The Academic Minute

What happens to your brain under anesthesia?

Janna Helfrich, assistant professor at the Department of Anesthesiology at Yale University, says it’s not quite what we expected.

Faculty Bio:

Janna D. Helfrich is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Anesthesiology at Yale University. She has completed her residency training in anesthesiology at the University Medical Center Tuebingen, Germany. In addition to her clinical training, she did a postdoc in neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley, USA. In her research, she studies the neurophysiological underpinnings of physiological, artificial, and pathophysiological forms of unconsciousness, such as sleep, anesthesia, or coma, and their impact on higher cognition. Dr. Helfrich uses a variety of methods to study the brain, including scalp and intracranial EEG in humans as well as cross-species approaches. She is deeply dedicated to teaching anesthesiologists and advancing their understanding of EEG, thereby enhancing the safety and efficacy of anesthetic practices through education and research.

Transcript:

Every year, millions of people undergo surgery under general anesthesia. The drugs work — patients become unresponsive, have no memory, and feel no pain. But despite decades of use, we still don’t fully understand what anesthesia actually does to the brain. Is it like sleep? Is it like a coma? Or something else entirely?Working with teams at UC Berkeley, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the University of Oslo in Norway, we recorded electrical brain activity from the scalp — using a technique called electroencephalography, or EEG — in patients under propofol anesthesia, healthy volunteers during sleep, and patients in a coma in the intensive care unit. We then created detailed “fingerprints” of brain activity across dozens of frequency ranges and time points, and compared them to each other.What we found was striking. The anesthetized brain isn’t simply one thing — it borrows features from multiple states at once. Its slow, low-frequency activity most closely resembles a coma. The characteristic alpha waves — generated by deep brain circuits about ten times per second — look like the sleep spindles seen in deep sleep. And perhaps most surprisingly, certain high-frequency patterns actually mirror rapid eye movement sleep, the stage in which vivid dreams occur.In other words, general anesthesia is a mosaic of brain states — part coma, part sleep, with its own unique signatures on top.Why does this matter? The monitors clinicians use today to track anesthesia depth only capture a narrow slice of brain activity, often distilling it down to a single index number. Our findings suggest that simply isn’t enough to appreciate the full complexity of what the brain is doing under anesthesia.More importantly, our results point toward a potential path for making anesthesia healthier. By steering the brain toward a more sleep-like state — and away from a deeper, coma-like one — through tailored drug combinations or modified anesthetic protocols, we may be able to reduce some of anesthesia’s side effects, including postoperative memory problems and delirium.The brain under anesthesia has been a black box for far too long — and opening it up may be one of the most important steps we can take toward making surgery safer for everyone.

Read More:

[Frontiers for Young Minds] - What Is Anesthesia?

[Quanta Magazine] - Brain’s ‘Background Noise’ May Hold Clues to Persistent Mysteries

[The Science Breaker] - Awake or dreaming: how brain ‘noise’ tells the difference

[Wall Street Journal] - Your Brain on Anesthesia: Could Be More Like a Coma Than You Think

[Hartford Courant] - CT researchers studied the impact of anesthesia on human brains. Here’s what they found

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Many people use cannabis as a sleep aid, but can it be dangerous?

Joanna Fong-Isariyawongse, associate professor of neurology at the University of Pittsburgh, examines the risks.

Faculty Bio:

