Catalina I. Fernández, PhD (she/her)'s Avatar

Catalina I. Fernández, PhD (she/her)

@catferna

Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Florida Atlantic University. I study food, nutrition and health from a biocultural and evolutionary perspective. Views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employer.

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24.01.2025
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Latest posts by Catalina I. Fernández, PhD (she/her) @catferna

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Trump Administration Affirms Support for Bayer in Glyphosate Case Make America Healthy Again supporters plan to rally against the proposal when Supreme Court justices hear the case in Ap

Of course this administration, which loves to talk a big game on "health," is trying to protect a pesticide company from legal accountability.

04.03.2026 18:00 👍 5 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
How to explain glyphosate hypocrisy? Bayer’s lobbying and revolving door Here's one place where the MAHA and Food Justice movements agree: on glyphosate.  Here is a post from thefoodbabe (@Vani Hari): LOBBYING This refers to U.S. Right to Know's Bayer lobby tracker. Federal disclosures show Bayer reported spending $9.19 million on lobbying Congress and the executive branch in 2025, which includes fees paid to at least 13 outside lobbying firms…

How to explain glyphosate hypocrisy? Bayer’s lobbying and revolving door

Here's one place where the MAHA and Food Justice movements agree: on glyphosate.  Here is a post from thefoodbabe (@Vani Hari): LOBBYING This refers to U.S. Right to Know's Bayer lobby tracker. Federal disclosures show Bayer…

04.03.2026 14:01 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Come work with us! And get in touch with any questions you might have about the position, our labs or living/working in Germany #PostdocWanted

02.03.2026 12:36 👍 16 🔁 12 💬 0 📌 0

🤩PREPRINT OUT! Using our causal model of 👫 growth, we test if model can estimate growth trajectories of pops. of 🚸 of uncertain age using cross-sectional data. Results: our model provide accurate estimates providing a solution for bioarcheological and other contexts!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

27.02.2026 16:45 👍 14 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 1

AI scribes suck. Check your clinical notes, everyone! I’ve had them cite the wrong body part (left vs right) for surgery, state that I have a diagnosis that I’d specifically said I do NOT have, mistranscribe my symptom descriptions, and more! Genuinely dangerous for so many reasons.

19.02.2026 16:43 👍 7 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0
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Trump Administration Erases the Government’s Power to Fight Climate Change

It's not an exaggeration to say this will result in genocidal-scale death. And I don't mean in the distant, speculative future. Just the tens of thousands of pollution deaths in the relative near-term (Free link.) www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/c...

12.02.2026 22:50 👍 326 🔁 141 💬 16 📌 10
Postdoctoral Research Scholar - Climate Change Impacts We are seeking a skilled and motivated postdoctoral fellow to conduct research on the social and health impacts of extreme climate events and the attribution of those impacts to climate change.The IU ...

🚨🧑🏼‍🔬I’m hiring a postdoc to start in the fall! Come join our growing group here in Bloomington, Indiana.

Please apply if you’re interested in climate impacts, extreme heat and health, climate change attribution and any related topic.

indiana.peopleadmin.com/postings/32142

10.02.2026 17:22 👍 10 🔁 12 💬 0 📌 1

How to turn off Gmail's AI "summaries" while retaining the helpful inbox category tabs--finally!

28.01.2026 18:00 👍 94 🔁 53 💬 3 📌 4

"It's less harmful to me to make sure that they can do the things without the AI than to try and push the AI into my classroom knowing that, at least for some of them, it's going to mean that they don't get to acquire the skills that they need."

This this this this this this this this this this 🙏

28.01.2026 13:38 👍 159 🔁 45 💬 3 📌 2
A person with polio lying inside an 'iron lung'

A person with polio lying inside an 'iron lung'

1 in 200 #polio infections leads to irreversible paralysis.

In the 1960s children suffering from irreversible paralysis caused by polio were required to use 'iron lungs' to help them breathe.

We don't see these 'iron lungs' anymore today because #VaccinesWork

27.01.2026 14:01 👍 531 🔁 215 💬 16 📌 18
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The risks of AI in schools outweigh the benefits, report says A new report warns that AI poses a serious threat to children's cognitive development and emotional well-being.

An invaluable new report. A "premortem" is exactly what we need.

14.01.2026 12:09 👍 250 🔁 96 💬 7 📌 13
The MAHA Dietary Guidelines I: Personal Responsibility vs. Public Health Policy This is the first of a series of posts I will be writing about the new Dietary Guidelines for America, 2025-2030 Yesterday, I gave an overview of the guidelines, finding them cheerful, but muddled, contradictory, ideological, and retro. I do like the cheerful message: Eat Real Food. But after reviewing lsome of the rest of the materials that come with the guidelines, I think those terms miss a more important concern: they are about personal responsibility, not public health.

The MAHA Dietary Guidelines I: Personal Responsibility vs. Public Health Policy

This is the first of a series of posts I will be writing about the new Dietary Guidelines for America, 2025-2030 Yesterday, I gave an overview of the guidelines, finding them cheerful, but muddled, contradictory,…

09.01.2026 14:00 👍 8 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 1
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How saturated fats lost, and won, on new food pyramid New dietary guidelines limit saturated fats to 10% of total calories, but also encourage full-fat dairy, red meat, and beef tallow. How will that work?

“The recommendation to limit saturated fats remains intact. Yet the guidelines also encourage people to eat foods higher in saturated fats… “It’s almost laughable that they kept the 10% limit for saturated fat while really pushing red meat and dairy… Good luck trying to circle that square.”

09.01.2026 13:53 👍 74 🔁 18 💬 2 📌 4
Poster for the talk by Rebecca Sear, entitled "21st century eugenics, scientific racism and the role of academia in promoting political ideology". It will take place on Monday, 8 December 2025 at 4 pm (CET) via Zoom.

