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Migration no guarantee of bird biodiversity

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 01:11:14 +0000

Migration no guarantee of bird biodiversity Rachel Sauer Thu, 10/23/2025 - 19:11

Cody DeBos

�Ͼ�Ʒ�� researchers challenge long-held assumptions about the relationship between bird migration and the process by which new species arise

Every year, billions of birds take to the skies, riding thermal currents and navigating with an innate sense of direction across distances that would humble even the most accomplished commercial pilots.

“Migration is one of the most spectacular natural phenomena,” says Gina Calabrese, an evolutionary biologist and postdoctoral research fellow in the Safran Lab at the �Ͼ�Ʒ��.

Gina Calabrese, an evolutionary biologist and postdoctoral research fellow in the Safran Lab at �Ͼ�Ʒ��, and her research colleagues, tested the theory that bird migration may be a leading force behind the genesis of new species.

Aside from inspiring awe in bird enthusiasts, this ancient ritual has also sparked many scientific theories. One suggests that migration—by way of dividing populations across different routes and destinations—may be a leading force behind the genesis of new species.

“The idea that this behavior could be a major driver of biodiversity has been an attractive one,” Calabrese says.

But does it hold up under evolutionary scrutiny? That what she and a team of co-researchers set out to test in a new study published in Systematic Biology.

Rethinking migration and diversity

Calabrese and her colleagues’ research challenges long-held assumptions about the relationship between migration and speciation, or the process by which new species arise. While scientists have documented cases where migratory behavior appears to be splitting populations, her team wanted to know whether this pattern was widespread enough to have shaped bird diversity at a large scale.

“There a body of literature that suggests migration could promote the formation of new species, by isolating populations that use different migratory routes or wintering areas,” she explains. “If this were a widespread pattern, we might expect migratory lineages to be more diverse today than other non-migrating birds.”

To test the hypothesis, Calabrese and her collaborators examined evolutionary trees called phylogenies that map out how present-day bird species are related to one another. Drawing from massive data sets of two avian superfamilies, they used statistical models to estimate how quickly different bird lineages have diversified over evolutionary time. They then compared the rates of speciation in migratory birds to those that make a home in one location year-round.

The results weren’t what they had expected.

“We found no consistent evidence that migratory birds speciate faster than non-migratory ones,” Calabrese says. “This was a surprise—especially given how much attention the idea of migration-driven speciation has received.

“There are clear examples where migration is leading to population splits—those are real,” she says. “But those examples are often recent, and they might not always result in fully separate species.”

In other words, migration might occasionally set the stage for speciation, but it no guarantee.

“Not every population split leaves a lasting imprint in the fossil record or leads to a new species,” Calabrese adds.

“We found no consistent evidence that migratory birds speciate faster than non-migratory ones. This was a surprise—especially given how much attention the idea of migration-driven speciation has received," says �Ͼ�Ʒ�� researcher Gina Calabrese. (Photo: Todd Trapani/Unsplash)

One reason for this, she suggests, is that many observed migratory divides are evolutionarily young. These populations may just be starting to diverge, and many might merge again over time. Others may remain distinct but not reproductively isolated.

If the goal is to understand how biodiversity has accumulated over millions of years, a short-term snapshot—whether looking at bird lineages today or thousands of years ago—may not tell the full story.

“This is a good example of how something can be true in some cases but not necessarily explain large-scale patterns,” Calabrese says.

Following evidence, not expectations

Calabrese recent work is also a case study in scientific humility. When she and her colleagues first set out to test the migration-speciation connection, they weren’t looking to debunk anything. However, when the results started pointing in a different direction than their hypothesis, they remained committed to following the data.

“I think it important that we test assumptions—even appealing ones—with data,” Calabrese says.

The process also gave her a new perspective on how the scientific method plays out in real-world applications.

“I was a little anxious at first, until I kind of really felt like I had a handle on what my results were and felt confident in them. And then at that point, your job is just to tell the story of what your data show,” she adds.

While this study might have raised more questions than it answered, that part of what keeps Calabrese curious and driven to study the incredible phenomenon that is migration.

“It a little disappointing because you want to believe that what you’re studying today is explaining the answers to your bigger questions,” she says. “But it also cool because our findings mean that there still a lot to understand about how we get the diversity we see today and there still some mystery out there to solve, which is cool to me.”

�Ͼ�Ʒ�� Professor Rebecca Safran contributed to this research, as did Kira Delmore, Jochen Wolf and Daniel Rabosky.

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�Ͼ�Ʒ�� researchers challenge long-held assumptions about the relationship between bird migration and the process by which new species arise.

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Top image: InstaWalli/Pexels

Exploring Colorado untapped geothermal energy potential

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 21:00:33 +0000

Exploring Colorado untapped geothermal energy potential Rachel Sauer Wed, 10/22/2025 - 15:00

A major question looms over Colorado energy future: Why does geothermal energy—a natural renewable resource—remain virtually untapped?

Assistant Teaching Professor Shae Frydenlund of the �Ͼ�Ʒ�� Center for Asian Studies, along with Professor Bri-Mathias Hodge of the Department of Electrical, Computer & Energy Engineering, will examine the technological and social barriers that have held back geothermal development in Colorado.

Learn more about this research

A major question looms over Colorado energy future: Why does geothermal energy—a natural renewable resource—remain virtually untapped?

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Research on python hearts has possible implications for human medicine

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 20:30:32 +0000

Research on python hearts has possible implications for human medicine Rachel Sauer Wed, 10/22/2025 - 14:30

Blake Puscher

�Ͼ�Ʒ�� scientists discover the growth of new tissue in Burmese python hearts, which may be transferrable to mammals

Heart disease is the top cause of death in the United States, resulting in one in three deaths in 2023. In addition to being such a vital organ, the adult heart, unlike other parts of the body, cannot heal itself, only adapt to the damage caused by cardiac events like heart attacks.

In cases of minor injuries like skin wounds, damaged tissue grows back as the surrounding cells begin to replicate themselves and ultimately replace what was lost or damaged. Because cells in developed hearts cannot replicate, they must instead change in size and organization to adapt, but this process is itself pathological and will eventually lead to heart failure if the underlying issue is left untreated.

All of this is true in humans, but there are some examples of animals that can grow new heart cells even after the early stages of their development. Newts, zebrafish and spiny mice can all restart the mitotic reproduction of heart cells as adults in response to cardiac injury. In a previous study of hypertrophy—the process adult human hearts use to adapt to damage—in Burmese pythons, �Ͼ�Ʒ�� researchers discovered that the snakes’ heart cells can replicate themselves, too, under certain conditions.

�Ͼ�Ʒ�� postdoctoral researcher Yuxiao Tan and his research colleagues are studying the mechanism by which pythons' heart cells are enabled to replicate and how it could be transferred to mammals.

Yuxiao Tan, Thomas Martin, Angela Peter, Christopher Ozeroff, Christopher Ebmeier, Ryan Doptis, Brooke Harrison and Leslie Leinwand conducted a recently published follow-up study based on this information, not only discovering a fuller, dynamic model of how pythons grow after meals, but also the mechanism by which their heart cells are enabled to replicate and how it could be transferred to mammals. According to Tan, once this transferability is fully explored, it is possible that the process could be used to treat the tissue damage associated with heart disease.

Hyperplasia vs. hypertrophy

First, it important to understand the difference between the kind of growth that allows for regeneration and the kind of growth that normally occurs in the adult human heart. The first form of growth is called hyperplasia and the second is called hypertrophy.

