Why people still care about the Oscars

A film professor has answers for you about the enduring influence of the Oscars.

“And the Oscar goes to…”

Those are the words many will tune in to hear on March 15 for the 98th Academy Awards. But the number of people viewing the broadcast is far below the peak—55 million watched in 1998 when Titanic won best picture. Last year the ceremony drew 18 million viewers.

Still, the Academy Awards haven’t lost their hold on us.

Below, David Tarleton, professor of film and chair of the film and media arts department in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, breaks down the Oscars’ enduring influence and changes happening within the Academy to draw in viewers.

Still the pinnacle

Tarleton says the Oscars’ cultural influence starts with what the awards do for the people who win them.

“It makes people’s careers,” he says. “There are lots of cases of people where the Oscar is central to why an actor or filmmaker had the career they did. Frankly, even being nominated for an Oscar makes an enormous difference in terms of box office. That’s been true throughout the history of motion pictures, and it’s certainly true even today.”

An Oscar win can mean doubling your salary or more on your next project, he says.

“In the entertainment industry, it’s still enormously important and significant,” Tarleton says. “It’s still very much the pinnacle of awards.”

Tarleton says there have always been movies very few people see, until they win an Academy Award. The 2022 film Everything Everywhere All At Once, which started as a small project might have come and gone quietly, he says. Instead, it became an indie hit and took home seven Oscars.

“It was in the context of the Oscars that it became as big as it did,” he says.

More than movies

There’s no question the way people engage with the Oscars has evolved with the media landscape, Tarleton says. There are viewers who only tune in for the elements around the event—the ecosystem around the red carpet and the fashion or memes or highlights the next day.

“There’s all these other components to it,” he says. “The movies themselves are only part of it.”

There also is a generational divide for viewers that Tarleton says rivals the cultural age split seen in the 1960s.

“There’s this enormous difference between younger people and older people in terms of media consumption and who is famous to you?” he says. “Your average 50-year-old probably doesn’t know who Mr. Beast is, but your average 14-year-old certainly does. The opposite is also true—to what extent are movie stars important celebrities to younger people?”

The divide is part of a broader shift for the film industry that goes beyond the Oscars, he says. Theatrical attendance has been declining across all demographics for years, and the rise of streaming has fundamentally changed how people relate to movies.

“While I still personally appreciate watching movies in the theater, when you have a 75-inch TV and a decent sound system at home—with no need to pay for parking, a babysitter, or $18 popcorn—the case for leaving the house gets harder to make,” Tarleton says.

Yet, the Oscars still require a theatrical release as a condition for eligibility. Tarleton says he doesn’t see the Motion Picture Academy changing the requirement any time soon, since it’s part of how it maintains the allure of the Oscars’ exclusivity.

“I see the Academy more likely wanting to limit eligibility to theatrically released films more, to make it a little bit harder probably, rather than easier,” Tarleton says.

“Whether or not that works for them, we’ll have to see in the long term. Because the challenge is, if people aren’t going to the movie theater, are not seeing these movies in that way as much, does that make the Oscars even less relevant? That’s the danger.”

Evolving carefully

Tarleton says it’s clear the Academy knows it has work to do. Starting in 2029, the awards show will be exclusively streamed on YouTube. New categories have been added, and there’s awareness around pacing and creating moments during the ceremony that translate to social media.

The Oscars have also become more international, with non-English language films appearing more regularly—a shift Tarleton says reflects real changes in Academy membership and voting.

The Oscars are a measure of what members of the Academy thought best during any given year. Because of how the Academy typically admits new members—Oscar nominees can automatically join, or by being sponsored by existing members, not application—the average age of its membership is generally older. Which means the tastes tend to be more artistically conservative.

“Very young people aren’t usually represented at all, because generally it’s people who have gotten to a certain point in their careers, doing the kind of work that’s getting nominated, in order to be invited to join the Academy,” Tarleton says.

But recent movements, like the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, also brought in new members.

“There’s been a number of things that have opened up the Academy to a more diverse group of people, and that really helps in terms of the kind of work that’s being seen,” Tarleton says.

Whether the work the Academy is doing is enough to bring in new, younger audiences, remains to be seen.

“There’s no question that viewership is less in terms of real numbers, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not still significant in terms of cultural prestige or the aura around it,” Tarleton says. “Hollywood is very good at selling glamour.”

Source: Syracuse University

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How can you get rid of a phobia?

An expert has answers for you about what phobias are and how you can get rid of them.

