The Academic Minute

Eating ultra-processed foods may hinder brain health during aging.

Benjamin Katz, associate professor of human development and family science at Virginia Tech, examines this relationship.

Ben Katz, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor within the Department of Human Development and Family Science and the Director of the Cognitive Aging and Translational Science Laboratory at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on the development of executive function throughout the lifespan. Executive function refers to a broad set of cognitive skills, including working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility, that are closely linked to our abilities to learn, reason, think and decide. He is particularly interested in how experience and intervention, ranging from cognitive training to non-invasive brain stimulation to lifestyle behaviors, like diet and exercise, might be used to modulate these processes, to help a range of individuals including older adults concerned about Alzheimer’s disease, or children and emerging adults in academic settings. He uses a wide range of methodologies, including multi-level analytic approaches and fMRI neuroimaging , in the context of this work.

Ultra-processed foods, which includes sugar-sweetened sodas, packaged deli meats, and ready-made snacks, have been closely linked to poorer physical health. Recent research has also connected consumption of ultra-processed foods to issues with brain health during aging. But the industrial processing involved in creating different foods varies widely. For example, while sugar-sweetened beverages might include artificial flavorings, a packaged deli-meat may be more likely to include high levels of sodium to extend shelf-life. In my lab, two of our graduate students, Elayna Seago and Maria Rego, worked with me and my colleague Brenda Davy to better understand how specific ultra-processed foods might be related to someone’s chance of developing dementia. We examined seven years of data from several thousands US older adults who completed a survey called the Health and Retirement Study, which includes information about diet and cognition. We found that only some ultra-processed foods were associated with a heightened risk of developing cognitive impairment, which can include issues with memory and attention. On average, each additional daily serving of sugar-sweetened beverages, like sodas, was linked to a 6% higher chance of developing cognitive impairment by the end of the study. And each additional daily serving of ultra-processed animal products, like packaged deli meats, was linked to a 17% higher risk of developing cognitive impairment. We didn’t identify increased risk from other ultra-processed foods, like dairy items or savory snacks. Next, we’re hoping to better understand which aspects of these foods might be linked to worse brain health, as well as what specific neural mechanisms might be impacted. Our results show how important it is to consider these foods individually – a whole grain bread may have higher levels of processing but still be healthy overall. Each ultra-processed food is ultra-processed in different ways – with very different risks.

Read More:

[Science Direct] - Differential association of ultraprocessed food categories with risk of developing cognitive impairment in middle-aged and older adults in a longitudinal panel study

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If customer service is already excellent in a sector, how can a hotel differentiate itself from competitors?

Rin Yoon, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Iowa, determines this.

Rin Yoon is assistant professor of marketing at the Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa. She studies consumer psychology at the moment of transaction, with the goal of helping organizations design more effective incentives and payment environments. She holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, a B.A. in Communication Studies, with a minor in Statistics, from UCLA, and an M.S. in Marketing from Korea University Business School.

When you hear the word, ‘hotel’, maybe you think of the soft robe, the Egyptian cotton sheets, the body wash bottles that somehow smell out of this world.

The hospitality industry, after all, is built on customer satisfaction. It’s hard to find any sector more obsessed with keeping customers happy. But here’s the catch: when every hotel already offers great service, satisfaction stops being a competitive advantage.

So what else makes guests become loyal to a hotel and write those five-star reviews?

Our research suggests it’s psychological ownership — that subtle feeling that a space is mine, even if it’s only for one night.

We analyzed thousands of TripAdvisor hotel reviews, ran a field study at a hotel, and simulated various check-in experiences, and found this -- guests who felt a greater sense of ownership of their rooms, were more likely to put more time and effort into endorsing the hotel, took better care of the space, and were more likely to remain loyal to the brand.

So our message to anyone in a market where satisfaction is no longer a differentiator but simply the floor is this: we can boost loyalty by making customers feel the product truly belongs to them. The best part? Psychological ownership is low-cost, easy to implement, and surprisingly powerful. For hotels trying to stand out in a sea of excellent service, turning “the room” into “my room” may just be the next big competitive edge.

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If you need to persuade someone, maybe let AI do the talking.

Vered Shwartz, assistant professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia, explores why this might be.