“Hypertrophy means the cell is growing in size,” explains Tan, a postdoctoral researcher in the Leinwand Lab. “Hyperplasia means the cell is dividing, proliferating, so they are growing in numbers.” Hyperplasia happens because of a cellular process called mitosis, while hypertrophy happens because of an expansion in the volume and surface area of cells.

The human heart undergoes both hyperplasia and hypertrophy, but hyperplasia only happens during fetal development; after that, the heart can only grow when its cells increase in size. Both processes cause growth, but hyperplasia can be regenerative, and hypertrophy can be adaptive. Additionally, although hypertrophy is pathological in the context of cardiac injury, it can also be healthy or physiological, in which case it is reversible. The pythons in this study underwent physiological hypertrophy because no injuries were introduced to their hearts.

Growth after meals

Burmese pythons are predators that consume large prey infrequently, sometimes going months or even more than a year without feeding. When they are between meals, their metabolism is slowed to save energy, but once they begin digesting a large meal, it increases massively.

Correspondingly, the python organs, including the heart, grow, expanding by 20 to 40 percent over several days. This growth was generally understood to be driven by hypertrophy because the python organs return to their normal size almost as quickly as they grow—it is reversible, just like physiological cardiac hypertrophy in humans. However, the researchers discovered that, if fed enough, the python heart would not shrink all the way back to what its weight was before feeding.

“Their organs grow after a big meal,” Tan says, “but it very transient, very temporary. After one standard meal, if you look at other papers, the organ shrank back to its original size.” Depending on how much and how often the pythons ate, though, the results were different, as the researchers proved by assigning 24 pythons different feeding regimens and observing how those regimens affected them. The pythons were either “Fasted,” “Normal Fed,” “Frequent Fed” or “Frequent Fed/Fasted.”

Burmese pythons are predators that consume large prey infrequently, sometimes going months or even more than a year without feeding. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

“There were frequent feeding regimens, which means we fed them every four days, and they usually average 28 days between meals,” Tan explains. As expected, the Fasted pythons grew the least while the Normal Fed animals grew a bit more and Frequent Fed and Frequent Fed/Fasted pythons grew massively. Meanwhile, although the Frequent Fed and Frequent Fed/Fasted pythons were fed the same amount for eight weeks, the fact that the latter was not fed for four weeks after led to unique results.

While the Frequent Fed/Fasted pythons’ body weight and major organ masses (such as those of the kidney and liver) decreased once they were no longer able to eat so often, the total weight of their hearts remained elevated. This indicates that, while heart growth in Burmese pythons is normally caused by hypertrophy, when they can eat often enough, a different kind of cellular signaling occurs in the heart, and hypertrophic growth is locked in through hyperplasia. So, under the right circumstances, both methods of growth occur, with hypertrophic growth preceding hyperplastic growth.

“It a hybrid model,” Tan says. “In the past, we only considered hypertrophy, but in my study, hypertrophy happens first, and then it quickly followed up by the hyperplastic process.” Tan says that hyperplasia comes with de-differentiation in this case: The cells that are able to multiply lose their adult functionality during the process.

“During hypertrophy, they don’t want proliferation yet, because cells will de-differentiate and lose contractility. That why, at the early stage, when they need the heart to perform, it just hypertrophy, but once they complete most of the process, the heart can take a short break, so the cells can divide as well. I propose that why hypertrophy happens first.”

Differential gene expression

This leaves an important question: How do Burmese python hearts undergo hyperplasia when adult hearts, including those of these pythons, aren’t normally able to? The answer has to do with the way that genes are expressed by heart cells.

In a previous �Ͼ�Ʒ�� study, researchers showed that the plasma of fed Burmese pythons promoted healthy cardiac hypertrophy in mammals. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Heart cells are capable of hyperplastic growth in principle—they do it during fetal development to form the basic structure of the adult heart. However, after that early stage of development, the heart changes in many ways, including its cells becoming unable to replicate. These two forms of behavior, or differential expressions of the genes, occur because some of the cells’ genes are inactivated after early development.

The genome is like a set of instructions or code that determines how cells behave, with individual genes being like one item in a list of instructions or a line of code. When a gene is inactivated, it is like an item being crossed out or a line of code being commented out: The information isn’t lost, but the way it is annotated tells cells not to follow that part of the instructions or execute that code. Still, something that is crossed out can be rewritten, or something commented out can be uncommented, and this is true for genes as well; a gene that is inactivated can be reactivated.

“You have genes involved in mitotic pathways,” Tan says, “and when they get activated, that will send cells into a mitotic stage, so the cells will prepare themselves for division.” This differential expression is studied through gene set enrichment analysis. “Enrichment simply means these genes in a cluster of genes are activated at the same time,” Tan explains.

Aside from the masses of Frequent Fed pythons’ hearts remaining elevated, the researchers know that mitosis is happening in the animals’ hearts because they observed signals associated with cellular reproduction and because the process was captured with 3D imaging.

“First of all, you see green, because the pHH3 protein is activated, and that means cells are in the mitotic stage,” Tan explains. “For a non-dividing cell, you wouldn’t see anything. Then the figure shows a cell with two nuclei. Everything has one nucleus, but in that cell, there are two, and they’re pulling apart.” This describes the process of mitosis, where the cell duplicates its DNA in its nucleus, the barrier between the nucleus and the rest of the cell breaks down, and the two nuclei—or sets of nucleus content, which will soon become distinct nuclei—are separated into their own cells.

Implications and future research

Although the researchers have good evidence that something in Frequent Fed pythons’ bodies is triggering hyperplastic growth in their hearts, what it is exactly remains unknown. Tan says that the growth was likely triggered by circulating factors in the pythons’ blood plasma. In an earlier study, the researchers showed that the plasma of fed Burmese pythons promoted healthy cardiac hypertrophy in mammals. Along the same lines, the plasma of fed pythons, and especially that of Frequent Fed pythons, activated hyperplasia.

Could pythons' wild feeding habits inspire new treatments for human heart disease?

“The python plasma started the cell cycle again, so that means there something there,” Tan says. “You can translate the snake biology to mammals, because the protein activated mammal cells. It hard to say if we could use this for drug development, but that provisioned here. You identify the factor, synthesize it, and use that. I think it has the potential to be something, but we just don’t know yet.”

A medicine that can regenerate people hearts sounds like it would change the world, but because this study did not involve Burmese pythons with injured hearts, we don’t even know how much they could recover using this process yet, much less how well it would work in humans.

“Once people get a heart attack,” Tan says, “the injuries have already happened, and some cells have died already, which will affect your heart function. You can’t just fully recover and get rid of the scar, but at least if the heart cells are able to grow back, even just a little, that going to help your overall cardiac function.”

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�Ͼ�Ʒ�� scientists discover the growth of new tissue in Burmese python hearts, which may be transferrable to mammals.

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New learning center more than just a place to study math

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 21:30:48 +0000

New learning center more than just a place to study math Rachel Sauer Mon, 10/20/2025 - 15:30

Rachel Sauer

The Applied Mathematics Community and Learning Center, opened last month after a summer-long renovation, invites students to collaborate, hang out and learn

In one corner of the common room, Ben Sewald is writing an equation on a whiteboard. A first-year �Ͼ�Ʒ�� student, he still deciding whether to major in aerospace engineering or applied mathematics but knows one thing for sure: Discrete math is his favorite class.

“The whole time before this, I’ve been learning math, but in this class it about how we can prove that these things are true,” he explains as he writes.