Dr. Joanna Fong-Isariyawongse is an Associate Professor of Neurology at the University of Pittsburgh, specializing in Sleep Medicine and Epilepsy. She is a nationally recognized advocate for sleep health and brain health, working to turn scientific evidence into actionable public policy. Her efforts focus on issues like later school start times for adolescents, adoption of permanent standard time, and improved care and education for people living with epilepsy.Clinically, Dr. Fong-Isariyawongse provides expert care for individuals with epilepsy, including those undergoing surgical evaluation for drug-resistant seizures. She also sees patients with a wide range of sleep concerns, helping individuals improve sleep quality to enhance cognitive function, emotional resilience, and overall performance. In addition, she leads critical care continuous EEG services across eight UPMC hospitals, ensuring timely neurological monitoring for patients in intensive care. Her commitment to patient-centered care has earned her UPMC’s Excellence in Patient Experience Award and recognition as a Pittsburgh Magazine Best Doctor since 2019.She serves on national advocacy and health policy committees for the American Academy of Neurology (AAN), the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), and the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), where she helps shape legislation and healthcare priorities at both state and federal levels. She is a board member of the Pennsylvania Neurological Society, a physician advisory board member for the Epilepsy Association of Western and Central Pennsylvania, and a professional advisory board member for the Epilepsy Foundation of Eastern Pennsylvania.Dedicated to public education, Dr. Fong-Isariyawongse speaks widely on the science of sleep and its role in learning, mood, seizure control, athletic performance, and public safety. Her outreach spans school districts, athletic teams, first responders, and public transportation workers. She also serves as a neurology consultant to the Pittsburgh Steelers.Whether in the clinic, the classroom, or the Capitol, Dr. Fong-Isariyawongse is committed to building a healthier, more well-rested future for all.

Transcript:

Picture a 15-year-old girl staring at the ceiling past midnight. Her bus comes in six hours. Melatonin didn’t work, so tonight she tries a cannabis gummy a friend recommended. Twenty minutes later, she’s asleep.Now picture a 34-year-old veteran, jolted awake by nightmares for months. The VA sleep clinic has a six-month waitlist. The dispensary is six blocks away.Both will tell you cannabis works. And that’s exactly the problem.As a sleep neurologist, I see patients whose sleep has quietly unraveled after months or years of cannabis use. Here’s what’s happening inside the brain when the lights go out.THC does help people fall asleep faster, at first. But the body adapts quickly, so the same dose does less, and people need more. And falling asleep faster is not the same as sleeping well. Brain recordings show that chronic cannabis users spend more time awake at night and get less restful sleep, REM sleep, the stage where the brain processes emotion, locks in learning, and rebuilds resilience is especially disruptedThen comes the trap. When people try to stop, withdrawal hits: rebound insomnia, vivid disturbing dreams, anxiety, irritability. The symptoms that drove a person to cannabis come roaring back, often worse. So they return to it, and the cycle continues. For teenagers, whose brains are still under construction, and for veterans with PTSD, the stakes are highest.But there is good news: Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia outperforms every sleep aid, including cannabis. It treats the root cause of insomnia, and research shows it can both improve sleep and redice cannabis use.Sleep is the foundation of memory, mood, and judgment. Everyone lying awake tonight deserves a real solution, not a trap.

Read More:

[The Conversation] - Using cannabis for sleep isn’t harmless – a neurologist explains how it can trap people in a cycle of dependency

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Poor sleep is tied to Alzheimer’s risk in older women.

Kitty Lui, doctoral student in clinical psychology at the University of California San Diego, discusses these findings.

Faculty Bio:

Kitty is a doctoral student at the San Diego State University / UC San Diego Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology (Neuropsychology track). She is particularly interested in understanding why women are at elevated risk for Alzheimer’s disease. Her doctoral research has focused primarily on the sex-specific impacts of sleep disturbances on Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers, in hopes that this work could inform intervention and prevention for the disease for each sex.

Transcripts:

