Listen: Why do people crave ultraprocessed foods so much?

Many people love to eat ultraprocessed foods. Think about those crispy French fries or a delicious strawberry milkshake.

Ultraprocessed foods are heavily changed from their original form and made mostly in factories rather than kitchens.

Instead of simple ingredients you might recognize—like flour, eggs, or milk—these foods often contain long lists of additives, preservatives, artificial flavors, and chemicals designed to improve taste, texture, and shelf life.

Ashley Gearhardt, a University of Michigan professor of psychology, studies how addictive processes may drive overeating.

She joins the Michigan Minds podcast to share her insights on the impact of these foods on a global level and what drives overconsumption:

Source: University of Michigan

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Dark matter could be key to supermassive black hole mystery

Dark matter decays could be the missing ingredient explaining how giant black holes formed before the first stars.

A growing mystery in astronomy is the presence of gargantuan black holes—some weighing as much as a billion suns—existing less than a billion years after the Big Bang. According to the standard theory of black hole formation, these black holes simply should not have had enough time to grow so large.

The new study led by University of California, Riverside graduate student Yash Aggarwal shows that dark matter decays could be the key to understanding the origin of these cosmic behemoths.

Published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, the research shows that the energy released from dark matter decay could alter the chemistry of early galaxies enough to cause some of them to directly collapse into black holes rather than forming stars.

The result is timely since NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope continues to observe unusually large black holes in the early universe that could have formed by direct collapse. Astronomers had believed this process requires a coincidence of nearby stars shining onto pre-stellar gas and so expected it to be rare.

Aggarwal’s team goes beyond the standard approach by using dark matter—the unknown 85% of the matter in the universe that helps form galaxies. They show that if dark matter decays, it can leak a small amount of its energy into the gas and supercharge the direct collapse rate. Each decaying dark matter particle would only need to inject an amount of energy that is a billion trillionth the energy of a single AA battery.

“Our study suggests that decaying dark matter could profoundly reshape the evolution of the first stars and galaxies, with widespread effects across the universe,” Aggarwal says.

“With the James Webb Space Telescope now revealing more supermassive black holes in the early universe, this mechanism may help bridge the gap between theory and observation.”

Flip Tanedo, associate professor of physics and astronomy at UCR and Aggarwal’s doctoral coadvisor, says ideas related to this work had been bouncing around his group since 2018.

“The first galaxies are essentially balls of pristine hydrogen gas whose chemistry is incredibly sensitive to atomic-scale energy injection,” says Tanedo, a coauthor on the paper.

“These are the properties that we want for a dark matter detector—the signature of these ‘detectors’ might be the supermassive black holes that we see today.”

The research team, which included James Dent of Sam Houston State University in Texas and Tao Xu of the University of Oklahoma, modeled the thermo-chemical dynamics of the gas in the presence of decaying axions and found that a window of dark matter masses between 24 and 27 electronvolts could produce the conditions to seed direct collapse black holes.

Tanedo points out that the work stemmed from a series of coincidences that brought the right people together at the right time, including a series of workshops that connected particle physicists, cosmologists, and astrophysicists to discuss the big questions in their field.

“We showed that the right dark matter environment can help make the ‘coincidence’ of direct collapse black holes much more likely,” he says.

“In the same way, the support for interdisciplinary work helped make the ‘coincidence’ leading to this work possible.”

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and a UCR Hellman Fellowship.

Source: UC Riverside

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Team uses penguins to find ‘forever chemicals’ in remote Patagonia

Penguins living along the Patagonian coast of Argentina can serve as living monitors of their environment by using small, chemical-detecting leg bands, according to a new study.

For the proof-of-concept study in the journal Earth: Environmental Sustainability, University of California, Davis scientists outfitted 54 Magellanic penguins with silicone passive samplers placed gently around their legs for a few days during the 2022-24 breeding seasons.

The sensors safely absorbed chemicals from the water, air, and surfaces the penguins encountered while the unwitting “toxicologists” foraged to feed their chicks.

Once retrieved, the samplers were sent to the University of Buffalo for testing, which revealed that per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)—often called “forever chemicals”—were detected in more than 90% of the bands, even in this remote region.

Testing revealed a mixture of older legacy pollutants, as well as chemicals that replaced phased-out PFAS.

“By using a non‑invasive sampling approach, we were able to detect a shift from legacy PFAS to newer replacement chemicals in the penguins’ environment over time,” says lead author Diana Aga, director of the UB RENEW Institute and professor in the UB chemistry department.

“The presence of GenX and other replacement PFAS—chemicals typically associated with nearby industrial sources—shows that these compounds are not staying local but are reaching even the most remote ecosystems. This raises important concerns that newer PFAS, despite being designed as safer alternatives, are still persistent enough to spread globally and pose exposure risks to wildlife.”