Ben Sewald, a first-year �Ͼ�Ʒ�� student, writes an equation for his discrete math class in the Applied Mathematics Community and Learning Center. (Photo: Rachel Sauer)

Not far from him, but on a different whiteboard, Atticus Fretz, a sophomore studying environmental engineering, is tutoring two Calculus I students, pointing with a blue marker to explain each part of the equation as he writes it.

And through the rest of the common area—and in the three classrooms arrayed from it—the hum of applied mathematics hovers around students solo studying or clustered in groups; around tutors explaining the finer points of differential equations, algorithms and data structures and every level of calculus; and around faculty members expanding on what they taught in class—but from the comfort of a lounge chair.

It the middle of a Thursday afternoon, and the Applied Mathematics Community and Learning Center (CALC) is hopping.

Opened last month after a summer-long, $1.7 million renovation of a section of a classroom wing in the �Ͼ�Ʒ�� Engineering Center, CALC is designed to be “a warm, inviting space for undergraduate students, especially engineering calculus students, to learn, hang out and work on their coursework,” explains Mark Hoefer, professor and department chair of applied mathematics.

The space, in ECCR 252, formerly was a computer lab, “but it wasn’t heavily used,” says Silva Chang, a full teaching professor of applied mathematics. “So, we started talking about creating a comfortable, welcoming place where students could feel at home and hang out with their friends while they study and learn.”

When it was a little-used computer lab, the space was darker and not especially comfortable, so the renovation included jackhammering through concrete walls and replacing them with glass to allow in natural light, painting the walls in lighter colors, replacing carpeting and lighting and arranging comfortable chairs and benches around the space.

“We want this to be a space that supports collaboration,” Chang says.

CALC will become a home to all-day drop-in office hours with faculty members and teaching assistants; tutoring with applied mathematics-trained tutors; small, learning assistant–led study groups; workshops on study strategies; and proactive student outreach, Hoefer says. Further, faculty and staff will continually work with students to assess how they’re using the space and what would improve or enhance their experiences in it.

“I think people are slowly discovering this space,” Silva says, gesturing to students grouped around tables and in comfortable chairs or writing on whiteboards. “It especially important for first-year students to have a place where they can find mentors and connect with classmates; those things are so important for student retention, so they can feel that this is a place where they belong.”

For Maxwell Minson, a first-year student studying bioengineering and, on this particular afternoon, writing Calculus 3 equations on a whiteboard, CALC is a place where “I feel really comfortable,” he says. “I’m here all the time.”

Atticus Fretz (kneeling, wearing purple hoodie), a sophomore majoring in environmental engineering, tutors Calculus 1 in the Applied Mathematics Community and Learning Center. (Photo: Rachel Sauer)

The Applied Mathematics Community and Learning Center offers drop-in hours with faculty members and teaching assistants as well as tutoring with applied mathematics-trained tutors. (Photo: Rachel Sauer)

Renovation of a little-used computer lab in the �Ͼ�Ʒ�� Engineering Center included replacing concrete walls with glass ones to let in more light, including one etched with the Department of Applied Mathematics logo. (Photo: Rachel Sauer)

Elizabeth Wallis McGuire (crouched, pointing at whiteboard), a junior studying electrical and computer engineering, tutors Calculus 1 in the Applied Mathematics Community and Learning Center. (Photo: Rachel Sauer)

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The Applied Mathematics Community and Learning Center, opened last month after a summer-long renovation, invites students to collaborate, hang out and learn.

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Looking at the big picture (book) of East Asia

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 16:11:56 +0000

Looking at the big picture (book) of East Asia Rachel Sauer Wed, 10/15/2025 - 10:11

Alexandra Phelps

An innovative project in the Program for Teaching East Asia brings culture and history to Colorado K-12 students

Colorado students don’t need to book a flight or get a passport to experience East Asia, because a program from the �Ͼ�Ʒ�� is bringing the region culture and history to them.

For the past two spring semesters, students participating in a �Ͼ�Ʒ�� outreach program to K-12 classrooms have been using a favorite childhood medium: picture books.

The program is coordinated by Lynn Kalinauskas, director for the Program for Teaching East Asia (TEA); Catherine Ishida, assistant director for Japan and Korea Projects; and Christy Go, the program graduate student assistant. They have varied their program to involve many East Asian countries, yet the central goal of their program has always been to develop students' cross-cultural understanding.

Lynn Kalinauskas (left), director for the Program for Teaching East Asia (TEA), and graduate student assistant Christy Go (right), along with colleague Catherine Ishida, assistant director for Japan and Korea Projects, coordinate a �Ͼ�Ʒ�� Ͼ�Ʒ�� outreach program to K-12 classrooms that uses a favorite childhood medium: picture books.

Building a program

Three years ago, Kalinauskas, who is also the co-director of the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia, envisioned a new classroom outreach program that would bring East Asia into K-12 Colorado classrooms via picture books.

In spring 2024, with funding support from the Office for Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship and the Freeman Foundation, the program used books that taught elementary and middle school students about natural science. Books in the program, such as Moth and Wasp, Soil and Ocean and When the Sakura Bloom, allowed students to see agriculture and plant cycles within an East Asian context.

“Picture books offer a wealth of information. You can look at an image and learn so much,” remarks Kalinauskas. Go noted in an article about the first run of the program that teachers were receptive to the medium that offered a beautiful window into another culture. One educator who is grateful for what the program has done for their classroom said, “The carefully chosen picture book prompted interesting reflections and questions. The artifacts enhanced children's understanding and appreciation of the topic. I appreciated how the presenter drew connections between the children's lives and the experiences of the protagonist of the story.”

As the program progressed, Kalinauskas and her colleagues expanded its scope to cover a new topic. In spring 2025, students learned about the geography of East Asia, and the spring 2026 semester will center on learning about the contributions of famous Japanese people.

Pictures of East Asia

The process of choosing which picture books will be used involves a number of factors. At �Ͼ�Ʒ��, the Program for Teaching East Asia is a coordinating site for the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. This national organization administers the Freeman Book Awards that recognize quality books for children and young adults that contribute meaningfully to an understanding of East and Southeast Asia. Many of the books chosen for the project have won the Freeman award.

In the spring 2025 semester, the five books chosen were The Ocean Calls: A Haenyeo Mermaid Story by Tina Cho, Warrior Princess: The Story of Khutulun by Sally Deng, The Sound of Silence by Katrina Goldsaito, Rice by Hong Chen Xu and Mommy Hometown by Hope Lim.

A book such as Rice can be an important addition to the curriculum as it highlights agricultural practices in southern China, informing the reader about the impact geography has on people daily lives, their environment and cultural practices.

Lily Elliott (EBio, AsianSt'25) reads Rice to elementary school students. (Photo: Christy Go)

Students teaching students

Organizers note that the program is innovative not because it teaches students through picture books, but because it gives an internship opportunity to �Ͼ�Ʒ�� students of all disciplines and brings these new interns into Colorado classrooms.

Every fall, TEA staff begin recruiting for the spring outreach. Applicants have to submit short essays and participate in an interview. It is important that students selected be excited to teach about East Asia.

The process of working with the �Ͼ�Ʒ�� students is individualized and collaborative. Go says she works as a mentor for the students, adding that the staff work with student interns on multiple levels from how they should dress when presenting in classrooms, school procedures and what to expect when teaching children. Students work with the staff to identify the important characteristics of their assigned book and develop a lesson plan. Because students may visit different grade levels, they also learn to adapt their lessons to different age groups.

