Research

We’re still tasting the spice of 1960s sci-fi

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 13:00:00 +0000

We’re still tasting the spice of 1960s sci-fi Rachel Sauer Fri, 08/29/2025 - 07:00

Bradley Worrell

With this month marking Dune’s 60th anniversary, ��’s Benjamin Robertson discusses the book’s popular appeal while highlighting the dramatic changes science fiction experienced following its publication

Sixty years ago this month, a novel about a galactic battle over a desert planet valued for its mystical spice forever altered the face of science fiction.

Authored by Frank Herbert, Dune would go on to sell more than 20 million copies, be translated into more than 20 languages and become one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time, spawning several sequels and movie adaptions that have further boosted its popularity.

Benjamin Robertson, a �� associate professor of English, pursues a research and teaching focus on genre fiction.

In retrospect, it’s hard to quantify how important Dune was to the genre of science fiction, says Benjamin Robertson, a �� Department of English associate professor whose areas of specialty includes contemporary literature and who teaches a science fiction class. That’s because the status Dune attained, along with other popular works at the time, helped transition science fiction from something that was primarily found in specialty magazines to a legitimate genre within the world of book publishing, he says.

Robertson says a number of factors made Dune a remarkable book upon its publication in August 1965, including Herbert’s elaborate world building; its deep philosophical exploration of religion, politics and ecology; and the fact that its plot was driven by its characters rather than by technology. Additionally, the book tapped into elements of 1960s counterculture with its focus on how consuming a spice harvested on the planet Arrakis could allow users to experience mystical visions and enhance their consciousness, Robertson says.

Journey beyond Arrakis with a different kind of dune

“There’s also the element of the chosen one narrative in the book, which is appealing to at least a certain segment of the culture,” he says. The book’s protagonist, Paul Atreides, suffers a great loss and endures many trials before emerging as the leader who amasses power and dethrones the established authorities, he notes.

While Dune found commercial success by blending many different story elements and themes in a new way that engaged readers, it’s worthwhile to consider the book in relation to other works of science fiction being produced in the 1960s, Robertson says. It was during that turbulent time that a new generation of writers emerged, creating works very different from their predecessors in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, which is often considered the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

Whereas many Golden Age science fiction writers tended to set their tales in outer space, to make technology the focus of their stories and to embrace the idea that human know-how could overcome nearly any obstacle, Robertson says many science fiction writers in the 1960s looked to reinvent the genre.

“The 1960s is probably when, for me personally, I feel like science fiction gets interesting,” he says. “I’m not a big fan of what’s called the Golden Age of Science Fiction—the fiction of Asimov or Heinlein. The ‘60s is interesting because of what’s going on culturally, with the counterculture, with student protests and the backlash to the conformities of the 1950s.”

New Wave sci-fi writers make their mark

In 1960s Great Britain, in particular, writers for New Worlds science fiction magazine came to be associated with the term New Wave, which looked inward to examine human psychology and motivations while also tackling topics like sexuality, gender roles and drug culture.

“This new generation of writers grew up reading science fiction, but they were dissatisfied with both the themes and the way it was written,” Robertson says. “One of the New World’s most notable writers, J.G. Ballard, talked about shifting away from, quote-unquote, outer space to inner space.

“That dovetailed with other writers who weren’t necessarily considered New Wave but were writing soft science fiction that was not focused on technology itself—such as space ships and time travel—but more about exploring the impact of technologies on humanity and on how it changes our relationship with the planet, the solar system and how we relate to each other.”

New Wave authors also wrote about world-ending catastrophes, including nuclear war and ecological degradation. Meanwhile, many British New Wave writers were not afraid to be seen as iconoclasts who challenged established religious and political norms.

“Michael Moorcock, the editor of New Worlds, self-identified as an anarchist, and Ballard was exemplary for challenging authority in his works. He was not just interested in saying, ‘This form of government is bad or compromised, or capitalism is bad, but actually the way we convey those ideas has been compromised,’” Robertson says. “It wasn’t enough for him to identify those systems that are oppressing us; Ballard argued we have to describe them in ways that estranges those ideas.

“And that’s what science fiction classically does—it estranges us. It shows us our world in some skewed manner, because it’s extrapolating from here to the future and imagining …what might a future look like that we couldn’t anticipate, based upon the situation we are in now.”