“The only way we’ve had of measuring pollutant exposure in the past is by getting blood samples or feathers,” adds co-corresponding author Ralph Vanstreels, a wildlife veterinarian with the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center within the UC Davis Weill School of Veterinary Medicine.

“It’s exciting to have something that is only minimally invasive. The penguins are choosing the sample sites for us and letting us know where it’s important to monitor more deeply. As the animals go about their business, they’re telling us a lot about the environment they’re experiencing.”

The study provides an efficient, practical means of tracking the locations and times of chemical exposure, particularly in hard-to-sample aquatic environments. The authors envision the method being used to identify pollution exposure from oil spills, shipwrecks and other industrial sources.

“Moving forward, we’d like to increase our environmental detectives by expanding to different species,” says Vanstreels, adding that they next plan to test the method on cormorants, which can dive to depths of more than 250 feet.

“By turning penguins into sentinels of their environment, we have a powerful new way to communicate issues relevant for wildlife health and more broadly for the conservation of marine species and our oceans,” says coauthor Marcela Uhart, director of the Latin America Program within the UC Davis Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center.

Additional contributors are from UB and Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas in Argentina (CONICET).

The study was funded by the Houston Zoo.

Source: University at Buffalo

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Listen: Your relationship attachment style can change

A neuroscientist has answers for you about how attachment styles change from childhood to adulthood—and how you can become more secure.

What if the way you relate to others isn’t fixed—but fundamentally changeable?

Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Amir Levine is an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center.

He was the author of the best-selling book Attached (Penguin Random House, 2012), which examined how people’s attachment styles—from secure to anxious to avoidant. In his new book, Secure: The Revolutionary Guide to Creating a Secure Life (Penguin Random House, 2026), Levine argues that attachment styles aren’t lifelong labels but actually patterns the brain can relearn.

In this episode of the Big Brains podcast, he digs into the emerging science of “earned security”—how relationships reshape our neural wiring, why some people feel safe under pressure while others spiral, and what it takes to move from insecurity to stability:

Source: University of Chicago

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Why does stress push people to habits like drinking?

A new study offers one of the clearest answers yet to the question of why stressful moments so often push people toward habits like drinking.

The research identifies a direct connection inside the brain that links stress to addiction‑related behaviors.

The work shows how alcohol disrupts the natural stress‑response system, making it harder for the brain to adapt or make good decisions.

The team, led by Jun Wang, professor in the neuroscience and experimental therapeutics department in the Naresh K. Vashisht College of Medicine at Texas A&M University, published its findings in eLife.

The researchers found a pathway that connects the brain’s stress centers to the region responsible for habits and decision‑making. The stress centers include two small regions deep in the brain called the central amygdala (CeA) and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), which are areas that react when we feel overwhelmed, anxious or threatened.

“What we’ve identified is a direct line of communication between the brain’s stress centers and the region that governs habits and actions, a connection that wasn’t previously understood well,” says Wang, the study’s senior author.

“Seeing stress signals travel straight into this decision‑making system gives us a clearer picture of why stressful experiences can so strongly influence behavior, sometimes in ways that become unhealthy.”

These stress centers send messages using a chemical called CRF (corticotropin‑releasing factor). CRF is the brain’s main stress signal, released to help the body and brain respond during challenging situations.

Until now, scientists didn’t know how CRF reached the dorsal striatum, the part of the brain that helps control our actions, especially habits. The new study shows that CRF‑sending cells in the stress centers send direct lines of communication into the dorsal striatum.

What CRF reaches inside the dorsal striatum are cells called cholinergic interneurons, or CINs. These are specialized cells that act like traffic controllers for the brain. They help determine whether we stay flexible and adjust our behavior or slip into automatic habits.

When the researchers applied CRF to these cells, the cells became more active. This increase in activity also boosted their release of acetylcholine, a natural brain chemical that supports learning, decision‑making and the ability to change plans when needed.

“Under normal conditions, this stress signal actually helps the brain stay flexible, not rigid,” Wang says. “It helps us pause, think and make better decisions, especially when something stressful is happening.”

The second major finding of the study shows how alcohol disrupts this helpful stress‑response system.

When alcohol was applied to the brain cells—during early withdrawal—it weakened the ability of CRF to activate the cholinergic interneurons. Alcohol on its own also slowed the activity of these cells.

In plain terms: Alcohol blocks the brain’s natural ability to adapt during stress.

“Alcohol essentially cuts the line of communication,” Wang says. “When that happens, the brain loses some of its ability to respond to stress in a healthy way. This may push a person toward automatic or habitual behaviors, like drinking.”