Teachers participating in the program often try to align the book selection with the material they’re already teaching. “We had kindergarten and second grade classrooms that were learning about the life cycles of plants, so they chose When the Sakura Bloom because they wanted to talk about the connection (between the East Asian representation and their science),” reflects Go. “Tracing the life cycle of the Sakura (cherry blossom) tree in the story not only reinforced student learning of the plant life cycle but also engaged students in discussing cultural events inspired by these natural processes through the presentation of hanami (cherry blossom–viewing picnic events) in the story.”

In the classrooms, CU student interns provide background information for students. The CU interns each read aloud while pointing out cultural representations, key characters and concepts, location, relationships between characters and relevant context related to the themes, science or geography. One CU student teaching The Ocean Calls introduced different sea life and later asked students while they were reading to point out the animals. This is followed by a lesson plan and an interactive activity. For one student teaching Sound of Silence, a book about a boy trying to find silence in the city of Tokyo, “our student found sound clips of different places in Tokyo and had students listen and guess where they were,” remembers Go. “Students loved it!” The presentations are like “a traveling show,” says Kalinauskas, who oversees each step of this process.

Beyond their involvement in coordinating with teachers, choosing books and mentoring student interns, staff take their commitment to the program one step further by driving student interns to schools all around Colorado.

"Picture books offer a wealth of information. You can look at an image and learn so much."

More than a cup of noodles

In the first year, 64 classrooms participated; the following year, interns presented in 49 classrooms. The classes are usually in the Denver-Boulder metro area but have reached as far as Greeley. While mainly aimed at elementary classrooms, program organizers have also brought their CU interns to middle schools and one high school classroom. Additionally, if a school is too far to be reached by car, like one school in Grand Junction, interns have done interactive Zoom presentations.

This program has been enriching for Colorado K-12 students while simultaneously being a great educational experience for the �Ͼ�Ʒ�� student interns. Kalinauskas and Go have found that through this program, many students have gained professional skills and experience that have expanded their career pathways. Two former graduate students in education are now teaching in local schools. Another student intern, who taught a book on Korea, was so inspired that she moved to Korea to teach English.

For Colorado teachers, the program doesn’t end when interns leave their classroom. Although the presentations cover only one book, each classroom receives a copy of every book in that semester program for students to read for years to come. Teachers also receive cultural information and teaching resources to engage students in learning about all the books in the program. TEA also hosts a fall in-person workshop for Colorado teachers focused on the same books. Kalinauskas and Go note that although they aim to expand their program to many new classrooms, some teachers love it so much they have participated in multiple semesters.

TEA is bringing its program into Colorado schools next spring. The focus for Spring 2026 will be on the biographies of famous Japanese people and Japanese culture. The program features the story of a young female artist in Japan during the Edo period, the first woman to summit Mount Everest and a story about how Momofuku Ando created one of the world most popular foods, instant ramen.

“The picture book Magic Ramen not only teaches us about how instant ramen was created but takes us back in time to Japan post-World War II, where a young man was trying to feed people in Osaka,” says Kalinauskas. “We don’t always think about that historical context when we are just having our cup of noodles.”

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An innovative project in the Program for Teaching East Asia brings culture and history to Colorado K-12 students.

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Top image: Isaac Kou (CompSci, EBio'25) reads "The Sound of Silence" to first-grade students. (Photo: Christy Go)

Building a digital home for Arapaho, one sentence at a time

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 15:54:34 +0000

Building a digital home for Arapaho, one sentence at a time Rachel Sauer Mon, 10/13/2025 - 09:54

Cody DeBos

�Ͼ�Ʒ�� linguistics scholar Andrew Cowell helps Arapaho stories find new life online

The Arapaho words beteen, meaning “sacred,” and beteneyooo, “one body,” have a special connection for those who speak the language. Their linguistic similarity isn’t a coincidence.

Andrew Cowell, a �Ͼ�Ʒ�� professor of linguistics and faculty director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS), says the Arapaho see it as a lesson encoded in the language. “It indicates that the body is sacred and therefore we have to protect it,” he says.

Such examples of cultural knowledge don’t always survive translation. That exactly why Cowell belief in the importance of preserving Indigenous languages led him to redirect the entire trajectory of his career.

�Ͼ�Ʒ�� linguist Andrew Cowell, faculty director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS), has partnered with a host of collaborators including CU students, community partners and native speakers to build digital tools to protect and revitalize the Arapaho language.

It also why, for the past two decades, he and a host of collaborators including �Ͼ�Ʒ�� students, community partners and native speakers, have been building digital tools to protect and revitalize the Arapaho language.

Cowell didn’t originally come to �Ͼ�Ʒ�� to work on Arapaho, but he has long been curious about Indigenous languages, in part thanks to his personal connection to Native Hawaiian culture through his wife.

“Arapaho was the native language of Boulder, so when I got hired at CU I decided, well, I’ll look into Arapaho,” he recalls. “I started looking into Arapaho more and more and doing more work on the side and eventually decided to switch departments into linguistics so I could focus all my energy on indigenous languages.”

Two databases, one goal

Today, Cowell work on Arapaho takes two forms: one, an online lexical database; the other, an unpublished, in-depth text database of natural language conversation and narratives.

The lexical database, freely accessible online, functions like a living dictionary. With more than 20,000 entries and a searchable interface, it often used by learners across the Arapaho-speaking world in place of print dictionaries, according to Cowell.

But a larger effort has quietly been taking shape behind the scenes.

The text database, which is not publicly released, contains more than 100,000 sentences of spoken Arapaho. Among them are natural conversations and stories recorded over decades.

“At this point, I’ve got over a hundred thousand sentences of natural speaking that I have not only recorded, but also transcribed into written Arapaho, translated into English, and then it has linguistic analysis attached as well,” Cowell explains.

The database is the backbone of several major projects, all with the goal of making learning Arapaho more accessible and preserving it for future generations. One effort is a student grammar dictionary that focuses on the most useful and common words.

“We’ve gotten a list of the frequency of all the nouns in the language and all the verbs," Cowell says. "We ranked those, and it allowed us to produce a really small student dictionary where we only included words that occurred around 40 times or more.

“It means (students) don’t have to flip through rare and uncommon words they’re unlikely to be really interested in as initial learners.”

A pathway for new learners

Beyond the student dictionary, Cowell and his team are working on developing a scaled curriculum for teaching Arapaho. It guides learners from basics to more complex concepts across sequential levels based on real-world language use patterns.

Young Arapaho dancers (Photo courtesy the Wind River Casino)

“We’ve developed 44 steps of knowledge, and even within that there's 23a and 23b and so forth,” he says. “It all based on looking at the text we've collected and looking at the frequency of certain kinds of grammatical features that occur.”

Unlike French or Spanish, Arapaho wasn’t historically taught in a classroom but passed down through families at home. Cowell team has had to build an instructional framework from the ground up.

“With Arapaho, no one really ever tried to teach it as a second language. Now we’re trying to learn it and teach it, and the databases have allowed us to really produce that scaled curriculum,” Cowell says.

Generations of trust

Ensuring that his work isn’t just academic has been a priority for Cowell since the start. The database project is built on decades of trust between himself and the Arapaho community.

“The one thing Native American communities have often had problems with in the past is someone comes in, does their research, then disappears. Then the community is left wondering what they are getting out of it. In some cases, nothing,” Cowell says. “I worked hard to establish that I really want to learn the language and ensure my work is something that will feed back into the community and help out.”

That commitment has led to rich partnerships, sometimes spanning generations.

