Research

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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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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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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And the heavyweight champion of TV is ... HBO!

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 23:11:23 +0000

And the heavyweight champion of TV is ... HBO! Rachel Sauer Thu, 10/02/2025 - 17:11

Jared Bahir Browsh

Fifty years after the Thrilla in Manila bout launched HBO as a national broadcasting powerhouse, the network continues to shape modern viewing and entertainment

The Thrilla in Manila, fought 50 years ago on Sept. 30, 1975, in Quezon City, Philippines, was the third bout between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier and is considered by many as one of the best, most brutal fights in boxing history. It also marked a new era in sports media as the first fight broadcast nationally through Home Box Office (HBO).

Television audiences had been limited in what sports they could watch since the 1930s. Broadcast networks had to fit sports in with their other programming, including news and scripted shows, so audiences that wanted to watch at home were limited to regional offerings or national games of the week. In 1948, a fight between Joe Louis and Joe Walcott was broadcast in theaters through closed-circuit television. Theaters were connected through private telephone or coaxial cable, and viewers bought tickets to see the bout projected from a special receiver.

Closed-circuit broadcasts of boxing matches and other sports events peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, earning millions of dollars for event promoters. Ali fights in this era were among the most popular closed-circuit events, but others, like the Indianapolis 500, also drew large audiences of sports fans to movie theaters. The famed Rumble in the Jungle between Ali and George Foreman earned $60 million in theater admission in the United States, with fans paying $20 ($130 today) to watch the event live as it occurred across the world in the former Zaire.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the �Ͼ�Ʒ�� Department of Ethnic Studies.

The same year as the Louis-Walcott fight, cable television debuted, connecting rural homes too remote to receive a television signal over an antenna. Northeastern Pennsylvania was a test ground for this form of television, since it was close enough to New York City and Philadelphia to pick up broadcast signals with a strong antenna atop a building or a mountain, then connect households through cable. Later, cities in eastern Pennsylvania like Wilkes-Barre and Allentown were among the first whose residents subscribed to paid cable television outside of major cities like New York.

Businessman Charles Dolan was granted a franchise permit to build the first cable system, Sterling Manhattan Cable, in 1965, obtaining financial backing from Time-Life. A lack of quality programming beyond some events in Madison Square Garden hampered the growth of the system, which cost millions of dollars to install but only attracted a few hundred customers in the city. In 1971, during a cruise to France, Dolan conceived of a network that could be leased to other cable systems, which would air unedited films without advertising and was funded by subscriber costs, tentatively named the “Green Channel.”

Along with convincing Time-Life that this was a viable business, Dolan also had to navigate Federal Communications Commission (FCC) scrutiny, which had limited the programs that could be broadcast on cable due to non-duplications rules and other regulations focused on supporting the broadcast networks. Also, consistent lobbying from movie theater chains and broadcasters hampered cable companies, since customers were bombarded with messages that cable was a threat to both the movie business and to free over-the-air content.

Undeterred, Dolan convinced Time-Life to support the Green Channel, which it did after the FCC gave preemptive authorization to launch a paid television service. Dolan and his Time-Life partners originally planned to launch through the Teleservice cable system in Allentown, but after an agreement to broadcast Philadelphia 76ers games collapsed, they launched through the same service 65 miles north in Wilkes Barre to avoid NBA blackouts. Wilkes-Barre was considered New York Knicks territory, and the network had the right to broadcast Knicks games through its agreement with Madison Square Garden. During this time, Dolan and Time-Life also selected a placeholder name for the network, Home Box Office, as they prepared to launch in 1972. The network was soon made available throughout the northeastern United States by relaying microwaves along towers across the region; some of the earliest programming included movies and New York Rangers hockey.