In the Alfred Hitchcock classic film Vertigo, the protagonist John “Scottie” Ferguson, played by James Stewart, is plagued with acrophobia, or an extreme fear of heights. This condition impairs him to such a degree that he is forced to retire from his job as a police officer, and it creates emotional turmoil central to the movie’s plot.

Phobias.

Many suffer from them. Whether it is a fear of spiders (arachnophobia) or fear of enclosed spaces (claustrophobia) or fear of rats (musophobia), as many as 13% of the US population are affected by them.

Here, Jill Ehrenreich-May, professor in the psychology department at the University of Miami and director of the Child and Adolescent Mood and Anxiety Treatment program, explains more about phobias:

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Team turns DNA into a rewritable hard drive

Researchers are developing a rewritable DNA hard drive.

Around the world, scientists are exploring an unexpected solution to the growing data crisis: storing digital information in synthetic DNA. The idea is simple but powerful—DNA is one of the most compact, durable information systems on Earth.

But one issue has held the field back. Once data is written into DNA, it can’t be changed.

Now, researchers at the University of Missouri are helping solve that problem by transforming DNA from a one-time medium into a rewritable digital hard drive.

“DNA is incredible—it stores life’s blueprint in a tiny, stable package,” Li-Qun “Andrew” Gu, a professor of chemical and biomedical engineering at Mizzou’s College of Engineering, says.

“We wanted to see if we could store and rewrite information at the molecular level faster, simpler, and more efficiently than ever before.”

Why DNA?

Today’s computers store information as a series of zeros and ones. DNA-based data storage goes a step further by turning those bits into sequences of letters—A, C, G, and T—the same building blocks that make up DNA.

To store digital files in DNA, scientists translate the zeros and ones that make up photos, videos, and other data into sequences of those four chemical letters. Machines then build synthetic strands carrying that exact pattern.

DNA’s advantages are striking. It can hold huge amounts of information in tiny volumes—theoretically, all the world’s data could fit into something the size of a shoebox. When kept dry and cool, it remains stable for thousands of years. And storing data this way requires far less energy than running massive data centers.

Until now, however, DNA storage has been permanent. Once the data is encoded, it can’t be updated or reused—a major limitation for anything beyond long-term archiving.

That’s where Gu’s team comes in. They’ve developed a method that allows data stored in DNA to be erased and overwritten repeatedly. This rewritability is essential for any storage system meant for regular, everyday use.

Their method allows DNA to function less like a static archive and more like a modern hard drive—one with extraordinary storage density and longevity.

Retrieving the information requires reading the DNA sequence. The Mizzou team is developing a compact electronic device paired with a molecular-scale detector called a nanopore sensor. As the DNA passes through the sensor, it creates subtle electrical changes that software translates back into zeros and ones and, ultimately, the original data file.

Mizzou’s system is faster, simpler, and more environmentally friendly than existing methods. In the long term, Gu hopes to shrink the device into something about the size of a USB thumb drive.

High-capacity and ultra-secure

DNA stores information in three dimensions rather than on a flat computer chip, giving it unparalleled storage density. And because it exists as a physical molecule rather than a constantly connected electronic system, it offers additional protection against hackers.

“Think of it like a super-secure safe deposit box for your digital life,” Gu says. “DNA storage could protect everything from personal memories and important documents to scientific data and corporate archives—without the added cybersecurity concerns.”

While many research groups are advancing DNA storage, Mizzou’s work moves the field closer to a practical, rewritable system—a key milestone in making DNA a long-term replacement for some of today’s energy-hungry storage technologies.

The study appears in PNAS Nexus.

Source: University of Missouri

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Listen: Why is protein having a moment?

If you’ve walked the aisles of a grocery store, scrolled through social media, watched television, or set foot in a fast-casual restaurant chain in recent months, you know that protein is having its moment.

So, why are brands pushing protein? An International Food Information Council study found that 70% of adults are looking to increase their protein intake. But as it makes its way into more products than ever before, is it too much of a good thing?

Lesley Baradel is a registered dietitian, nutritionist, and lecturer in the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech. In this episode of Generating Buzz, she digs into the protein-packed trend, with implications ranging from health and wellness to marketing and how the rise of GLP-1s factors into the increased focus on the macronutrient:

Georgia Tech · Generating Buzz: A Protein-Packed Industry

Source: Georgia Tech

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Life forms can catch rides to other planets on asteroid debris

Tiny life forms tucked into debris from an asteroid hit could catapult to other planets—including Earth—and survive, a new study finds.