“We’re close to having 100 different native speakers represented in our data. At this point we’ve got grandparents and now their kids are working on it,” Cowell says.

A worthy effort

From a linguist perspective, Cowell explains, Indigenous languages expand our understanding of what language, and indeed human cognition, can do.

“We’re close to having 100 different native speakers represented in our data. At this point we’ve got grandparents and now their kids are working on it.”

“There are many cases in the history of linguistics where people have made a claim like ‘no language could possibly do this,’ and then someone goes to the Amazon and discovers a language that does it,” he says.

More importantly, the motivating force that has kept Cowell working for over twenty years comes from the Arapaho speakers themselves.

He says, “In my experience, Native American communities are very invested in their language. They see it as really crucial, central to their identity.”

That why the full text database hasn’t been released publicly, especially with growing concerns about how the data might be used or exploited by artificial intelligence. Still, Cowell and his team are taking steps toward broader access.

A grant from the National Science Foundation will support the release of 5,000 carefully selected sentences from the text database for public use. The snippets, which have been approved by native Arapaho speakers, will be available online with additional computational linguistic labeling.

As for Cowell, he says that even after 20 years, he never tires of seeing the work evolve. He hopes it shows CU students what possible when you follow your curiosity.

“You never know where you’re going to end up and what results are going to come out of something. You just have to trust that research is going to turn out to be interesting. You can’t necessarily predict when or where.”

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�Ͼ�Ʒ�� linguistics scholar Andrew Cowell helps Arapaho stories find new life online.

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Top image: "Two Riders Leading Horses" by Arapaho artist Frank Henderson, ca. 1882 (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

2025 Nobel Laureate in physics once served as a graduate student mentor at �Ͼ�Ʒ��

Kylie Clarke — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 18:46:26 +0000

2025 Nobel Laureate in physics once served as a graduate student mentor at �Ͼ�Ʒ�� Kylie Clarke Thu, 10/09/2025 - 12:46

Kirsten Apodaca

Like many rockstar scientists, 2025 physics Nobel Laureate John Martinis spent time in Boulder rich scientific ecosystem mentoring graduate students and inspiring others in quantum computing.

In the 1990s, while working as a scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Martinis also held the position of a physics lecturer at �Ͼ�Ʒ��. His university affiliation focused on research collaborations and mentoring graduate students as a research advisor in the Department of Physics.

“It was important to us to build partnerships with NIST scientists, to foster more research collaborations and opportunities for our students,” said John Cumalat, professor of physics and chair of the department at the time of Martinis’ appointment. “John was instrumental in recruiting graduate students to �Ͼ�Ʒ��.”

It was important to us to build partnerships with NIST scientists, to foster more research collaborations and opportunities for our students. John [Martinis] was instrumental in recruiting graduate students to �Ͼ�Ʒ��.

The Department of Physics history book lists Martinis as a lecturer from 1993 to 1999. He supervised several PhD students, some in partnership with John Price, emeritus professor of physics.

Price fondly recalls his research collaborations with Martinis. When Price was a new faculty member starting out in a related field, Martinis shared his circuit design and building expertise, helped make samples, and provided general guidance and wisdom.

“He was generously helpful with people who had aligned interests and wanted to see everyone do interesting science,” said Price.

While at NIST-Boulder, Martinis worked on fundamental physics and technologies that were critical to the development of quantum devices now used in NIST electronic current and voltage standards.

"John enriched the scientific community not only in quantum computing related electronics, but also in several areas related to low-temperature microelectronics,” said Price.

Much of Martinis’ work at NIST has continued under the leadership of Ray Simmonds (also a physics lecturer) and other group leaders, with physics graduate students continuing to conduct their doctoral research at NIST.

“This is the rich opportunity that our students receive –– it not only the classroom instruction, but also the broader scientific community,” said Price.

Among today's quantum information superstars who worked at NIST are Kent Irwin (top left), now at Stanford, who helped to develop highly sensitive single-photon sensors and John Martinis (right). This photo was taken in the 1990s at the NIST-Boulder laboratories. Photo by NIST.

CU partnership with NIST has flourished over the years, both through JILA, a joint institute between �Ͼ�Ʒ�� and NIST, and through the Professional Research Experience Program (CU PREP) which provides research opportunities for students and postdoctoral researchers with scientists at NIST.

Martinis was one of the co-organizers of the inaugural Boulder Summer School for Condensed Matter and Materials Physics with Professor Leo Radzihovsky, which launched in 2000. He has returned to give lectures during the annual school several times since, maintaining connections with colleagues at �Ͼ�Ʒ��.

Martinis later became a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, before working for Google and most recently co-founded a quantum computing startup Qolab.

The Nobel

Martinis shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Clarke and Michel Devoret “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in an electric circuit,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

In the 1980s, Martinis was a graduate student in John Clarke lab at UC Berkeley, working alongside postdoctoral researcher Michel Devoret. Their experiments focused on electrical components called Josephson junctions – devices made of two superconductors separated by a thin oxide layer that particles ordinarily can’t cross.

Martinis shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Clarke and Michel Devoret for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in an electric circuit.

However, thanks to a quantum effect called tunneling, pairs of electrons can pass through – even though this defies the laws of classical physics.

The idea dates back to 1928, when physicist George Gamow used quantum tunneling to explain why certain materials give off radiation, or alpha decay. Gamow later became a professor of physics at �Ͼ�Ʒ�� and is the namesake to both the Gamow Tower in the Duane Physics and Astrophysics building and to the George Gamow Memorial Lecture Series.

Superconductors, when cooled to very low temperatures, allow electricity to flow without resistance. In this environment, particles behave as one unified wave, all moving together as if they are one.

Through a series of experiments, the team discovered that these large-scale quantum states acted like individual particles, showing behaviors of quantum mechanics like tunneling and discrete energy levels.

This work created the basis for using superconducting circuits to create qubits, the fundamental unit of quantum computers. It laid the groundwork for many researchers and companies now working to build the first operational quantum computers that have the potential to revolutionize technology in many areas, like drug discovery and cryptography.

Want to learn more? �Ͼ�Ʒ�� boasts five Nobel laureates, four of them in physics. Professor of Physics Paul Beale is interviewed about the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics at this link.

Get the latest info.

Like many rockstar scientists, 2025 physics Nobel Laureate John Martinis spent time in Boulder rich scientific ecosystem mentoring graduate students and inspiring others in quantum computing.

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Lights! Camera! Action! Cherry Yogurt!

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 23:04:09 +0000

Lights! Camera! Action! Cherry Yogurt! Rachel Sauer Mon, 10/06/2025 - 17:04

Bradley Worrell

Aspiring filmmaker and �Ͼ�Ʒ�� senior Francesca Hiatt short film, Cherry Yogurt, relies on subtlety to touch on grief and support, viewed through children eyes

Sitting alone on a wooden pew in a quiet church, a 7-year-old boy stirs cherry yogurt in a cup with his spoon. He seems distraught.

Entering the ornate church, a young girl approaches the boy. She asks if he has been crying. He tells her he has a headache, and he points to a pill mixed in the yogurt that he says is for the pain.

Nearby, behind closed doors, adult voices murmur. At one point, a woman can be heard crying softly.

Francesca Hiatt, a �Ͼ�Ʒ�� film major, received an Office of Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship (PACES) Tier 1 micro grant to make her short film, Cherry Yogurt, which began as an assignment in a screenwriting class.