The following year, Home Box Office, Inc., was spun off from Sterling Communications, with Time-Life increasing its equity in the company. Dolan stepped down as CEO of Home Box Office and Sterling after disagreements with Time-Life, accepting a buyout that enabled him to expand his cable service across Long Island. Time-Life had a tentative agreement with Warner Communications to buy HBO, but ultimately that deal fell through. Time-Life later took over Sterling Communications, but the service continued to struggle, ending in 1973 with fewer than 20,000 subscribers and a high turnover rate as customers found the programming repetitive.

The Thrilla in Manila bout between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier marked a new era in sports media as the first fight broadcast nationally through Home Box Office (HBO).

The turning point for HBO came in 1975, when executives made a deal with RCA Americom Communications, a satellite communication company, to relay the HBO signal nationally through UA-Columbia Cablevision. UA-Columbia was a joint venture with United Artists that later took over the entire cable service from Columbia and partnered with Madison Square Garden to form Madison Square Garden Sports Network in 1977, changing its name to USA Network in 1980.

Sports = audience

The partnership between HBO and UA-Columbia, and later the formation of what would become USA Network, showed that even early cable service providers and networks understood live sports would attract audiences. This was confirmed when HBO first transmitted its programming by satellite, debuting the now national network through what is considered by many the greatest boxing match in the sport history. Between 1973 and 1980, HBO grew from a regional cable network to a national one, increasing subscribers from 8,000 in the northeast at the start of 1973 to more than 3 million nationally in that seven-year period. HBO model was also replicated in local markets through networks like the Z Channel in Los Angeles, which launched in 1974, and Prism in Philadelphia, launched in 1976.

Satellite transmission led to the accelerated growth of cable, with several networks launching in the second half of the 1970s. WTCG became the first superstation in 1976 after Ted Turner learned of the success of the Thrilla in Manila broadcast. He had received approval to buy the Atlanta station six years earlier, and on Dec. 17, 1976, WTCG became the first local station to be retransmitted nationally. The station obtained the rights to broadcast Atlanta Braves baseball games and Atlanta Hawks basketball games—Turner bought the teams in 1976 and 1977, respectively—so when WTCG was renamed WTBS in 1979 and went national, so did the broadcasts for both teams.

The success of WTCG/WTBS led Turner to launch Cable Network News, the first 24-hour news network, in 1980. He launched several other networks through the 1980s and 1990s, including Turner Network Television (TNT) in 1988, Cartoon Network in 1992 and Turner Classic Movies (TCM) in 1994, helping him become the first cable magnate and a billionaire before selling Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner in 1996—placing TBS and Turner other holdings under the same umbrella as HBO.

Competition in sports programming

Boxing had been a cornerstone of HBO programming since 1973, when the George Foreman upset of Joe Frazier was made famous by Howard Cosell calling “Down Goes Frazier!” HBO also broadcast the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974 before going national. Many credit “HBO World Championship Boxing” for the sport continued growth in the 1970s through the 1990s, even after Ali retired in 1981. The network also launched “Inside the NFL” in 1977, the first league-branded analysis show on premium cable, which was followed by the Major League Baseball-branded “Race for the Pennant” the following year. HBO aired Wimbledon matches starting in 1975 and set a standard for investigative sports journalism with “Real Sports with Bryant Gumble,” which ran for 28 years starting in 1995.

HBO was a fixture in boxing for 45 years, airing its last boxing match in 2018 as it shifted network focus away from sports overall due to competition from sports media companies, including those also owned by Warner Bros. Discovery like CBS Sports and TNT.

ESPN is another sports media company that emerged from the establishment of regional sports cable networks, including the Madison Square Garden Sports Network. It was originally conceived as a Connecticut sports network before founder Bill Rasmussen learned it would be cheaper to broadcast nationally over satellite from Bristol, Connecticut, than regionally, leading to the first national 24-hour sports network launching in 1979.

The same year, a local Columbus, Ohio, children cable network, Pinwheel, went national—renamed Nickelodeon for its April 1 launch. Warner-Amex owned Nickelodeon and launched MTV two years later in 1981, three years after HBO music video-focused “Video Jukebox” premiered.