This disruption could help explain why stress makes people more likely to relapse during recovery from alcohol use disorder—and why addiction often involves rigid, difficult‑to‑change behavior patterns.

The discovery of this direct pathway gives scientists a clearer picture of how emotional stress can influence decision‑making and habit formation in the brain. It helps explain several well‑known but previously mysterious features of addiction:

• Stress is a powerful trigger for relapse: If alcohol has weakened the brain’s natural stress response, stressful moments may push a person right back into old habits.
• Addiction involves rigid, compulsive behaviors: If the brain’s “flexibility” system is disrupted, it becomes harder to break out of harmful routines.
• Withdrawal can make stress feel worse: The study found that even early withdrawal blunted CRF’s effects, meaning the brain might be especially vulnerable during this period.

Wang says the findings are impactful because if scientists understand where a system breaks, they can start figuring out how to fix it. “This pathway may be a promising target for helping people build resilience against addiction or relapse,” he says.

Because the study pinpointed some of the exact cells and receptors involved, it may guide the development of future treatments. For example, therapies might aim to:

• strengthen the activity of the cholinergic interneurons
• support CRF signaling during withdrawal
• protect this stress‑response circuit from alcohol’s effects.

By uncovering a precise biological link between stress and addiction‑related behaviors, the study offers a milestone in the effort to understand and eventually treat the forces that make addiction such a difficult disorder.

“This discovery gives us a map of how stress reaches the brain’s decision‑making machinery,” Wang says. “And importantly, it shows us how alcohol interferes with that map. That knowledge is powerful.”

This research was sponsored by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Source: Texas A&M University

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New paint changes color to reveal impacts

Imagine a paint that changes color depending on how hard its surface is hit.

It could be used on football helmets to monitor concussion-level impacts, to record the handling history of shipped packages, or placed on insoles to analyze an orthopedic patient’s gait.

The paint is the latest innovation coming from the Tufts University Silklab, led by Fiorenzo Omenetto, a professor of engineering. Omenetto and research assistant professors Marco Lo Presti and Giulia Guidetti developed the paint to quantitatively measure the site and force of an impact without using any electronic circuitry or sensors.

The innovative substance is made with a color‑changing polymer surrounded by a silk protein polymer shell, and can be painted on surfaces of almost any size, texture, or contour.

The potential applications cover a wide range of measurements, from the subtle changes in pressure when analyzing the surface aerodynamics of cars and planes to the powerful impacts that could occur from military or industrial blast exposure.

The researchers even collaborated with Grammy Award-winning drummer Terri Lyne Carrington to demonstrate how the paint can reveal patterns of impact on a drum skin surface.

The research appears in the journal Advanced Science.

How does it work?

The tiny spherical particles in the coating—each about the size of a human blood cell—contain a core of color‑changing polymer called polydiacetylene, surrounded by a harder polymer shell made of silk fibroin proteins derived from the common silk moth.

The core polymer undergoes a blue-to-red transition when under mechanical stress, such as being squeezed, twisted, or stretched. At the microscopic level, the mechanical stress twists the chemical backbone of the inner polymer, affecting how electrons move along its length.

That in turn affects how the electrons absorb photons and causes the core polymer to change from deep blue to bright red. Because the amount of red increases with how hard the surface of the paint particles are hit, the paint can act like a built‑in force meter.

“You can tune the hardness of the shell so that you can extend the response of the paint to different levels of forces,” says Guidetti. The silk shell also prevents false triggers, so the paint only changes color when it is hit with a meaningful force.

Once the color changes, it stays changed, providing a permanent record of the level of force and its location on the surface. Additional hits in the same location provide an additive response, and the level of color change can be converted directly into newtons—the conventional unit to measure force.

The paint in its current form detects forces ranging from 100 to 770 newtons—levels comparable to that from a light hammer tap to a strong punch from a UFC fighter.

The paint can be brushed, sprayed, or drop cast (poured and then evaporated dry) to form films on many types of surfaces, including paper, plastic, wood, and metal, and on a wide range of objects that may benefit from displaying an impact profile of their use.

“You can paint it on anything from helmets to footwear and clothing, or on ropes and cables to measure stress,” says Omenetto.

Because it doesn’t rely on electronics, the coating is lightweight, inexpensive, and easy to scale up. It performs reliably even on curved or flexible surfaces, allowing one to capture complex impact patterns with fine detail.

Science and art

In one experiment, the researchers worked with renowned drummer Terri Lyne Carrington to demonstrate how the paint, applied to the drumheads, could be used as an analytical tool to show the location, forces, angles, and patterns of drumstick strikes during a performance, a bit reminiscent of sports analytics graphs such as basketball shot charts.

The experiment arose out of a longstanding collaboration between the Tufts Silklab and the Global Jazz Institute at Berklee College of Music.

