Iowa Climate Statement 2023: It’s Time to Tap Iowa’s Vast Solar Energy Resources

2023 was another year in which global and regional temperatures broke multiple records, and distant heat-exacerbated wildfires degraded Iowa’s air quality. Scientists continue to find that warming temperatures in the global atmosphere and ocean, caused largely by greenhouse gases from fossil-fuel combustion, are interconnected and are a root cause of increasing regional weather disasters1. In Iowa, new evidence links a warmer Gulf of Mexico to wetter spring planting conditions and a warmer atmosphere to rapid drying that creates flash drought and intensified storm systems.2,3 Iowa has multiple opportunities to help mitigate these climate changes with technologies that will also stimulate the economy and produce high-paying jobs.Copyright 2023, The Author

Genetic studies of body mass index yield new insights for obesity biology

Note: A full list of authors and affiliations appears at the end of the article. Obesity is heritable and predisposes to many diseases. To understand the genetic basis of obesity better, here we conduct a genome-wide association study and Metabochip meta-analysis of body mass index (BMI), a measure commonly used to define obesity and assess adiposity, in up to 339,224 individuals. This analysis identifies 97 BMI-associated loci (P 20% of BMI variation. Pathway analyses provide strong support for a role of the central nervous system in obesity susceptibility and implicate new genes and pathways, including those related to synaptic function, glutamate signalling, insulin secretion/action, energy metabolism, lipid biology and adipogenesis.</p