Expanding cable

Cable growth was still limited through the early 1980s, with many municipalities blocking expansion to protect their own media. The Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 helped create regulations that ensured local stations would be available on cable while also requiring that a portion of cable subscriptions fund public, educational and government (PEG) access channels. As cable spread accelerated, HBO continued to break ground in television programming and larger culture.

The Sopranos (cast pictured) was one of the industry-changing shows that debuted on HBO duringthe late 1990s and early 2000s. (Photo: HBO)

When HBO launched, there were only a handful of comedy clubs in the United States, with only a few venues to see standup comics outside of New York or Los Angeles. On broadcast television, standup comedy was limited to five-minute sets on late-night and variety shows. HBO comedy specials changed the industry when comedian Robert Klein debuted on the network in 1975. HBO helped legendary comedians like George Carlin become stars, while providing viewers exposure to future generations of comedians by creating standup comedy shows like Def Comedy Jam. Other networks and platforms like Comedy Central and Netflix followed this lead and expanded their program offerings through standup programs and specials.

One of the draws of these specials was that they were uncensored. HBO and its sister network Cinemax, which launched in 1980, were unique because they aired uncut theatrical films and adult programming. As HBO spread, advocacy groups tried to block the network in some states, due to what they felt was obscene content. Utah passed several laws to try to block HBO, but ultimately, as a premium network that required a subscription, it was not subject to broadcast obscenity laws and was protected by the First Amendment.

HBO was also a pioneer in unscripted programming, becoming one of the top producers of documentary films and series. From concert films to true crime, the breadth of unscripted programming became an inspiration for reality programming across television and helped advance documentary filmmaking. HBO now releases a documentary film or series nearly every month and helped create a template for documentaries, especially those focused on sports or culture.

As other premium and cable networks encroached on HBO programming, the network stayed ahead of the pack and produced its own scripted programming in the early 1980s—including Not Necessarily the News, a satirical news program that inspired series like The Daily Show and HBO own Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

One of the true turning points for HBO and the sitcom genre was the debut of The Larry Sanders Show in 1992. The network saw a number of the comedians that launched their careers through HBO—including Jerry Seinfeld and Roseanne Barr—receive their own shows, so HBO worked with Garry Shandling to create the show based on Shandling life. The single-camera, behind-the-scenes, laugh track–free show inspired similar series like 30 Rock, The Office and HBO Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The true turning point

The true turning point for HBO came in the late 1990s, when the network helped launch what many consider the age of prestige television. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, HBO debuted a string of industry-changing shows including Oz, Sex and the City, The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, and The Wire, which inspired other networks to focus on higher-quality scripted programming like The Shield on FX and Mad Men on AMC.

During this time, HBO also launched the first video-on-demand service in 2001 through cable providers, initiating a shift away from appointment television and toward the current streaming environment, which HBO helped expand by launching HBO Go in 2010. Although Netflix launched its streaming service in 2007, HBO Go offered the network original programming and pushed Netflix to do the same; Netflix aired its first original series, House of Cards, in 2013.

HBO Go was supported by a new wave of highly produced series that brought cinematic-level production to television. Shows like Game of Thrones and Westworld helped support the continued growth of cinematic sensibilities influencing television production. Even with increased competition from streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu, HBO continues to be an industry leader despite questions regarding parent company Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) future. HBO Max is the streaming home for the corporation offering HBO programming along with news (CNN), sports (Turner/CBS) and scripted and unscripted programming from across WBD many brands.

HBO growth from a small regional subscription network to the standard bearer of television internationally can be traced to the network national debut. That its first national broadcast happened to be one of the greatest boxing matches in the sport history is fitting, considering HBO impact on modern television.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the �Ͼ�Ʒ�� Department of Ethnic Studies.

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Fifty years after the Thrilla in Manila bout launched HBO as a national broadcasting powerhouse, the network continues to shape modern viewing and entertainment.

