cancer-news/press-release/2015-12-23-mapping-cancers-social-networks-opens-new-approaches-to-treatment