The work demonstrates that a certain hardy bacterium easily withstands extreme pressure comparable to an ejection from Mars after an asteroid hit, as well as the inhospitable conditions it would face during the ensuing interplanetary journey.

The study in PNAS Nexus suggests that microorganisms can survive remarkably more extreme conditions than expected, and raises questions about origins of life. The work also has significant implications for planetary protection and space missions.

“Life might actually survive being ejected from one planet and moving to another,” says senior author K.T. Ramesh, an engineer who studies how materials behave in extreme conditions.

“This is a really big deal that changes the way you think about the question of how life begins and how life began on Earth.”

Impact craters cover the surfaces of most bodies in the solar system. Mars, a planet that could harbor life, is one of the most cratered celestial bodies. We know asteroid strikes can launch material across space—and Martian meteorites have been found on Earth.

However, scientists have long wondered if life forms could also be launched from an asteroid impact. Tucked inside ejected debris, they might land on another planet—a theory called the lithopanspermia hypothesis.

Previous experiments to test the theory have been inconclusive, and targeted organisms widely found on Earth, rather than a life form that would suit the extreme environments of other planets.

To study how a microorganism would realistically handle the stress of a planetary ejection, the team devised a way to replicate the pressure and a singular biological model.

The team chose to test Deinococcus radiodurans, a desert bacterium found in the high deserts of Chile that is notorious for its ability to survive the most inhospitable, space-like conditions—everything from extreme cold and dryness to intense radiation. It has a thick shell and a remarkable ability to self-repair.

“We do not yet know if there is life on Mars, but if there is, it is likely to have similar abilities,” Ramesh says.

The experiment simulated the pressure of an asteroid strike and ejection from Mars by sandwiching the microbe between metal plates and then firing a projectile at it from a gas gun. The projectile hit the plates at speeds up to 300 mph, generating 1 to 3 Gigapascals of pressure.

For perspective, the pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the Earth’s oceans, is a tenth of a Gigapascal. Even the lowest pressure in this experiment is more than ten times that.

After shooting the microbes, the team determined whether they survived and examined the survivors’ genetic material for clues to how they handled the pressure.

The bacteria proved very hard to kill. They survived nearly every test at 1.4 Gigapascal of pressure and 60% at 2.4 Gigapascals of pressure. The cells showed no signs of damage after the lower pressure hits, but after the higher pressure experiments, the team observed some ruptured membranes and internal damage.

“We expected it to be dead at that first pressure,” says lead author Lily Zhao, a graduate student. “We started shooting it faster and faster. We kept trying to kill it, but it was really hard to kill.”

In the end, what did die was the equipment. The steel configuration holding the plates fell apart before the bacteria did.

When asteroids hit Mars, ejected fragments experience a range of pressures, perhaps close to 5 Gigapascals, though some could see much higher. Here the microbe easily survived almost 3, much higher than previously thought possible.

“We have shown that it is possible for life to survive large-scale impact and ejection,” Zhao says. “What that means is that life can potentially move between planets. Maybe we’re Martians!”

The possibility of life spreading between planetary bodies has significant implications for planetary protection and space missions, the team says.

Space mission protocols evaluate the likelihood of life surviving on the target planet. When missions travel to planets that might sustain life, like Mars, there are tight restrictions and safety measures to prevent contaminating the planet with Earth life. And when a mission brings back materials from a planet, there are very strict measures to control the possible release of that life on Earth. Because this work demonstrates that materials from Mars might reach other bodies, particularly its two nearby moons that aren’t currently restricted, the team says policies might need to be reassessed.

Phobos, in particular, orbits so close to Mars that any ejecta that gets there is probably exposed to much less pressure than what is required to get to Earth, the team says.

“We might need to be very careful about which planets we visit,” Ramesh says.

The team next hopes to explore whether repeat asteroid impacts result in hardier bacterial populations—or whether bacteria adapt to this kind of stress. They’d also like to see if other organisms, including fungi, can survive these conditions.

The work was supported by NASA’s Planetary Protection program.

Source: Johns Hopkins University

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Team pinpoints tendon disease trigger

Researchers have discovered a trigger of tendon disease.

Complaints such as pain in the Achilles tendon, tennis elbow, swimmer’s shoulder, and jumper’s knee are familiar to many young sportspeople, as well as to older individuals.

These conditions are all caused by overloading of tendons and are generally very painful.

“Tendons are fundamentally susceptible to overuse,” explains Jess Snedeker, a professor of orthopaedic biomechanics at ETH Zurich and Balgrist University Hospital in Zurich.