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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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Sometimes ‘building back better’ doesn’t include everyone

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 23:14:40 +0000

Sometimes ‘building back better’ doesn’t include everyone Rachel Sauer Mon, 09/22/2025 - 17:14

Cody DeBos

�Ͼ�Ʒ�� researcher Mary Angelica Painter finds that in post-disaster recovery, equity isn’t guaranteed

In the mountains of Colorado outside Boulder, a tight-knit community once made up of mobile homes and modest living has all but disappeared. Now, visitors will find the hills dominated by sprawling new homes and residents of a different tax bracket.

“We were driving through, and it was all these multi-million-dollar homes. A lot of talk about this community having more dogs than people,” Mary Angelica Painter recalls after a recent trip to the town. “It a very wealthy, affluent community.”

Painter, a research associate at the �Ͼ�Ʒ�� Natural Hazards Center, knows the history of this town from the work of scholars in the hazards and disaster field. It was a place where lower-income, often elderly residents leaned on each other for care and social support. But after a devastating flood in 2013, everything changed.

Mary Angelica Painter, a research associate in the �Ͼ�Ʒ�� Natural Hazards Center, co-authored a paper defining “hazard gentrification” as the process that unfolds when natural hazards destroy a large portion of a community and residents are displaced by wealthier newcomers during recovery and rebuilding.

“After this event, most of the residents were dispersed and displaced. We saw one area where there was supposedly low-income housing, and we were told rent was ‘only’ $1,800 a month. I was like, ‘Wow.’ I had no other term to define it than hazard gentrification,” Painter says.

It a familiar pattern she has seen while studying natural hazards and the subsequent recovery efforts of the affected communities.

In an effort to better describe the trend, she recently co-authored a paper defining “hazard gentrification” as the process that unfolds when natural hazards destroy a large portion of a community and residents are displaced by wealthier newcomers during recovery and rebuilding.

Unlike slower-moving forms of gentrification, such as those related to climate change, Painter says hazard gentrification is more rapid and has devastating repercussions.

Defining a new kind of gentrification

The term coined by Painter and her co-authors builds on years of disaster capitalism research—the idea that public and private entities exploit disasters to consolidate power and wealth.

“We often hear the term ‘build back better,’ which leads to the question of ‘build back better for whom?’” she says.

Sustainability gentrification, a similar but unique concept, has been coined recently as well. However, those takeovers tend to happen gradually.

“Hazard gentrification is much faster than other forms of sustainability gentrification,” Painter explains, “so that why we really felt the urge to write this short paper and punctuate this specific type of gentrification.”

She also warns that it isn’t a theoretical concern. From New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to the aftermath of wildfires in Lahaina, Hawaii, the pattern has played out repeatedly.

“We needed to name this phenomenon as its own thing so we can start identifying solutions,” Painter says.

The forces at play

So, what turns a disaster into a reality-altering event for a local community? Painter says the answer is political as much as environmental.

“Disasters stem from social, economic and political choices that leave people in devastation. So, in my mind, disasters are very political.”

After a natural hazard hits, local governments often face pressure to restore services quickly and begin the rebuilding efforts. Much of that push comes from the loudest and most affluent voices in the community.

Structures and infrastructure in Jamestown, Colorado, were significantly damaged by 2013 floods (Photo: Steve Zumwalt/FEMA)

“There is a huge push to build back faster,” Painter says, “and because of that, there are fewer opportunities to involve local community members in the process of making decisions of how it happens.”

When participation is limited, she points out, redevelopment favors those with more money, time and connections. The dynamic also benefits outside investors and developers who are eager to move in where disaster presents an opportunity.

Who gets left behind

For many long-time, even lifelong, residents, rebuilding after a hazard hits simply isn’t an option.

“These populations that are more socially vulnerable tend to either be underinsured or not insured at all against hazards and disasters. They might be living paycheck to paycheck and don’t have the extra income or time to find secondary housing,” Painter says.