“It’s an unusual collaboration, but based on a fundamentally simple principle,” says Omenetto. “In the work we do we start with a fixed input—silk—and end up with a thousand different things you can creatively think of for applications, such as a sensing paint. In music, you have equally fixed inputs such as the 12 notes of a chromatic scale that are reassembled in a myriad of tunes and improvisations.

“Having a dialogue between scientists and musicians about what represents a new idea and how it is generated leads to an incredibly rich interaction,” he says.

“This inspiration from great musicians helps scientists reframe their point of view and think of a ‘beautiful question’ that goes beyond mere lab work and addresses a bigger context and global impact.”

Omenetto says he asked Carrington if she would like to play some of her songs so they could visualize them on the drumskin. Carrington improvised and played songs from her 2019 album Waiting Game. The result looked like an abstract piece of art.

Omenetto wonders if the hit pattern could have any use for new drummers learning the instrument.

“It could help with training drummers to hit the center of the drum head, which is important for sound quality,” says Carrington.

“And it would show if a drummer has tendencies to hit other places, like closer to the rim. In other words, you could see more easily when your aim is off.”

Carrington also reflects on the crossover between the arts and technology. “Music is mathematical and scientific, so it is not surprising to me that I was drawn to the idea Fio presented. Great improvised music has a lot of questions and answers and problem solving,” says Carrington, but ultimately “the heart and mind—the human condition—is what really makes music good or not.”

Source: Tufts University

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TV ads don’t work nearly as well as believed

Traditional TV ads are far less effective than believed, according to real-time viewership data.

Even with all the hype around streaming, traditional TV still dominates ad spend. Advertisers are putting $139 billion into linear ads this year, compared to just $33 billion for ads on streaming/connected TV.

“We show TV ads are only about half as effective as we thought.”

With no way to track individual behavior among traditional TV viewers, it’s difficult to determine whether all that spending gets results.

New research from the University of Notre Dame helps determine the return on investment for TV ads, ironically by using digital data.

By combining massive datasets that track exactly what households watch and buy second by second, the study separates the real impact of TV ads from other factors.

Traditional methods of measurement, which rely mostly on ratings and aggregate market data, appear to overestimate ad effectiveness by 55% in a study of advertising for food delivery services, according to Shijie Lu, an associate professor of marketing at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

Lu’s research appears in Marketing Science.

Imagine that a household watches only part of a live game. If a food delivery ad airs during the portion they watched, they may see it; if it airs earlier or later, they may miss it. That timing difference creates a kind of natural experiment, helping the researchers isolate the ad’s true effect from other factors, such as which households were already more likely to order food. Researchers could not easily do this before with traditional TV measurement. Smart TV tracking now provides second-by-second household viewing data, making this kind of measurement possible at a much finer level.

Using LG smart TV data, Lu and coauthors Tsung-Yiou Hsieh from Oklahoma State University and Rex Yuxing Du from the University of Texas at Austin analyzed the viewing habits of millions of people who opted in to sharing their viewing data, letting the researchers see exactly what was on peoples’ screens—broadcast networks such as NBC and ABC, specifically—over a four-month period. The study didn’t track streaming apps like Hulu or Amazon. LG watched what viewers watched and connected that data to people’s food delivery app usage to measure ad impact.

“This is a game-changer,” Lu says, “because we can now link precise TV viewing data with real purchase history to measure TV ad effectiveness more credibly.

“Brands are overestimating their campaigns and wasting money on ineffective placements,” he says.

“We show TV ads are only about half as effective as we thought. When corrected, the real sales impact is much lower, which has important implications for how advertisers evaluate performance and allocate spending.”

In addition to showing that traditional measures greatly overstated the effects of TV ads, the new measurement method revealed additional insights that could help companies better target their ads.

Data show that promotions for first-time buyers increase retention. Viewers’ responsiveness to ads peaks within two days of purchasing food on a delivery app, with the highest engagement rate found among customers who have ordered two to four times previously. Young, tech-savvy sports fans are better prospects than older news viewers.

“The old ways of measuring TV ads are missing an important part of the picture, because they do not fully account for who is more likely to see ads and who is more likely to buy,” Lu says.

Traditional TV ad tracking confuses ad effectiveness with pre-existing habits (like who is already likely to buy or who watches a lot of TV), leading to inflated results. This research fixes that by isolating the random timing of ad slots within shows, allowing the team to accurately measure the true sales lift of TV ads and determine how that impact varies based on a customer’s history.

The study provides a powerful tool for more precisely measuring the return on investment of TV advertising. By targeting ads based on what viewers actually buy—not just demographics like age or gender—this approach brings digital-level precision to TV.

Source: University of Notre Dame

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