“They must withstand powerful loads, with all the forces of our muscles being concentrated to the relatively thin tendons that transmit these forces into movement of our skeleton.”

In medical terms, the aforementioned conditions are known as tendinopathies. They are some of the most frequent conditions seen by orthopedic specialists, but treatment options are extremely limited. Although physiotherapy can help, there are many serious cases for which this treatment does not achieve much. Scientists are therefore keen to research these tendon problems in greater depth with a view to developing effective treatments.

Now, a team of researchers led by Snedeker and by Katrien De Bock, professor of exercise and health at ETH Zurich, has reached a new milestone. In the HIF1 protein, they have identified a central molecular driver of tendon problems of this kind. A part of HIF1 acts as a transcription factor, which controls the activity of genes in cells.

This protein was already known to be present at elevated levels in diseased tendons. However, it was unclear whether the increase was simply a concomitant phenomenon or whether the conditions are actually triggered by the protein. In experiments in mice and with tendon tissue from humans, the team of researchers has now shown the latter to be the case.

In mouse experiments, the researchers either activated the HIF1 protein permanently or switched it off completely. Whereas they observed tendon disease even without overloading in the mice with permanently activated HIF1, no tendon disease occurred in the mice if HIF1 was deactivated in tendons, even in the case of overloading.

Both in the mice and in the experiments with human tendon cells, which the researchers obtained from tendon surgeries at the hospital, they were able to show that elevated HIF1 levels in the tissue leads to a pathogenic remodeling of the tendons: More crosslinks form within the collagen fibers that make up the basic structure of the tendons.

“This makes the tendons more brittle and impairs their mechanical function,” explains Greta Moschini, a doctoral student in De Bock and Snedeker’s groups and lead author of the study. In addition, blood vessels and nerves growth into the tendon tissue. “This could be the explanation for the pain commonly observed in tendinopathy,” says Moschini.

“Our study not only provides new insight into how the disease develops. It also shows that it’s important to treat tendon problems early,” says Snedeker. He is thinking particularly of young athletes, who frequently struggle with tendinopathies. In these cases, it is often still possible to treat the problems.

“However, the damage caused by HIF1 in tendon tissue can accumulate and become irreversible over time. Physiotherapy then no longer helps, and the only treatment at this moment is to surgically remove the diseased tendon.”

The fact that HIF1 has now been identified as a molecular driver raises the question whether it is possible to develop medicines that deactivate HIF1 and therefore can prevent or cure tendon disease. It is not quite that easy, explains ETH Professor De Bock. In many organs of the body, HIF1 is responsible for detecting a lack of oxygen (hypoxia) and activating a physiological adaptation. “Switching HIF1 off throughout the body would likely lead to side effects,” she says.

It may be possible to look for methods that specifically deactivate HIF1 only in the tendon tissue. In De Bock’s view, however, the more promising approach would be to explore the biochemical processes around HIF1 in the cells in greater detail. This could help to identify other molecules that are influenced or controlled by HIF1 and that could be more suitable targets for the treatment of tendinopathy. The researchers will now embark on precisely that search.

The research appears in Science Translational Medicine.

Source: ETH Zurich

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How brain networks work together is key to human intelligence

Researchers have conducted a neuroimaging study to investigate how the brain is organized and how that integrated system gives rise to intelligence.

Modern neuroscience understands the brain as a set of specialized systems. Aspects of brain function such as attention, perception, memory, language, and thought have been mapped onto distinct brain networks, and each has been examined largely in isolation.

While this approach has yielded major advances, it has left unresolved one of the most basic facts about human cognition: its overall unity as an integrated system.

“Neuroscience has been very successful at explaining what particular networks do, but much less successful at explaining how a single, coherent mind emerges from their interaction,” says Aron Barbey, a professor of psychology in the University of Notre Dame’s psychology department.

How cognitive ties form ‘general intelligence’

Psychologists have long known that areas as diverse as attention, perception, memory and language are correlated, forming what they term “general intelligence.” This accounts for how humans function and adapt in a wide range of academic, professional, social, and health contexts. It shapes how efficiently we learn, reason, and perform in response to a multitude of everyday problems and tasks.

For more than a century, this structure has suggested that cognition is unified at a fundamental level. What has been missing is a theory to explain why such unity exists.

“The problem of intelligence is not one of functional localization,” says Barbey, who is also the director of the Notre Dame Human Neuroimaging Center and the Decision Neuroscience Laboratory.

“Contemporary research often asks where general intelligence originates in the brain—focusing primarily on a specific network of regions within the frontal and parietal cortex. But the more fundamental question is how intelligence emerges from the principles that govern global brain function—how distributed networks communicate and collectively process information.”