Vered Shwartz is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, a CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute, and the author of “Lost in Automatic Translation: Navigating Life in English in the Age of Language Technologies”. Her research interests focus on natural language processing, with the fundamental goal of building models capable of human-level understanding of natural language. She is currently working on testing and improving the capabilities of large language models and vision and language models, developing culturally-competent AI, and responsible NLP applications in sensitive domains (e.g., legal, medical). Before joining UBC, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Prior to that, she did her PhD (2019) in Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University.

Who is more persuasive, AI chatbots or humans? It turns out, AI. In a recent study, we recruited people to role play a person considering a lifestyle change such as becoming vegan or attending grad school. Half of the participants were paired with a human who was tasked with persuading them to make a particular decision, and the other half was paired with GPT-4, a popular AI large language model or LLM. People were not only more easily persuaded by GPT-4, but also perceived it as more empathetic. Analyzing the conversations, we found several reasons. First, GPT-4 has access to vast knowledge from training on text from the web. Crucially, it’s also able to access that knowledge quickly and generate long responses. While the human participants were allowed to use Google, they were slower at the task. The result is that GPT-4 generated not only multiple arguments in favor of the decision but also concrete logistical support – for example recommending brands of meat substitutes – which proved very effective. This speed also allowed GPT-4 to add “niceties” such as greetings and validation which likely made people feel seen and further helped persuade them. Finally, GPT-4’s choice of words made it seem more authoritative, further increasing its persuasiveness. Because of their authoritative style, we typically assume that LLMs “know what they are talking about”, although they often “hallucinate” facts. As more people turn to LLMs for advice, this perception could lead to adverse effects. Recently, a person was hospitalized after taking sodium bromide based on advice from ChatGPT for reducing table salt consumption.As individuals, it’s more important than ever to get basic AI education and develop critical thinking. LLMs are a very useful tool, but not a perfect one, and we must ensure we’re all aware of their risks and limitations.

Read More:The 3rd Workshop on Social Influence in Conversations

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Trusting financial advisors is key to the best outcomes, but what determines the most trustworthy financial advisors?

Jesse Ellis, Alan T. Dickson distinguished professor of finance at North Carolina State University, looks at their beginnings.

Jesse Ellis is the Alan T. Dickson Distinguished Professor of Finance at North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management. His research explores financial advisor behavior, institutional investing, and the cultural and psychological foundations of financial decision-making. His work has been published in leading academic journals, including The Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, and Management Science.

Financial advisors manage trillions of dollars and help families make their biggest financial decisions. But here’s the catch: financial products are complex, and most people lack the expertise to know whether they’re getting good advice. Economists call this a credence good: clients have to trust the expert because they can’t easily evaluate the service.

So what keeps advisors from exploiting that trust? Regulation and market incentives help, but they’re not enough: about one in thirteen financial advisors has a record of misconduct. When monitoring is hard, personal ethics do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Where do those ethics come from? People form core moral beliefs during adolescence, absorbing norms from the culture around them. We asked whether advisors’ professional conduct is shaped by the ethical climate of their childhood hometowns.

We tracked more than 86,000 financial advisors from their childhood addresses into their adult careers. Using regional data on political corruption, corporate fraud, and other ethical violations, we built a misbehavior index capturing each area’s ethical climate. Does growing up in a place with higher tolerance for rule-breaking predict misconduct decades later?

Yes—by a lot. Advisors raised in Staten Island show misconduct rates around 16 percent; those from Omaha just over 2 percent. Even after advisors move across the country, childhood hometown culture predicts misconduct more strongly than their current location’s culture. The pattern appears even within the same branch office—comparing advisors working at the same firm in the same location, those raised in higher-misbehavior areas are more likely to misbehave than their coworkers.

The takeaway: monitoring and reputation help, but ethical behavior in finance also reflects the moral standards we internalize growing up—what Adam Smith called the impartial spectator that guides us when no one is watching.

Read More:

[Oxford Academic] - Childhood Exposure to Misbehavior and the Culture of Financial Misconduct

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Would you rather finish second or third in a competition? Andrea Luangrath, associate professor of marketing in the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa, says the answer may be surprising for athletes. Andrea Luangrath is an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in Marketing in the Tippie College of Business […]

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How do eyeless corals see light?

Akihisa Terakita, professor in the Graduate School of Science at Osaka Metropolitan University, dives in to find out more.

Akihisa Terakita and Mitsumasa Koyanagi are Professors at Osaka Metropolitan University’s Graduate School of Science with interest in photoreception.