The scene marks the opening of Cherry Yogurt, a short film written, directed and produced by Francesca Hiatt, a �Ͼ�Ʒ�� film major. With her short film, Hiatt didn’t set out to create a neatly packaged story. Instead, in just less than seven minutes, she constructed what might be considered an emotional memory, loosely defined and quietly observed.

The idea: kids watching the world

Hiatt began Cherry Yogurt as a script for a screenwriting class in November. However, the kernel of the idea had been forming long before that.

“I like to write films about adult themes put into children perspective,” she says. “I work with kids a lot, and I’m the oldest sibling of four. Just seeing what adult scenarios look like through their eyes always intrigued me, so that typically what I write about.”

That approach became the foundation for Cherry Yogurt. In the film, the adult world remains mostly off-screen. It hinted at—through murmured conversations off camera. The children in the film aren’t unaware, but they don’t fully comprehend, either. That gap in understanding is central to the short film, Hiatt says.

“Subtlety is really important in this piece. Any time you’re writing from the personal perspective of children, you paint the world how they view it,” she explains.

One thing that is clear to the boy and girl is how slowed down time feels as they wait for the adults to emerge from behind closed doors, as children and adults experience time differently, Hiatt notes.

“Maybe it only an hour long, but if you’re a child kept waiting it feels like it four hours long,” she says.

Making the film was a family affair

As intimate as the short film story is, the production of Cherry Yogurt was even more so. Hiatt cast her younger brother, Victor, in the lead role. Her mother, an actress, also played a part, as did her father, despite not being an actor.

“My whole family are actors. My dad is not an actor—but I made him do it anyway,” she says with a laugh. “It was a family effort for sure.”

Get your spoon and enjoy some Cherry Yogurt.

Watch Cherry Yogurt

In that respect, making the short film felt very familiar, as Hiatt previously directed her siblings in several short homemade movies.

“Back in the COVID days, I was making movies with my siblings in our basement. Honestly, they were not great, but they were very funny to me and I learned a lot from making them,” she says. Later, at �Ͼ�Ʒ��, Hiatt participated in a number of student filmmaking projects, some of which she had a supporting role in and some that she spearheaded.

“I had previously done a couple of other films at �Ͼ�Ʒ��, but Cherry Yogurt was the first film that I made from inception and writing the script all of the way to completion,” she says.

Filming took place over one hectic day, following a prep day that involved doing camera tests for lighting at the ornate Denver church. “It was insane. We only had eight hours to shoot because of a time limit on making use of the location, so we had to just get one solid take and move on,” Hiatt explains.

Despite the rush, Hiatt says the results were effective. She credits her cast—especially the two child actors—for bringing an authentic spirit to the film.

Student filmmaker Francesca Hiatt cast her younger brother, Victor (seated, wearing red hoodie), in the lead role of her short film Cherry Yogurt, which she filmed in one hectic day at a Denver church. (Photo: Francesca Hiatt)

“Flubbing a line is a totally different universe when they’re 7 years old and just laughing,” she says, explaining that laughter and innocence are exactly the point.

The crew and the gear came together

While the film cast was largely made up of family members, the crew came from Hiatt close circle of collaborators at �Ͼ�Ʒ��.

“It a group of four of us,” she says, referring to her fellow film students. “We’ve worked on every single one of each other films since the first day.”

Hiatt also tapped into Denver professional film community, recruiting a professional director of photography with whom she had previously worked. In turn, he brought a few seasoned crew members to elevate the film production value, she says.

All of this was made possible by a �Ͼ�Ʒ�� Office of Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship (PACES) Tier 1 micro grant for $2,000. The funding was awarded to Hiatt Action! Film Club, which she created to provide middle school students opportunities to be part of film projects.

“The grant was huge,” Hiatt says. “I honestly don’t think the film would have been made without it.”

The PACES funding covered the location fee, catering for a 20-person shoot and, crucially, a rented gimbal—a stabilizing camera rig that made handheld shots smoother and more professional looking. The grant funding also paid for all of the costumes and props.

The cherry yogurt of it all

The film title, Cherry Yogurt, seems whimsical—almost trivial—at first glance. That, too, was intentional.

“It was something youthful and it was a symbolic item throughout the film,” Hiatt says. “You hear ‘cherry yogurt’ and you think of something bright, but it doesn’t hint at how heavy the other parts of the theme are.”

Francesca Hiatt credits her cast—especially the two child actors (above, in a scene from the film)—for bringing an authentic spirit to the film. (Photo: Francesca Hiatt)

Some scenes leave questions unanswered. Is the boy distraught solely because of a headache or are there other reasons? Is the pill in the yogurt simply intended for pain relief or possibly for something else? In a later scene, the girl, wearing several friendship bracelets, gives one to the boy, saying they offer protection. But protection from what, exactly?

Hiatt kept those elements intentionally ambiguous.

As for what the adults are meeting about behind closed doors, Hiatt says she originally specified in the script that they were attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In the final version of the film, the nature of the meeting is left unspecified, but Hiatt says it is made clear through the hushed tones of the adults that it something serious.

Post-production offers time for reflection

Final editing of the film wrapped in August, more than a year after Hiatt first wrote the script.

“It crazy how long it takes to make even a short film,” she says. “After finding the (PACES) grant funding, I started all of the pre-production work, which includes establishing the timelines, location scouting, producer work, getting a crew together and securing the cast. It takes a lot of planning and a lot of work getting people to respond, and I was doing all of this on top of being a full-time student and working full-time, so it was definitely a big project.”

Even during post-production, Hiatt says she kept learning.

“I look back and think, ‘Wow, I already know so much more now than when I shot this,’” she says. “I’m lucky to have opportunities to learn quickly and it hard for my art to keep up with how much I learn—even on a daily basis.”

Hiatt recently screened Cherry Yogurt for cast and crew members. Meanwhile, she has submitted the short to a handful of film festivals in hopes of attracting a larger audience for the production. The short film can be viewed here.

Exit, stage left

Hiatt is graduating a year early and will walk with the class of 2026 in May. She has worked with several Denver and Boulder film production companies already and sees herself continuing freelance video work while aiming for her long-term goal: destination Los Angeles.

However, Hollywood is just one possible path to what is most important to Hiatt: “The big goal for me is to get a job that I’m passionate about—something that makes me happy, drives me creatively and where I can make money. Something that makes me excited to go to work every day.”

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Aspiring filmmaker and �Ͼ�Ʒ�� senior Francesca Hiatt short film, Cherry Yogurt, relies on subtlety to touch on grief and support, viewed through children eyes.

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Hindsight may be 20/20, but people feel more strongly about the future

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 21:57:27 +0000

Hindsight may be 20/20, but people feel more strongly about the future Rachel Sauer Fri, 10/03/2025 - 15:57

Blake Puscher

In reviewing psychological studies, �Ͼ�Ʒ�� researcher Leaf Van Boven and colleagues find that people prioritize thinking about the future over the past

Although time travel has typically been the domain of science fiction, whenever you take a moment to remember the past or imagine the future in detail, you are in a sense travelling through time. In psychology, these processes are called retrospection and prospection. Retrospection is thinking about and creating mental representations of the past, while prospection is the same thing but for the future.

Some work in the field of psychology has suggested that retrospection and prospection are functionally interchangeable, but intuitively, they seem to be very different. After reviewing the research in a recently published paper, Leaf Van Boven, a �Ͼ�Ʒ�� professor and department chair of psychology and neuroscience, along with research colleagues Eugene Caruso and Sam Maglio, finds that people think about the past and future differently because of several assumptions that people make about the nature of time (referred to as temporal axioms in the paper), and that people prioritize thinking about the future—a conclusion with implications for how psychological research should be conducted going forward.