Poster for the talk by Rebecca Sear, entitled "21st century eugenics, scientific racism and the role of academia in promoting political ideology". It will take place on Monday, 8 December 2025 at 4 pm (CET) via Zoom.

Next week, we welcome @rebeccasear.bsky.social in our Lecture Series. Rebecca will talk about 21st century eugenics, scientific racism and the role of academia in promoting political ideology. Just register here to participate 👉 rotorub.wordpress.com/roto-lecture...
#PhilSci #HPBio

01.12.2025 14:48 👍 58 🔁 29 💬 5 📌 3

EHBEA awarded a workshop grant this year to researchers aiming to strengthen evolutionary approaches to the study of behaviour in Chile & elsewhere in Latin America, as we're keen to use these awards for outreach beyond our usual community. Congrats to the organisers, & hope the workshop goes well 😊

27.11.2025 15:35 👍 15 🔁 8 💬 0 📌 0
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New Study Finds Gender Equality Linked to Modest Fertility Rebound – But Not Enough to Reverse Long-Term Decline A new study from the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science reassesses whether rising gender equality can help reverse falling birth rates, a long-standing theory in demography. The research, publi...

📉 Many countries are seeing falling birth rates—but can rising gender equality reverse the trend?
A new study from our centre revisits a major debate in demography and finds a modest fertility rebound at high levels of gender equality.

www.demography.ox.ac.uk/news/new-stu...

20.11.2025 16:22 👍 15 🔁 9 💬 1 📌 0
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Under RFK Jr., CDC reverses course on stance that vaccines don’t cause autism A CDC website now promotes the debunked idea of a link between vaccines and autism.

“All I can say is ‘Wake up, America. This administration wants to take your vaccines away from you. And they’re on a path to do that,’” Michael Osterholm, director of @cidrap.bsky.social

www.statnews.com/2025/11/20/c...

20.11.2025 17:06 👍 104 🔁 64 💬 2 📌 0
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No se pierda este 10 de diciembre de 2025 el workshop en Evolución Biocultural!

Estaremos hablando de salud, comportamiento y evolución! 🤓

Link de inscripción aquí 👇

tr.ee/ytgK8OIO7V

18.11.2025 17:09 👍 3 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0

@catferna.bsky.social @ehbea.bsky.social

18.11.2025 17:10 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Hierarchical relationship? Only development will tell | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core Hierarchical relationship? Only development will tell - Volume 48

🚨 PUBLICATION ALERT 🚨

Happy to share a comment, together with Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, on the need of formal models and a developmental perspective to really understand the relationship between environmental uncertainty and the reproductive behaviour of humans 🤓😉

doi.org/10.1017/S014...

13.11.2025 15:27 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Going against my personal rules to post this, but …

Veep is telling us that he likes Grok bc it is most pseudoscientific.

ANTHROPOLOGISTS!
if you can hear me (and you don’t know this already), Grok will come at you with Phillipe Rushton papers to say you’re wrong about genetics and race.

14.11.2025 13:35 👍 10 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0
Spotify – Web Player

Lead is leaching into the environment and lurking in our homes. It's in soil, in water, in food, in our housing.

And it's poisoning people.

The first episode of Untold: Toxic Legacy launches October 22. Trailer here:

open.spotify.com/episode/6M4H...

09.10.2025 09:44 👍 31 🔁 13 💬 1 📌 0

It is hard to overstate the stress produced by the incoherence of academic institutions pumping generative AI when they want to play business and then leaving instructors to deal with the results when they want to play school

28.10.2025 13:45 👍 602 🔁 185 💬 3 📌 14
Mother rhesus macaque with her baby

Mother rhesus macaque with her baby

Postdoc position available at NYU Anthropology to work on topics related to longitudinal aging in the long-running (>80 years) study of rhesus macaque biology on Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico 🧪 #primates #academicsky

apply.interfolio.com/173938

📷: davidraju, wikimedia commons

23.10.2025 18:30 👍 27 🔁 21 💬 0 📌 1
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Will America finally treat child care as a public good? Some states are about to find out In November, New Mexico will become the first state to offer free daycare for children as young as 6 weeks. On the other side of the country, child care is a key issue in New York City's mayoral elect...

Childcare is a public good. The return on investment is high (and VERY well-documented). It benefits children, mothers, families, businesses, and the economy.

The lack of a robust childcare infrastructure is a choice the U.S. has made. We could make a different one.

www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/...

15.10.2025 17:45 👍 37 🔁 10 💬 1 📌 0
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

ICYMI Notre Dame Anthropology will be hiring a post-doc for 2026-2028. This is part of a university-wide initiative to support early career scholars. Deadline is Oct. 31...sorry for late notice.

apply.interfolio.com/171503

14.10.2025 14:22 👍 5 🔁 10 💬 0 📌 1

Our new paper is now out in SS&M! In a sample of US youth attempting weight loss, we found that those motivated to lose weight because of teasing engaged in riskier weight loss strategies and had higher BP and CRP compared to those citing other motivations authors.elsevier.com/a/1ltOu-CmV5...

11.10.2025 20:07 👍 4 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 1

Fat shaming is not just morally bad but also bad for your health. Awesome research by @jennifercullin.bsky.social and Kurt.E White.

13.10.2025 14:50 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
A photo of the Susan Welch Liberal Arts building at sunrise

A photo of the Susan Welch Liberal Arts building at sunrise

📢 Come join us! Penn State Anthropology is hiring *two tenure-track assistant professors*, one in human reproductive ecology and one in archaeology. Here are just a few reasons why working at Penn State is awesome:

01.10.2025 12:58 👍 38 🔁 31 💬 1 📌 0