“We actually know from research that white affluent people post natural hazard are actually better off after the disaster. They are able to get large insurance payouts, and if their house needs to be rebuilt or refurbished, the value can go up and they can sell it for a profit,” she adds.

Those benefits aren’t present for people who live in mobile homes or manufactured housing, let alone renters. Painter explains that rental assistance is often insubstantial, and renters do not receive the same high priority as homeowners.

The loss of social safety nets, both formal and informal, compounds the trauma for local residents who rely on them.

“They lose their networks of support. There are just so many factors that come together that make it slower or impossible for them to recover,” Painter says.

As a result, many residents find themselves priced out of the place they called home and are left to watch as the area is redeveloped without them.

How some communities push back

Despite the powerful forces at work, hazard gentrification isn’t inevitable. Painter points to a few examples, including Joplin, Missouri; Coffey Park in California; and Seattle Duwamish Valley. Here, early and meaningful community engagement helped limit displacement after natural hazards wreaked devastation.

People evacuate West Glenwood Springs, Colorado, in the face of spreading wildfires in 2002. (Photo: Bryan Dahlberg/FEMA)

She notes that Joplin story, one close to home, is especially striking. After an EF5 tornado nearly leveled the town in 2011, local leaders mobilized quickly.

“They really self-organized effectively. They were very engaging with the community in the rebuilding process and prioritized not leaving anyone behind,” Painter says.

“Not every community is able to do that in that way, but it was something that really jumpstarted their recovery into a positive life.”

Painter notes that these engagement efforts helped preserve community bonds and gave residents a sense of ownership over the recovery.

“There seems to be much more cohesion and democratization when it comes to rebuilding like that,” she says. “The idea is that you need to bring communities together and let them share their voices. It so important.”

What needs to change

The question going forward, Painter posits, is whether policymakers will make bold choices to prevent displacement before the next hazard strikes.

“You can’t be prioritizing the stuff you’ve been prioritizing. If in the past it was something like economic development at the harm of lower-income and marginalized residents, that can’t be the way you go forward,” she says.

In other words, more equitable recovery efforts must start with a cultural shift in how communities allocate resources. New policies promoting rent control, expanded insurance and better disaster assistance for renters can all help lower the burden in the wake of a hazard.

“People need to understand the idea of sacrifice for their neighbors,” she says.

�Ͼ�Ʒ�� Natural Hazards Center is working to bridge the gap between research and real-world solutions.

“We aren’t just a research apparatus,” Painter says. “We’re also a connecting body. It important that we as researchers connect with policymakers and decision makers and are solution oriented.”

As climate change fuels more frequent and intense natural events, hazard gentrification will become more common. Naming the problem is just a first step, but also a necessary one. From there, Painter hopes society collectively adopts an action mindset.

“We need to find ways to be equitable and to provide for and support our communities, and to have plans for if there devastation, too. Academics are really good at identifying problems. However, we need to focus on how we actually solve these problems and how we can use our positions to vocalize and advocate for those solutions.”

Justin Stoler, Ethan Sharygin and Sameer Shah also contributed to this paper.

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�Ͼ�Ʒ�� researcher Mary Angelica Painter finds that in post-disaster recovery, equity isn’t guaranteed.

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Top image: Lahaina, Hawaii, was devastated by August 2023 wildfires. (Photo: State Farm/Wikimedia Commons)

Liberals hit the brakes on buying Teslas

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 13:30:00 +0000

Liberals hit the brakes on buying Teslas Rachel Sauer Fri, 09/19/2025 - 07:30

Bradley Worrell

Research co-authored by �Ͼ�Ʒ�� environmental psychologist Amanda Carrico finds CEO Elon Musk embrace of rightwing politics results in liberals being less willing to buy the EVs

Tesla CEO Elon Musk embrace of rightwing activism has not done him any favors with liberal-leaning Americans—the U.S. demographic group most inclined to purchase electric vehicles—while not resulting in any notable corresponding increase in purchase intentions among the country conservatives.

