Obesa cantavit

The New England Journal of Medicine published a Harvard study using 35 years of data from the Framingham Heart Study, demonstrating that people who associate with over-weight people are likely to become over-weight themselves.

My ex-roommate Bryan, ever the sleuth, discovered an amazing animation in Figure 2 of the paper, which shows graphically how the obese people conglomerate and become bigger together as little yellow circles. Yellow, no doubt, to allude to bulging lipid micelles.

A hilarious article or blog (? I can't remember which...) on the NYTimes pondered if over-weight people would lose friends as a result of this study. I think they forgot that most of the people in the study were not obese to begin with!

The full text of the article (and the animation!) are available here.