We recently published a study that found sleep complaints may be an important Alzheimer’s disease risk factor in older women with a higher genetic predisposition to the disease. The findings suggest that women with a higher genetic risk for Alzheimer’s who reported poorer sleep also showed greater memory difficulties and more Alzheimer’s-related brain changes.We examined 69 women aged 65 years and older participating in the Women Inflammation Tau Study, an ongoing project at UC San Diego focused on aging and Alzheimer’s disease risk. Participants completed questionnaires about their sleep quality, underwent memory testing and received brain scans that measured tau, a protein that accumulates abnormally in Alzheimer’s disease.We found that poorer self-reported sleep was associated with worse visual memory performance and greater tau accumulation in brain regions affected early in Alzheimer’s disease — but only among women with higher genetic risk. Women with lower genetic risk did not show the same relationship between sleep complaints, memory and tau buildup. The results add to growing evidence that sleep disturbances and Alzheimer’s disease may reinforce one another over time. Previous studies have suggested that disrupted sleep can contribute to the buildup of abnormal tau proteins, while Alzheimer’s-related brain changes may also interfere with healthy sleep patterns. Because women account for nearly two-thirds of Alzheimer’s cases and frequently report poorer sleep quality than men, sleep may represent an important and potentially modifiable risk factor in older women.Self-reported sleep assessments are inexpensive and easy to administer, raising the possibility that sleep complaints could help identify people who may benefit from closer monitoring or early intervention. Improving sleep could become a target for future Alzheimer’s prevention strategies, particularly for women at elevated genetic risk. Overall, it might be important to take sleep complaints seriously for older women as it may be relevant to their brain health.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

One bottle of water can reveal the secrets of an entire ecosystem.

Jenny Whilde, adjunct research scientist at the University of Florida, explains how.

Faculty Bio:

Dr. Jenny Whilde holds a PhD in Animal Behavior, focusing on social group dynamics in zoo-housed animals, including elephants and orangutans. She has many years of experience in scientific writing, editing, and proofreading across a broad range of disciplines including cancer research, marine biology, and behavioral ecology and has contributed significantly to scientific publications, successful grant applications, and mainstream media articles.

Transcript:

Ireland is a land of storytellers, and it’s not just the people. The rivers, too, have stories to tell. In fact, a single water sample can be used to identify every living thing that has been in the area, including wildlife, humans, and even the pathogens that impact them.The key that unlocks this information is environmental DNA, or eDNA for short. This is DNA that any living organism has shed into its surroundings. It can come from skin cells, pollen, waste matter, even a cough or a sneeze. eDNA that is filtered from a water sample provides a snapshot of exactly what is living in and around the water. Typically, researchers use an approach called metabarcoding to decode eDNA. This is a powerful method if you are looking for a particular set of species, but it finds only what it is designed to find and ignores everything else.Our research team used a different technique, called long-read shotgun metagenomic DNA sequencing. This technique sequences all of the collected DNA from every species, from viruses to vertebrates and everything in between. Our team, led by Professor David Duffy, took water samples from different locations along the Avoca River, in Co. Wicklow, starting near its mountain source right through to where the river runs into the sea.The DNA we filtered from the water samples came from: the obvious, like ducks, sheep, and humans; the more elusive, like leatherback turtles and octopi at the river mouth, and from microscopic invertebrates and even viruses.We could identify the genetic origins of some species, and also found evidence of wastewater pollution. Within 24 hours, it is now possible to obtain a readout of all the eDNA in a water sample from any location, unlocking the secrets of an entire ecosystem.

Read More:

[The Conversation] - Fishing for DNA – how a cup of river water can reveal secrets about human health, pollution and biodiversity

[Oxford Academic] - Long-read nanopore shotgun metagenomic DNA sequencing for river biodiversity, wildlife, pollution, and environmental health monitoring

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

The coffee industry is vital to Ethiopia, but how is it evolving?

Walter Mswaka, associate professor of social entrepreneurship at Rollins College, examines the role of cooperatives.

Faculty Bio:

Walter Mswaka, PhD, is Associate Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. His areas of specialization include: Social Entrepreneurship; Entrepreneurial Finance; Business Strategy; and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).Professor Mswaka is an academic and social enterprise practitioner with over 20 years of experience working with social enterprises in various socio-economic contexts around the world. This includes providing practical hands-on support and technical advice to individuals and organizations involved in social enterprise in the UK, Brazil, Nepal, Ethiopia and Zambia, contributing to public understanding of social enterprise and community resilience through research and publications in peer reviewed journals.