Professor Mitsumasa Koyanagi and myself were lead authors for a study of light-sensing proteins, opsins, in corals. We obtained new insights into how corals and their symbiotic light-sensitive algae interact.

Most animals use retinal to absorb light, which forms a chemical bond with opsin, known as a Schiff base. Whether this bond carries a positive charge determines if the opsin absorbs visible light or UV. For visible light absorption, the positive charge is stabilized by negatively charged amino acids. However, reef-building corals lack these amino acids.

Our team found that Acropora tenuis corals use chloride ions from the environment instead. This suggests an association between environmental pH and light absorption. Under low pH conditions, the amount of positively charged particles increases, promoting the formation of positively charged Schiff bases and favoring visible-light detection. High pH means the opposite, favoring UV light.

This pH-dependent relationship is important for the coral’s partnership with algae. As the algae perform photosynthesis, carbon dioxide is consumed, raising the pH, which in turn, regulates the coral’s light sensing.

It’s a fascinating example of how symbiosis works in the complex reef ecosystem.

Read More:

[Osaka Metropolitan University - Research News] - How eye-less corals see the light

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Speech therapy can be crucial for some children, so how do we improve outcomes?

Tara McAllister, associate professor of communicative sciences and disorders at New York University, studies this.

Tara McAllister is a linguist and speech-language pathologist in NYU’s Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders. Her research aims to understand how speech skills are acquired in both typical and clinical populations, and why developmental speech patterns resolve in some children but persist in others. As director of the Biofeedback Intervention Technology for Speech (BITS) Lab at NYU, she has overseen multiple clinical trials measuring the efficacy of acoustic and ultrasound biofeedback in the treatment of speech sound disorder. Dr. McAllister is also active in technology development for speech therapy applications and oversees the team that released staRt, an iOS and web app to make biofeedback intervention widely accessible.

Millions of children see a speech therapist for help pronouncing certain speech sounds, especially the English ‘r’ sound. Over the years, studies have suggested that technology-enhanced training could help children overcome their speech difficulties faster, but it had never been tested in a large-scale randomized trial.Our study provided ten weeks of speech therapy to over 100 children aged 9-15 with persisting difficulty pronouncing the “r” sound. Participants were randomly assigned to receive treatment with traditional methods, where the clinician models speech sounds to imitate, or treatment with visual biofeedback, where the learner sees a real-time visual display of their speech. This study included two types of biofeedback. In ultrasound biofeedback, a probe held beneath the chin is used to visualize the shape and movements of the tongue during speech. In visual-acoustic biofeedback, participants see a real-time visual display of the acoustic spectrum of their speech, represented as a wave-like shape on a computer screen. While viewing these displays, children can adjust the positioning of their tongue in their mouth to try to match a display representing the correct pronunciation.We found that children in all treatment conditions made significant progress, but the rate of progress was 2.4 times faster with biofeedback than with traditional treatment. This provided the first-ever gold-standard evidence that biofeedback does outperform traditional speech therapy methods. We think this finding is important because speech therapists are managing ever-growing caseloads, and students who get stuck on ‘r’ can create a real bottleneck. Biofeedback can help resolve these speech difficulties more efficiently, reducing frustration and freeing up resources for other children with communication needs.

Read More:[NYU Steinhardt] - Children Receiving Biofeedback Speech Therapy Improved Faster Than with Traditional Methods

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Can concrete play a role in affordable housing in the future?

Pablo Moyano Fernandez, associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis, examines.

Pablo Moyano Fernández is an Associate Professor and founder of the Performative Concrete Hub (PCH). He brings extensive experience in architecture, having worked with international and national firms with a strong focus on construction. His teaching and research explore the performative qualities of concrete in building enclosures, structural systems, and other applications, leveraging innovative fabrication methods and novel concrete technologies.Through advanced studios and seminars, he investigates concrete’s potential across multiple scales—examining its impact on design, assembly, formwork innovation, and architectural expression. His research, supported by multiple grants, is complemented by built projects that demonstrate concrete as a resilient and sustainable building material. He recently designed and built Avis Spiralis, a bird blind structure constructed using an innovative casting method he developed.Pablo served as the faculty design leader for Washington University’s 2017 Solar Decathlon team, which developed CRETE House, a precast concrete home featuring an innovative enclosure system. The project earned second place in the Architecture Contest.His recent publications include “To Spur the Construction of Affordable, Resilient Homes, the Future Is Concrete” for The Conversation—a widely read article with over 30,000 reads—and scholarly work in The Plan Journal:“Opus Luteum: Incorporating a Third Dimension to Tilt-Up Concrete Wall Panels” (TPJ, Vol. 10 [2025], No. 1) and “Opus Versatilium: A Meta-Vernacular Approach for Contemporary Load-Bearing Walls” (TPJ, Vol. 9 [2024], No. 1), which was nominated for TPJ Best Paper of the Year 2024.