That according to a recent research paper published in Humanities & Social Sciences, which was co-authored by Amanda Carrico, an environmental psychologist whose research focus is on understanding people behaviors, attitudes and perceptions related to the environment. She is also an associate professor with the �Ͼ�Ʒ�� Department of Environmental Studies.

Carrico and her co-authors conducted five surveys of Americans between August 2023 and March of this year about their willingness to embrace 30 actions that would reduce greenhouse emissions. Purchasing electric vehicles (EVs) was the most polarizing item among those actions, with positive intentions recorded for liberals and negative intentions among conservatives.

�Ͼ�Ʒ�� scholar Amanda Carrico is an environmental psychologist whose research focus is on understanding people behaviors, attitudes and perceptions related to the environment.

However, in the past three surveys (May 2024, July 2024 and March), liberals have pumped the brakes regarding their intentions to buy Teslas—and that decline is associated with Musk relatively recent embrace of rightwing politics, Carrico says.

“We definitely find that overall intentions to purchase Tesla seems to decrease over time, so there seems to be an intensification of rejection of Teslas among liberals as Musk conservative persona emerged,” she says. That particularly significant given that liberals are the demographic group most inclined to purchase electric vehicles, she adds.

What's at stake when EV tax credits end Sept. 30?

“At the same time, conservatives have been pretty predictable across the entirety of the surveys: They just aren’t interested in EVs,” Carrico says. “As Elon Musk was shifting to the right, our initial theory was: Maybe we’ll see conservatives become more interested in EVs, because you’ve got this now conservative figure in the industry who is excited about EVs because of their benefit to the environment. We thought we might be on the precipice of EVs becoming a less polarized issue. However, that has not turned out to be true.”

To support their research on Musk impact on the Tesla brand, Carrico and her co-authors also point to a series of Morning Consult polls showing a steady decline in self-reported willingness to buy a Tesla among Democrats since 2023. Separately, a Data for Progress poll found two-thirds of Democrats and half of Independents reported that Musk had made them less likely to buy a Tesla.

Recently, Carrico spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine regarding the findings and implications of the research paper. Her responses have been lightly edited for grammar and clarity and condensed for space.

Question: Your team conducted five surveys between November 2023 and March of this year. Was it always the plan to ask specifically about Musk and Teslas, or did that come later?

Carrico: The idea came later, so it was opportunistic. It was interesting to us to see from the beginning that EVs were among the most polarizing action items, so we asked ourselves in 2024 if we should modify the question from EVs generally to Teslas.

There were two motivations for that. One was: How are people opinions shifting in response to this emergent political shift (by Musk)? The second was: We felt like we needed more information about people opinions about EVs generally versus Teslas, so some respondents were asked about EVs and some were asked about Tesla specifically, and that where you could see some delineation between those two categories.

Question: If Musk embrace of rightwing politics cost him the support of liberals without picking up notable support from conservatives, did he basically drive Tesla sales into a proverbial ditch?

"We thought we might be on the precipice of EVs becoming a less polarized issue. However, that has not turned out to be true,” says �Ͼ�Ʒ�� researcher Amanda Carrico. (Photo: Dylan Calluy/Unsplash)

Carrico: I would not want to speculate on the underlying economics of Musk portfolio. A lot of his businesses are interconnected, and a lot of the technologies are interconnected.

But just purely looking at the impact of his political persona in relation to consumer interests in purchasing Teslas, and also the market data about purchasing Teslas, it does seem very clear that there is a decline in consumer interest in Teslas. Of course, business leaders and public figures make value judgments all the time, just like we all do. We don’t know if this decision (by Musk) was driven by economics or other factors. …

I personally would stop short of making a judgment about whether that was a smart decision or an unwise one, but you can certainly see that relationship (Musk embrace of a conservative persona and a declining interest among liberals to buy Teslas) play out in our data and the market data that we were able to acquire during the project.

Question: Do you have thoughts as to whether Tesla could regain support, particularly support from liberals, if Musk either stepped away from his company or perhaps walked back some of his rightwing views?