Transcript:

Ethiopia is the largest coffee producer in Africa with over 10 million people involved in the production of coffee. Ethiopian coffee is valued globally and is a vital crop to the Ethiopian people, given the large percentage of households that depend on coffee production and sales.The coffee-marketing cooperatives of Ethiopia represent the very essence of the coffee business in that country, contributing to economic development by increasing incomes and employability, improving living conditions and stimulating grassroots economic activities. However, despite their importance, the cooperatives face challenges of resilience and sustainability. My research has shed new light on how they operate and deliver value, and how they are affected by national, internal and external stakeholders and institutional rules. We examined the operations of three small coffee-marketing cooperatives in southwest Ethiopia, with a focus on their internal governance challenges that include structure, communication and interactions with middlemen. We employed a multiple-case study approach involving face-to-face focus-group interviews with the management committees of the cooperatives--separately from the members, so that we could actually see what’s going on.We looked at five themes that influence operations: structures of governance, incorporating board management identity and make-up; selection of management committee members; the role of board and management committee members; the relationship between board/management committee and members; and board understanding of financial sustainability and influence of external stakeholders.Our findings illustrate that Ethiopian cooperatives are embedded in the communities they serve and provide a platform for members to benefit financially. While current literature suggests that the cooperatives have democratic governance models, closer scrutiny reveals that these organizations have complex governance structures. This suggests the need to understand better cooperative operating environments and the various external influences obtruding governance operations.Our findings have had an impact on both increasing coffee production and increasing the number of women involved in the cooperatives.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Our DNA may hold the key to storing our digital data.

Andrew Gu, professor of chemical and biomedical engineering at the University of Missouri, determines how.

Faculty Bio:

Andrew Gu leads a research lab at the University of Missouri’s College of Engineering that brings together biology, engineering and nanotechnology. His long‑term goal is to understand how life works at the molecular level and to create new tools that help doctors diagnose and treat diseases in a more personalized way.

Transcript:

When we look at the digital world, one thing is clear: we’re running out of room to store everything we create. For years, I’ve been fascinated by an idea that sounds like science fiction but comes straight from biology. What if we stored our data in DNA — the same molecule that carries the instructions for life?DNA is remarkable. It’s tiny, stable and incredibly dense. In theory, you could pack all the world’s information into something the size of a shoebox. And unlike today’s massive data centers, DNA doesn’t need much energy to keep it safe.But there’s been one big problem. Once you write information into synthetic DNA, it stays there. No changes. No updates. For a modern storage system, that’s a deal breaker.My team and I wanted to fix that. We asked a simple question:Can DNA behave more like the hard drives we use every day — something you can erase and rewrite?And now, we’ve taken a major step toward that future. We developed a method that lets us remove data from DNA and write new data back in. Over and over again.That’s something researchers haven’t been able to do before. And it opens the door to real, everyday DNA based storage — not just long-term archiving.Of course, writing the data is only half the job. You also need a way to read it. So, we’re building a small electronic device that uses a nanoscale sensor.As the DNA passes through it, we capture tiny electrical signals and translate them into digital files. Someday, I hope this whole system will shrink down to the size of a USB drive.To me, DNA storage isn’t just a scientific challenge. It’s a way to build a cleaner, more efficient future for our information hungry world.

Read More:

[Show Me Mizzou] - Mizzou researchers are developing a rewritable DNA hard drive

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Why is faculty tenure so controversial?

Deepa Das Acevedo, associate professor of law at the Emory University School of Law, explores this question.

Faculty Bio:

Deepa Das Acevedo is a legal anthropologist and Associate Professor at Emory University School of Law. Since 2020, she has been studying faculty tenure as an employment protection, blending legal doctrine with qualitative and quantitative social science. Her 2025 monograph, The War on Tenure, was named one of Forbes’ Top 10 Books in Higher Education, and her commentary has appeared in InsideHigherEd, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and TIME’s Made by History, among others.