Barbey and his research team, including Notre Dame graduate student and lead author Ramsey Wilcox, investigated the predictions of the unifying framework, called the Network Neuroscience Theory.

Their study appears in the journal Nature Communications.

The Network Neuroscience Theory

General intelligence is not itself a skill or strategy, the researchers argue. It is a pattern—the tendency for diverse abilities to be positively correlated. The study argues that this pattern reflects differences in how efficiently brain networks are organized and work together.

To test this claim, the cognitive neuroscientists analyzed brain imaging and cognitive data from one of the largest studies conducted to date, examining 831 adults in the Human Connectome Project, along with an independent sample of 145 adults in the INSIGHT Study, which was funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity’s SHARP program. The researchers integrated measures of both brain structure and function to enable a more precise characterization of the human brain.

Rather than identifying intelligence with a particular cognitive function or brain network, the Network Neuroscience Theory characterizes it as a property of how the brain works as a whole. In this view, intelligence reflects how brain networks are coordinated and dynamically reconfigured to solve the diverse problems we encounter in life.

This research represents an important shift, according to Barbey and Wilcox.

“We found evidence for system-wide coordination in the brain that is both robust and adaptable,” Wilcox says. “This coordination does not carry out cognition itself, but determines the range of cognitive operations the system can support.”

“Within this framework, the brain is modeled as a network whose behavior is constrained by global properties such as efficiency, flexibility and integration,” Wilcox says. “These properties are not tied to individual tasks or brain networks, but are characteristics of the system as a whole, shaping every cognitive operation without being reducible to any one of them.”

“Once the question shifts from where intelligence is to how the system is organized,” Wilcox noted, “the empirical targets change.”

Coordinated system of networks

The researchers found evidence to support four predictions of the Network Neuroscience Theory.

First, the theory predicts that intelligence is not localized to a single brain network but arises from processing distributed across multiple networks. Intelligence, therefore, depends on how the brain manages the division of labor across different networks and combines them as needed.

Second, for the brain to manage this distributed processing, it requires integration and effective long-range communications. To synchronize those efforts, Barbey says, there is “a large and complex system of connections that serve as ‘shortcuts’ linking distant brain regions and integrating information across the networks.” These pathways connect structurally distant areas of the brain, enabling efficient communication and supporting coordinated processing across the system.

Third, effective integration requires regulatory control that coordinates interactions among networks by shaping how information flows throughout the brain. These areas serve as regulatory hubs, reaching out to other networks to orchestrate the brain’s ongoing activities. They selectively recruit the appropriate networks for the specific task at hand—whether it be piecing together subtle clues to make sense of a problem, learning a new skill, or deciding whether a situation requires careful deliberation or a rapid, intuitive response.

Finally, Barbey says that general intelligence depends on the brain’s ability to balance local specialization with global integration. In other words, the brain functions best when tightly connected local clusters communicate well, but are still able to link to distant regions of the brain across short communication paths. This makes the most effective problem-solving possible, according to the coauthors.

The research suggests that intelligence is unified not because the brain relies on a single general-purpose processor, but because the same organizational principles shape how all cognitive functions work together.

Across both datasets, individual differences in general intelligence were consistently associated with these system-level properties. No single region or canonical “intelligence network” accounted for the effect.

“General intelligence becomes visible when cognition is coordinated,” Barbey noted, “when many processes must work together under system-level constraints.”

Applications for artificial intelligence

The implications of this study extend beyond intelligence research, he adds. By grounding cognition in large-scale organization, the study offers a principled account of why the mind is unified at all.

This framework helps explain why intelligence develops broadly during childhood, declines with aging, and is particularly sensitive to diffuse brain injury. In each case, it is large-scale coordination—not isolated function—that changes.

The findings also inform ongoing debates about artificial intelligence and how AI models are developed. If general intelligence in humans arises from system-level organization rather than from a dedicated general-purpose mechanism, then achieving general intelligence in artificial systems may require more than the accumulation or scaling of specialized capabilities.

“This research can push us into thinking about how to use design characteristics of the human brain to motivate advances in human-centered, biologically inspired artificial intelligence,” Barbey says.

“Many AI systems can perform specific tasks very well, but they still struggle to apply what they know across different situations.” Barbey says. “Human intelligence is defined by this flexibility—and it reflects the unique organization of the human brain.”

The research was conducted with coauthors Babak Hemmatian and Lav Varshney of Stony Brook University.

Source: University of Notre Dame

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