�Ͼ�Ʒ�� researcher Leaf Van Boven, department chair of psychology and neuroscience, finds that people prioritize thinking about the future—a conclusion with implications for how psychological research should be conducted going forward.

Temporal axioms

The assumptions people make about time are called temporal axioms because they relate to time (temporal) and are self-evident (the primary definition of an axiom). There are some philosophies of time that disagree with the axioms; for example, block time theory argues that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously, like different places except separated by time instead of space. However, even if such philosophies are true, the axioms remain valid premises because they describe not only people perception of time but also their subjective experiences of the world. The authors propose three temporal axioms—one of direction, one of uncertainty and one of control.

The axiom of direction describes the way all things move through time. Specifically, everything moves only from past to future, with the reverse being—as far as humans know—impossible. For example, if you blow up a balloon with air and then open the end, not only will the air always come out, but it will also be impossible to get the air back in; the balloon can be re-inflated, but it won’t revert it to its original state because it will be filled with different air. In physics, this reality is called entropy, a term for the tendency of all things to progress from states of order to disorder (the collected air disperses) or high energy to low energy (the relatively high pressure inside the balloon is relieved). Entropy defines the direction of time.

The axiom of uncertainty details that as uncertain as people may be about the past, there is at least some information about it, whether in the form of memory or history. Meanwhile, to the extent that the future is known at all, it is because of inference based on information from the past. Therefore, even if people could make predictions with 100% certainty, the uncertainty about the future would be at least as great as the uncertainty about the past, and in reality, it is always greater because people cannot make perfect predictions. “There are always different possibilities for any point in the future,” Van Boven explains, “and there are not different possibilities that actually exist in the past. There were many possibilities, but one of them did happen.”

The axiom of control describes how, because time has direction, the future is more uncertain than the past. This uncertainty creates a sense of control—of being able to choose between different possibilities by acting differently. While there are arguments against people having control over the future, people tend to view the future as more controllable than the past because of its relative uncertainty. Relatedly, according to Van Boven, “people don’t think of themselves as having control over their interpretation of the past, which presents its own set of challenges about how we make sense of what has happened in our lives.”

Prioritizing proception

The way that people think about the future and past is often understood in terms of psychological distance, which is just what it sounds like: how removed a person feels from an event, whether it is in the future or past. “There are many theories of psychological distance,” Van Boven says, “and within social psychology, one of the more prominent theories is Construal Level Theory, which is the idea that when things are in the distant future, they are interpreted on a more abstract level, whereas when they are in the very near future, we tend to think of them more concretely.”

This principle is fairly intuitive. For example, when you are given an assignment, it may not even feel real until the due date rolls around. However, although people think more concretely and feel more strongly about an event three days in the future than one three weeks in the future, they don’t necessarily think and feel the same about an event three days in the future as one three days in the past. In fact, Van Boven and his colleagues found in their review that people do not.

People pay more attention to getting ready for events in the future, and as soon as they pass, that attention quickly fades so they can refocus on what is coming next, says �Ͼ�Ʒ�� researcher Leaf Van Boven.

“When things are in the future,” Van Boven says, “our affective system is highly engaged. As soon as things move into the past, the affective system and our emotional reactions subside.

“A classic example would be, if you have an upcoming presentation, your emotional system will get really jacked up as it getting close, and then as soon as it has passed, even if it is still objectively close in time, the affective system down-regulates itself. The same is true with attention.” People pay more attention to getting ready for events in the future, and as soon as they pass, that attention quickly fades so they can refocus on what is coming next.

The underestimation of proception

One question the review raises is why the prioritization of proception isn’t an established psychological principle when research in the field often involves people thinking about real or hypothetical events, which are necessarily either in the future or the past.

“That has to do with research methods,” Van Boven says, referring to the example about the upcoming, stressful presentation: The fact that people feel more strongly about the event when it is in the future and then tend to move on shortly after it happens could be easily demonstrated in a laboratory setting, according to Van Boven. “The problem is getting a scientific understanding of what exactly is changing. There are many confounds in that event moving through time.

“When we have an upcoming presentation, we still don’t know exactly what is going to happen in that presentation. We don’t know what the room is going to be like, we don’t know what the audience is going to be like. There a possibility that we might bomb, and that would have negative consequences. What we do experimentally is we try to create these situations where everything is exactly the same, and the only thing that differs is whether you’re thinking of it as something that in the future or in the past.” This eliminates all of the temporal axioms except for direction; unlike in real life, in the lab there is no difference in uncertainty or control between past and future.

“This is kind of analogous to an active control placebo in medical research,” Van Boven explains. An active control placebo lacks the active ingredient of the actual medicine being tested but has similar non-treatment effects. This is intended to stop people from subconsciously distinguishing between the placebo and the medicine on the basis of the medicine expected side effects. “The carefully controlled study gives you a very precise estimate of how big the effect is for the specific medicine you’re interested in,” Van Boven says, “but that not how big the effect is that people experience when they take the medicine in real life, because they’re embracing the placebo effect.”

Changing tense

“People who psychologically prioritize the future are happier and healthier than those who prioritize the past."

This review has a major implication for other research, which has to do with the necessity of taking the difference between prospection and retrospection into account, especially during studies that rely on people imagining different scenarios.

“To a large extent, researchers ignore whether things are in the future versus in the past,” Van Boven says. “It just that it has not historically been a dimension that people are really concerned about. So, a very common research approach is to use scenario studies.” Scenario studies involve asking people to imagine different situations, then varying those scenarios to see how it affects people responses to them. For example, participants could be asked to imagine two people going on a date, then to say how well it went. The scenario would vary slightly between groups of participants—for example, who paid or how the bill was split may be different in each group scenario—and the experiment would measure the effect of this difference on how people viewed the situation.

Often in these kinds of experiments there is an implication as to whether the event already happened or is going to happen, even just based on the verb tense used to describe the scenario, and as Van Boven says, “People have been sort of haphazard in terms of whether they present those kinds of scenarios in the future tense versus the past tense. Part of what our review and framework shows is that there may be ways in which we’re understating the effects of different scenarios when we happen to put them in the past (rather) than when we happen to put them in the future. It may be the case that the tense matters a great deal, and it something that we haven’t noticed because we haven’t varied that within our experimental context.”

Changing one focus between future and past isn’t just important in the context of research, however. “People who psychologically prioritize the future are happier and healthier than those who prioritize the past,” Van Boven says. Broadly, an orientation towards the future has been associated with positive outcomes in several areas, including financial success, health outcomes and life satisfaction. “So,” Van Boven continues, “the axioms and resulting psychological patterns are not merely oddities or biases; they help people successfully navigate through life.”

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In reviewing psychological studies, �Ͼ�Ʒ�� researcher Leaf Van Boven and colleagues find that people prioritize thinking about the future over the past.

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What all the buzz about?

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 21:23:44 +0000

What all the buzz about? Rachel Sauer Thu, 10/02/2025 - 15:23

Bradley Worrell

In a week celebrating both National Coffee Day and International Coffee Day, �Ͼ�Ʒ�� scholar and “coffee-ologist” Kate Fischer considers a good cup of joe

By her education and training, Kate Fischer is a cultural anthropologist. But she uses an entirely different descriptor to explain her research focus.