Transcript:

You might have heard of professors having “tenure” and wondered what exactly that is or why anyone cares.Tenure is a type of employment contract that applies to around 20-to-30% of all full-time faculty in the United States. Whereas the average American employee can be fired “at-will” – for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all – tenured faculty, like all employees who hold “just cause “contracts, can only be fired for cause. In other words, tenure provides a level of job security that’s pretty unusual even if it’s not unique.Partly because of this heightened security, tenure triggers strong concerns about how it might affect faculty behavior. Critics both inside and outside the academy worry that tenure makes faculty lazy, prone to unethical (or even illegal) behavior, and more likely to become ideological renegades. The thinking is: why wouldn’t you do these things if you could get away with them while keeping your job? However, my research suggests that tenure doesn’t have these incentive-distorting effects. I built a national dataset of all individual tenured-faculty-terminations across institution, discipline, and region (within the United States) that happened between 2000 and 2021. It turns out that professors maintain fairly consistent levels of productivity before and after they win tenure, that (at least during the study period) they didn’t often lose their jobs because of their ideological views, and – finally – that there is no reason to think that winning tenure encourages professional or interpersonal misconduct. All this means that tenure isn’t encouraging bad behavior or getting in the way of good behavior as its critics understandably (but wrongly) argue.

Read More:

[The Chronicle of Higher Education] - Is Any Professor Safe From Being Fired Anymore?

[Inside Higher Ed] - Fighting Back Against ‘The War on Tenure’

[Time] - What Academic Tenure Is Really About

[Cambridge University Press] - The War on Tenure

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Should AI be a friend or foe in higher education?

Julia Khrebtan-Horhager, professor of communication studies at Colorado State University, considers this question from a teaching perspective.

Faculty Bio:

Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager is Professor of Communication at Colorado State University and Director of Education Abroad programs in Europe. She is the recipient of three International Communication Association Top Paper Awards and the CSU College of Liberal Arts Best Teacher Award.Her research focuses on intercultural communication, political science, international relations, global conflict, and media studies.She is the author of two books, Communicating the Other across Cultures and Migrant World Making, and has published widely in leading academic journals and edited volumes.She is multilingual and works across academic and public-facing contexts in Europe and the United States.

Transcript:

Scriveners. We no longer remember who they were, because of the printing press. We barely remember typewriters, because of computers. And now… artificial intelligence.This is not just another technological shift. It is a rupture.Emerging research shows that AI generates knowledge at unprecedented speed and scale. It also brings risks: misinformation, confirmation bias, hallucinations, social isolation, and surveillance.Among students, we already see deskilling. Writing without assistance – an essay, a letter, even an argument – is becoming less common.From an intercultural perspective, AI is not neutral. It learns from datasets shaped by unequal histories, power structures, and global representation gaps, and reproduces them.In classroom experiments, students ask AI to describe global conflicts or demographic groups, then compare outputs with lived narratives. The results are striking: AI “knowledge” often becomes stereotype, simplification, or erasure. AI does not merely reflect the world: it reshapes it. Yet, there is another side.AI can expand creativity, accelerate discovery, refine language, and deliver answers in seconds. What once took hours or weeks is now instant. It generates ideas, translates languages, and structures thought.Knowledge is no longer only accessed: it is produced in real time. This may be the most technologically empowered generation we have seen.So, is AI a dark knight or a savior? A friend or a foe?It is both. And neither.It is inevitable.We cannot stop it, but we can decide how to engage it. The task is not to fear or embrace blindly, but to guide, question, and train it.Because the real question is not whether AI will change the world: it already is.It is whether we will master it, or be mastered by it.So… we must learn to train our AI dragons.

Read More:

[University of Michigan Press] - Communicating the Other across Cultures

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

With money, trust is key. So how did Benjamin Franklin stop counterfeiters when paper money was so easy to fake?

Khachatur Manukyan, research associate professor at the University of Notre Dame, looks into the past to find out.

Faculty Bio:

Khachatur Manukyan is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Nuclear Science Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame. His research combines materials science, chemistry, and advanced characterization techniques to study energy materials, nuclear materials, and historical artifacts. His recent work has used modern analytical methods to investigate the materials and manufacturing technologies behind coins and paper money, revealing previously unknown details.