American science fiction writers might not have pushed the boundaries quite as far their British counterparts, Robertson says, but counterculture ideas found expression in some literature of the time. He points specifically to Harlan Ellison, author of the post-apocalyptic short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” who also served as editor of the sci-fi anthology Dangerous Visions, a collection of short stories that were notable for their depiction of sex in science fiction.

Robertson says other American sci-fi writers of the time who embraced elements of the counterculture include Robert Heinlein, whose Stranger in a Strange Land explored the concept of free love, and Philip K. Dick, who addressed the dangers of authority and capitalism in some of his works and whose stories sometimes explored drug use, even as the author was taking illicit drugs to maintain his prolific output.

“Dune definitely broke out into the mainstream—and the fact that Hollywood is continuing to produce movies based upon the book today says something about its staying power,” says �� scholar Benjamin Robertson.

Meanwhile, Robertson notes that science fiction during the 1960s saw a more culturally diverse group of writers emerge, including Ursula K. Le Guin, the feminist author of such works as The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven; Madeliene L’Engle, known for her work A Wrinkle in Time; and some lesser-known but still influential writers such as Samuel R. Delaney, one of the first African American and queer science fiction authors, known for his works Babel-17 and Nova.

At the same time, even authors from behind eastern Europe’s Iron Curtain were gaining recognition in the West, including Stanislaw Lem of Poland, author of the novel Solaris, and brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in the Soviet Union, authors of the novella Ashes of Bikini and many short stories.

Impact of 1960s sci-fi remains long lasting

As the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the 1980s, a new sci-fi genre started to take hold: Cyberpunk. Sharing elements with New Wave, Cyberpunk is a dystopian science fiction subgenre combining advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, with societal collapse.

Robertson says the 1984 debut of William Gibson’s book Neuromancer is widely recognized as a foundational work of Cyberpunk.

While works of 1960s science fiction are now more than five decades old, Robertson says many of them generally have held up well over time.

“Dune definitely broke out into the mainstream—and the fact that Hollywood is continuing to produce movies based upon the book today says something about its staying power,” he says. “I think the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, particularly the Left Hand of Darkness, is a great read and a lot of fun to teach. And Philip K. Dick is always capable of shocking you, not with gore or sex but just with narrative twists and turns.”

If anything, Dick is actually more popular today than when he was writing his books and short stories back in the 1960s, Robertson says, pointing to the fact that a number of them have been made into films—most notably Minority Report and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which was re-titled Blade Runner).

“At the same time, I think one of the dangers of science fiction is thinking what was written in the 1960s somehow predicts what happens later,” Robertson says. “It can look that way. But, as someone who values historicism, I think it’s important to think about cultural objects in the time they were produced. So, the predictions that Philip K. Dick was making were based upon the knowledge he had in the 1960s, so saying what happened in the 1980s is what he predicted in the 1960s isn’t strictly accurate, because what was happening in the 1980s was coming out of a very different understanding of science, of politics and of technology.

“What I always ask people to remember about science fiction is that it’s about more than the time that it’s written about—it’s about what the future could be, not about what the future actually becomes.”

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With this month marking Dune’s 60th anniversary, ��’s Benjamin Robertson discusses the book’s popular appeal while highlighting the dramatic changes science fiction experienced following its publication.

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Top illustration: Gary Jamroz-Palma

�� scholar helps unite Navajo culture and modern science

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 22:43:38 +0000

�� scholar helps unite Navajo culture and modern science Rachel Sauer Tue, 08/26/2025 - 16:43

Cody DeBos

Kelsey John’s Navajo-centered Horses Connecting Communities initiative offers culturally relevant, practical education about horses

When Kelsey John left Oklahoma to pursue her PhD in New York, she quickly started missing a central piece of her lifestyle: horses. Raised in an environment rooted in horse culture, John’s life is deeply intertwined with the animals.

“I am a citizen of the Navajo Nation, and I am a lifelong horse person,” she says. “Both sides of my family had horses in their background, so I grew up with a lot of exposure to them and education about them.”

As she studied away from home, Kelsey John, a �� assistant professor of ethnic studies, felt a strong pull to return home and rediscover the close relationship with horses she once had.