Wood remains the dominant material for single-family homes in the U.S., but it is often seen as “disposable”—lacking long-term durability and performing poorly under extreme weather such as flooding, hurricanes, and tornadoes. As these events grow more frequent, the vulnerabilities of wood construction become increasingly concerning.

Over 90% of new American homes use dimensional lumber for framing and plywood or OSB panels for enclosure. While light-frame wood construction is affordable, well supported by building codes, and familiar to builders, it burns easily, deteriorates with moisture, and is vulnerable to pests, mold, and wind damage. These weaknesses raise serious concerns about long-term resilience of homes.

Concrete offers a compelling alternative. It’s strong, durable, low-maintenance, and inherently resistant to fire, flood, pests, and severe weather. Yet concrete homes remain rare in the U.S., largely due to the reliance on labor-intensive cast-in-place methods, where formwork alone can account for up to 60% of construction costs.

My research focuses on precast concrete as a sustainable and affordable option. Unlike cast-in-place, precast components are made off-site in controlled settings, improving quality while reducing waste, construction time, and long-term cost.

In 2017, I co-led the team that created CRETE House, a prototype that withstood impacts equivalent to an F5 tornado. Building on that success, I designed the Compact House—a modular precast system for affordable and resilient housing.

Each unit is made of structural “rings” forming an airtight, energy-efficient shell. These rings can be mass-produced, shipped on standard trailers, and assembled in a single day. The open-source system allows any precast producer to adapt the molds, encouraging local production and cost efficiency.

Designed for lifespans exceeding 100 years, the Compact House reduces utility costs, maintenance, and insurance premiums. It represents a shift from short-term, disposable construction toward long-term resilience and equity—demonstrating that the future of affordable housing can be sustainable, durable and widely accessible.

Read More:[The Conversation] - To spur the construction of affordable, resilient homes, the future is concrete

Performative Concrete Hub

CRETE House

Using Concrete in a Smarter, More Sustainable Way

Roman-inspired concrete used in St. Louis bird blind | STLPR

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Repairing the brain after an injury can be crucial. So how do we do it?

Robert Krencik, associate professor in the department of neurosurgery and center for neuroregeneration at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, thinks small.

Faculty Bio:

Dr. Krencik received his PhD in neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and conducted research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California-San Francisco. At Houston Methodist, his research focuses on understanding the functional relationship of human astrocytes and neural networks in normal and injured states. His laboratory employs novel human pluripotent stem cell-based technologies to answer vital biological questions and to accelerate progress in promoting neuroregeneration in the human brain.

Transcript:

The adult human brain has a very limited ability to repair itself after injury and disease, including neurodegeneration. One promising therapeutic strategy to help recovery is to target broad underlying issues—like neuroinflammation. Inflammation of the brain can worsen symptoms and accelerate disease progression.

To address this, our team—together with Rice University—developed a new system to deliver anti-inflammatories directly to the brain.

The system we created is called AstroCapsules. These are tiny hydrogel spherical capsules, about the size of a grain of sand, that contain human astrocytes inside of them. Astrocytes are star-shaped support cells that help maintain healthy function of the nervous system, and we can produce these from human pluripotent stem cells in the laboratory.

In this study, we bioengineered the astrocytes to release an anti-inflammatory protein, interleukin-1 receptor antagonist. Our idea was that, if AstroCapsules were implanted into a specific region of the brain, the cells could help block damaging inflammatory signals in the microenvironment.

The purpose of the hydrogel is to act as a protective shell, allowing the astrocytes to do their job without being attacked by the immune system and not allowing them to migrate away from the target site.

We tested this approach by combining AstroCapsules with experimental models of the human brain in the lab, known as brain organoids, and by implantation directly into the mouse brain using neurosurgical procedures.