Transcript:

As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, many people are reflecting on the ideas and individuals that shaped the nation. Less attention is paid to one practical challenge faced by the American colonies: creating money that people could trust.In the eighteenth century, shortages of gold and silver coins forced colonial governments to rely on paper currency to support trade, public projects, and economic growth. Unlike coins, however, paper bills could be copied, altered, and counterfeited.Recent scientific analysis of hundreds of surviving colonial paper money notes reveals that Benjamin Franklin approached this challenge as both a printer and an inventor. Long before modern security threads, holograms, or microprinting, he developed a collection of material-based security features designed to make paper money more difficult to imitate.Using advanced scientific methods, researchers examined the inks, fibers, fillers, and printing techniques used in eighteenth-century currency. The study showed that Franklin incorporated colored fibers into paper, used specialized carbon-based pigments, added translucent mineral particles, created distinctive watermarks, and produced detailed impressions directly from natural leaves. These features created notes that were difficult for counterfeiters to reproduce.Many of these details are nearly invisible to the naked eye, yet they become clear through modern scientific analysis. The findings reveal that Franklin understood a principle that remains central to currency design today: trust can be engineered directly into a material’s physical structure.By helping people distinguish genuine notes from counterfeits, these innovations strengthened confidence in a financial system that supported a growing colonial economy.Three centuries later, the challenge remains the same. Whether protecting colonial banknotes or modern currency, the goal is to create something valuable that is also difficult to fake.

Read More:

[The Conversation] - We analyzed paper money printed by Ben Franklin to uncover his anti‑counterfeiting techniques and materials innovations

[PNAS] - Multiscale analysis of Benjamin Franklin’s innovations in American paper money

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Why do some bumblebee larvae become queens while others do not?

Etya Amsalem, associate professor of entomology at Penn State University, looks for the answer.

Faculty Bio:

Etya Amsalem is an Associate Professor of Entomology at Penn State University. She earned her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Zoology from Tel Aviv University, Israel, and completed postdoctoral training at Penn State University and the University of Haifa, focusing on chemical communication, insect genomics, and bee health. Her research examines the evolution and mechanisms of social behavior in insects, integrating approaches from chemical ecology, evolutionary biology, functional genomics, behavior, and physiology.

Transcript:

When we think about a bee colony, we often imagine a queen ruling her kingdom. But in some social insects, the colony functions less like a monarchy and more like a self-organizing society.

A defining feature of social insects is the division of labor between females. Queens and workers often share the same DNA, yet develop into individuals with very different roles. Queens are large, long-lived, and reproductive, whereas workers are smaller and typically nonreproductive.

But what determines which larvae become queens?

My colleagues and I investigated this question in bumblebees, seasonal social insects that are also vital pollinators. A single queen starts a colony in the spring and produces hundreds of workers that rear her offspring. Later in the season, workers begin laying their own eggs, while the colony starts producing new queens.

To understand how the same DNA produces both workers and queens, we manipulated juvenile hormone levels in workers and larvae and tracked the movement the labeled hormone. Juvenile hormone regulates reproduction and development across insects, but it was unclear who controls caste development and how these signals reach larvae.

Workers treated with juvenile hormone produced larger offspring and more queens. In contrast, treating larvae directly did not produce queens and often caused workers to eliminate them. We also found that larvae respond only during a brief developmental window. Most importantly, we discovered that workers transfer juvenile hormone to larvae during feeding, providing direct evidence that workers regulate queen development through hormone transfer.

These findings reveal a bottom-up rather than top-down system. As workers mature, their hormone levels rise, increasing the amount transferred to larvae. Collectively, these interactions determine which larvae become the next generation of queens, showing that the colony’s future is shaped not by the queen alone, but by the workers themselves.

Read More:

[ScienceDirect] - The making of a queen: Hormonal regulation of female caste in the social bee Bombus impatiens

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org