“I sometimes tell people I’m a coffee-ologist,” says Fischer, an associate teaching professor at the �Ͼ�Ʒ�� in the Arts and Sciences Honors Program as well as a seminar instructor in the Miramontes Arts and Sciences Program. While the connection between her chosen career field and area of research might not be clear at first blush, she explains, “My PhD is in cultural anthropology, which allows me to look at coffee from a lot of different angles—from biology and tropical plant science, to agricultural management, to labor conditions on the farms, all of the chemistry and engineering that goes into transforming it (into a beverage), and then the brewing and the baristas in the coffee shops who serve it. So, really it touches everything.”

For those who really, really love their coffee—including Fischer—this week was a special one, as Monday was National Coffee Day in the United States and Wednesday was International Coffee Day.

Kate Fischer, a �Ͼ�Ʒ�� associate teaching professor and cultural anthropologist, researched coffee in Guatemala and Costa Rica during her PhD studies.

With two days this week devoted to celebrating all things coffee, it seemed like the perfect time for Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine to ask Fischer about her thoughts on what makes for a good cup of java, the appeal of both new specialty coffees and old standards like Folgers and the pros and cons of becoming a coffee connoisseur. Her answers have been lightly edited and condensed for space.

Question: How did you come to be a self-described coffee-ologist?

Fischer: I started as a barista back in the day, and I had so many questions. Some people might have been happy to search online for answers; other people, like me, go and get PhDs to get their questions answered (laughs). And then still have questions.

My initial research was in Guatemala and then later in Costa Rica, where I lived for a year and a half while working on my PhD, looking to get the bigger picture of coffee. I was really fascinated by the idea that you could have this same crop grown in so many places, with some similarities but also many differences.

Question: How is it that coffee has become such a big part of the American experience when it not native to this country?

Fischer: Coffee has been a part of the United States for a really long time, but it particularly took off around World War II. Its ubiquity came from the fact that it became a part of soldiers’ rations, so when they came back from the war they were used to it and, as a result, we saw big increases in demand. With modernized packaging and shipping, it became easier to sell on store shelves.

It became this sign of a modern family to have your coffee in the home. Even if they weren’t drinking it as a kid, kids grew up with the smell of it in the parents’ and grandparents’ home. Even people who tell me they don’t enjoy the taste of coffee say they like the smell, because it brings back a lot of memories for them.

Question: Is there any data on how many Americans regularly drink coffee? And how coffee consumption today compares with past years?

Fischer: This year National Coffee Association report tells us that 66% of American adults drink coffee daily, which is more than any other beverage, and up nearly 7% compared to 2020. The average coffee drinker drinks three cups a day. While it up since 2020, over time our consumption of coffee has dropped, because there is so much more competition now.

Question: There is a perception that young people today don’t like coffee. As someone who teaches young adults, do you believe there is any validity to that idea?

Fischer: Again, I think one of the big things is that today there so much more competition in terms of drinks, especially ready-to-go drinks. In the 1980s, your big competition was soda and maybe tea. Today we have kombucha, boba tea, Monster and Celsius energy drinks and so many other choices, so the overall coffee share is probably a bit less.

"I encourage people who are interested in coffee not to get overwhelmed or turned off by some of those gatekeepers who have their opinions of what good coffee tastes like. There are lots of different ways to enjoy coffee," says �Ͼ�Ʒ�� coffee researcher Kate Fischer.

When I ask my students, especially first-years, how many of them drink coffee every day, it just a couple. Many of them have had other caffeinated beverages. But when I ask how many of them drink coffee at some point during the week, then it nearly everybody. So, it might not be every day, but they are drinking coffee at some point during the week. With juniors and seniors, there a definite increase in caffeine consumption, particularly coffee.

Question: How do you explain the appeal of coffee to people who don’t drink it or who say they don’t like coffee?

Fischer: For people who don’t love the taste of coffee, it is more of a caffeine delivery vessel, and maybe a sugar delivery vessel for people who like the lattes with the crazy syrups and other things in them. They want to hide the taste, but caffeine and sugar are strong appeals. For the people who really get into their coffee, there is the sensory side of it, like the way it roasted and ground, and how different preparation methods can make the same coffee taste very different.

I think a lot of people, when they say they don’t like coffee, really it bad coffee they don’t like. They don’t like hotel coffee, or dining hall coffee, or really dark roast coffee. There are so many other good alternatives to those types of coffee if they are willing to try them.

Question: What do you think makes for a good cup of coffee? Is it the beans? The grinding? The brewing process? Something else? Are there any commonalities?

Fischer: All of the above. What makes good coffee is a topic I’ve been looking at for a long time, and it has led me down many rabbit holes.

There are a lot of ways that people try to be empirical about what makes good coffee, which, as a cultural anthropologist, I tend to challenge the notion that you can be empirical about something as subjective as taste, but there are objective pieces to it.

The Specialty Coffee Association has come up with a grading system. For a long time, it was a numeric scale, and they said, ‘Here how you’re going to prepare this coffee,’ and they had this whole checklist of things like the roast level, the grind size and all these different things. And then there is a specialized tasting, called cupping, where experts look at these different attributes and score them. And people are trained to do this, judging coffees on a straight scale of totally bitter to totally sweet, and anybody who has a trained palate will agree on this. They’ve done all kinds of blind tests on this and they are very consistent in their judgments. Today it has evolved to include more holistic assessments that do a better job of separating out objective qualities from preferences.

But really, the answer is: The best cup of coffee is the one you like the best. Like anything else, it a preference.

"For the people who really get into their coffee, there is the sensory side of it, like the way it roasted and ground, and how different preparation methods can make the same coffee taste very different," says �Ͼ�Ʒ�� scholar Kate Fischer.

Question: Do you have thoughts on specialty brands, such as Death Wish Coffee, that are designed to give you a huge jolt of caffeine and basically assault your senses?

Fischer: At that point, is it really any different than drinking a Red Bull or other energy drink? With something like Death Wish, that absolutely a branding style and choice of who they’re aiming it at, and I think they are trying to capture the energy drink crowd by giving them a drink that more (caffeine) concentrated.

Ultimately, I think that about knowing your customer and what the buyer is looking for. So, if you’re trying to sell that customer who wants Death Wish a fruity, really light, delicate coffee, you’re probably not going to do very well.

Question: Alternatively, there are those who just like basic black coffee without any special flavorings or other enhancements. Anything you would say to them to encourage them to broaden their horizons, coffee-wise?

Fischer: There are a lot of people out there who say, ‘I don’t want my coffee to taste like cranberries’ or these other descriptors. They want coffee to taste like coffee, which for them might be something like Folgers. My father, for example, wants a nice, simple, comfort-food version of coffee, and for him, Folgers is comfort food. And for me, it just bitter and sad and needs a lot of help to disguise what it is. Which is not what I want in my coffee.

I try not to judge people for liking what they like when it comes to coffee, but developing a palate for coffee does ruin you. I’ve tried not to be a coffee snob, but once you’ve had the really good stuff and you know what it can taste like, it hard to go back.

Question: With two major events celebrating coffee this week, will you personally be doing anything to celebrate?

Fischer: I hadn’t planned to, but now I’m thinking I should. I would just encourage people to drink coffee and learn something about where it came from. With coffee, it one of those things that can be as complicated or as simple as you want it to be.

Also, I encourage people who are interested in coffee not to get overwhelmed or turned off by some of those gatekeepers who have their opinions of what good coffee tastes like. There are lots of different ways to enjoy coffee.

And it OK if coffee is not your thing. I don’t understand it, but it OK.

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In a week celebrating both National Coffee Day and International Coffee Day, �Ͼ�Ʒ�� scholar and “coffee-ologist” Kate Fischer considers a good cup of joe.

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