Carrico: I think there are some insights we could look to, to make an educated hypothesis on what might happen there. I will say, I think once something becomes politically polarized, like becoming aligned with a political identity, it very hard to undo that. Politics are very sticky, so it becomes hard to shed that.

With consumer behavior, we have seen a lot of companies recover from these kinds of things. For example, Budweiser being boycotted several years ago in response to their alliance with a transgender influencer. That was different, though, because Budweiser wasn’t entering into the political arena.

This is a very different thing, with Musk being the figurehead of a company. Tesla is unique in how tied Musk is to Tesla. For comparison, I don’t know how many people in America could tell you who is the leader of Nissan or Suncor or other companies, but Musk is uniquely visible in his role with Tesla.

Question: Do you have any thoughts as to how other EV manufacturers should respond to the survey findings when it comes to branding or messaging?

Carrico: Clearly, liberals want to explore EVs. I think it clear that it aligned with their identity. One interesting thing in this study that was very surprising to us is that the disinterest in EVs that started to grow over the course of the study wasn’t just isolated to Teslas. We started to see it bleed over into interest in purchasing EVs in general.

I wondered if that wasn’t so much a rejection of EVs as a disinterest in one of the leading vehicles in the EV market. Teslas were considered state-of-the-art in many respects. The charging infrastructure for Teslas feels quite superior to other alternatives, so it does feel like there a consumer demand that not being met by other alternatives.

"Teslas were considered state-of-the-art in many respects. The charging infrastructure for Teslas feels quite superior to other alternatives, so it does feel like there a consumer demand that not being met by other alternatives," says Amanda Carrico, �Ͼ�Ʒ�� associate professor and department chair of environmental studies.

Of course, that easier said than done, but insofar as there are opportunities for other producers to fill this space—to offer purchasing opportunities that are not Tesla but that fulfill the same goals and amenities as Tesla offered—I think that a real opportunity, and I’m sure they are scrambling to take advantage of that.

Question: A number of media outlets have reported on the study findings. What kind of reaction has the paper been generating?

Carrico: It been very interesting because the reaction has depended heavily upon the political orientation of the news outlet, which is perhaps not surprising. If it was covered by a more liberal outlet—Mother Jones, for example—the main takeaway was, ‘Look at Elon Musk. What a fool he was, shooting himself in the foot.’

Then if you look on the right—it been covered by Breitbart, for example—the narrative has been, ‘Look at these liberals rejecting these products that solve the problem they care so much about,’ meaning climate change.

There been accurate depictions of the findings in the paper, but also it been interesting because anyone can take what they want out of the paper and spin it, or link it, to their political identity.

Question: Do you think this is a topic you and your co-authors will revisit, perhaps to see how opinions on EVs in general, and Teslas in particular, evolve over time?

Carrico: To be honest, we have not talked about it yet, but I would not be surprised if that happens. Writing papers like this, there a lot of work to get one completed, and the review process can be long and tedious. But the team (of co-authors) is still meeting, and so I anticipate that within the next few months we’ll be revisiting things, deciding what we want to focus on next and trying to understand how polarization impacts a range of behaviors.

There is an aspect of this project that is trying to understand things people do agree on. Specifically, where is there less polarization? Because those areas are appealing targets for public policy, with the idea (that) we can make progress on the areas we agree on and wait for things we don’t agree on to see if there opportunities in the future.

I hope that this moment fades, so that we can move away from this rancor around EVs. I’m really hopeful about the potential of decarbonization and how that is linked with a changing of the vehicle fleet (from combustion engine to EV), so I still think there a lot of potential there, and I’m hopeful we will still see some renewed interest in this technology. I think we will.

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Research co-authored by �Ͼ�Ʒ�� environmental psychologist Amanda Carrico finds CEO Elon Musk embrace of rightwing politics results in liberals being less willing to buy the EVs.

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Top photo: Dmitry Novikov/Unsplash

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