This technology addresses several major challenges in cell-based therapy. It’s stable, localized, and avoids immune rejection. The most exciting part is how it combines neuroscience and bioengineering to create smart materials that can interact with the brain in a controlled and targeted way.

This technology is in early stages, but AstroCapsules could become a more precise and long-lasting treatment for inflammation in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

Read More:[Science Direct] - Delivery of cytokines via encapsulated human astrocytes for neural immunomodulation

[Houston Methodist NewsRoom] - Tiny treatment system helps fight back against neuroinflammation in the brain

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Can we detect Alzheimer’s disease decades before symptoms start?

Tomas R. Guilarte, Dean of the Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work and professor of cognitive neuroscience and imaging at Florida International University, looks into how this might be done.

Tomás R. Guilarte, Ph.D., joined FIU in 2016 after serving as the Inaugural Leon Hess Endowed Chair Professor and Chairman of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences (EHS) at Columbia University School of Public Health in the City of New York. Prior to Columbia University, he received his Ph.D. and was a professor with tenure in the EHS department at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health where in 2018 he was inducted into the prestigious Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars.

His current research explores the impact of environmental pollutants on brain health and neurodegenerative disease, specifically Alzheimer’s disease. His research has been continuously funded for more than 24 years by grants from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. He has garnered more than $40 million in research funding and has received many awards since arriving at FIU including: 1) the Hispanic Organization of Toxicologists (HOT) Distinguished Toxicologist Award (2018), which celebrates a toxicologist of Hispanic origin for his or her outstanding professional achievements; 2) In 2019, he was selected by NBC News as Top 20 Latino Making a Difference in the United States; 3) he received the Metal Specialty Section Career Achievement Award (2020) by the Society of Toxicology (SOT), the largest professional organization of toxicologists in the world with members from over 70 countries; 4) In 2020, he was inducted into the Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine of Florida; 5) In 2022, he received the SOT Translational Impact Award which recognizes a scientist whose recent outstanding translational research has improved human and/or public health in an area of toxicological concern within the last 10 years.

As dean of the FIU Stempel College, he has transformed the educational and research enterprise and increased ranking and reputation. In 2016, FIU Stempel College was not ranked by U.S. News & World Report and today the school is ranked No. 35 amongst public universities. He led the launch of a fully Online Master of Public Health (MPH) which ranks No. 11 by PublicHealth.org and has catapulted the NIH research funding of the college to No. 15 amongst public schools of public health, according to the Blue Ridge Institute of Medical Research. In the last 5 years, FIU Stempel College has secured $131.8 million in research grants. One of his most proud achievements has been the continuous rise of the First Time In College (FTIC) 4-year graduation rate from 52% in 2016 to 85% in 2025.

Alzheimer’s disease develops silently for years before symptoms such as memory loss or confusion appear. By then, the brain has already sustained major damage.

My team, which includes doctoral student Daniel Martínez Pérez, has been studying a protein called TSPO, long linked to brain inflammation. What we discovered in an Alzheimer’s mouse model is that TSPO rises much earlier than anyone thought – long before symptoms begin.

Using advanced imaging in a mouse model of familial Alzheimer’s, we saw TSPO spike in the hippocampus as early as six weeks of age – the equivalent of a human teenager.

The increases occurred in microglia. These are the brain’s immune cells that cluster around amyloid plaques – the tell-tale plaques that develop in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s.

We then confirmed these results in human brain tissue donated by carriers of the “paisa” mutation. Carriers of this mutation, who mainly live in Colombia, South America develop symptoms in their 30s and 40s and die in their 50s. Even in advanced stages, TSPO remained elevated around plaques.

This means TSPO could serve as an early warning sign of disease activity. But it also raises new questions: is TSPO fueling brain damage, or fighting it? Could targeting it with drugs slow progression?

To find out, we are now using an Alzheimer’s mouse model in which we have genetically removed the TSPO gene to see the impact on Alzheimer’s progression. We are also expanding our studies to late-onset Alzheimer’s, which accounts for the vast majority of cases.

The goal is simple: if we can delay progression by even five years, millions of people could live longer, fuller lives – and the global impact of Alzheimer’s could be dramatically reduced.

Read More:[Springer Nature] – Amyloid-β plaque-associated microglia drive TSPO upregulation in Alzheimer’s disease[FIU News] – Can we detect Alzheimer’s disease decades before symptoms start?Daily Mail Article

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