As she studied away from home, John, a �� assistant professor of ethnic studies and Center of the American West affiliate, felt a strong pull to return home and rediscover the close relationship with horses she once had. That realization inspired her doctoral research and gave birth to a community organization centered on the profound bonds between humans, horses and the environment. Ultimately, it led her back to her community to spearhead a unique initiative called Horses Connecting Communities.

Blending cultural traditions and modern science

Originally started as a one-day conference, Horses Connecting Communities quickly became a cherished gathering, providing Navajo people with culturally relevant and practical education about horses.

“The goal was to kind of braid those things together and just make it a really Navajo-centered event for the needs of the Navajo people and their horses. That’s where it all started, and it’s grown since then,” John says.

Events hosted by the organization typically include speakers, demonstrations, and hands-on workshops on horse care, training and veterinary skills. They are often led by Navajo experts like John, who return to their community to share their specialized knowledge.

“We’ve also partnered with a different camp that’s been happening on the Navajo Nation for over 10 years now called Song of the Horse Camp, which is organized by the folks at the University of Arizona,” says John.

“Since we partnered with them, we’ve been able to introduce more equine facilitated learning, which helps either youth or adults with academic skills, life skills, personal communication, confidence building, body language awareness … all these different interpersonal and personal skills in a new and different way,” she adds.

Horses, land and Navajo identity

At the heart of Horses Connecting Communities is the understanding that horses, land and Navajo cultural identity are inseparable.

“Something really unique about horses is that, in order to have a relationship with them, you’re kind of inevitably having a relationship with the land as well,” says John. “Because we are an indigenous community, we have a deep relationship with our ancestral land.”

She also emphasizes how Navajo traditions and modern equine science are not opposing ideas, but natural complements to each other.

“There is a great effort among the horse community in the Navajo Nation to understand and integrate our cultural beliefs with the best and most current science,” John explains. “I’ve had the huge privilege of being able to work with lots of professionals who are also tribal members so they can personally and in a communal way integrate tradition with relevant science.”

“There is a great effort among the horse community in the Navajo Nation to understand and integrate our cultural beliefs with the best and most current science,” says �� scholar Kelsey John. (Photo: Kelsey John)

Working ‘with,’ not ‘on’

John’s approach to relationship building through Horses Connecting Communities emphasizes the ethical necessity of working hand-in-hand with indigenous communities rather than just researching them. Her organization exemplifies this with a collaborative and sustained partnership that is directly shaped by the Navajo people’s needs and aspirations.

“The idea is making your research relevant and useful to the community and keeping that ongoing relationship and ongoing presence,” she says.

But community partnerships can still be complex, John acknowledges.

“There’s always going to be a power differential between a university—even a university researcher such as myself—and a community. You’re always dealing with power and access to resources and sometimes even conflicting ideas of what’s beneficial.”

Yet, despite these challenges, the rewards of genuine community-based collaboration inspire John to keep coming back for more.

“It’s been almost nine years now since I started my research, but I still work with a lot of the same people that I worked with for the first Horses Connecting Communities event. We’ve brought in new people and changed our programming and are always evaluating if what we’re doing is relevant,” she says.

John adds, “But it always goes back to what I learned in that initial research about what the horse means to the people, what they want, and what are the challenges they’re facing, then finding ways to support that.”

Looking ahead

Thanks to recent support in the form of a �� PACES Grant, Horses Connecting Communities will further explore equine facilitated learning tailored to the Navajo community.

“We want to understand what the needs of the tribe are and if they can be met through this unique educational approach,” John says.

She is also excited about organizing specialized events for Navajo women that recognize culturally significant beliefs about their relationships with animals and the land.

John’s ultimate aspiration, however, goes beyond education and research. She hopes her initiative will inspire a deeper appreciation for horses, their care and the Navajo people’s enduring relationship with these animals.

“The big thing is to really be aware of the legacy and the significance of the horse and the people’s relationship with the horse—and the land, too,” she concludes. “There’s such a long history there, and I’m so glad to be a part of the larger narrative about horses.”

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Kelsey John’s Navajo-centered Horses Connecting Communities initiative offers culturally relevant, practical education about horses.

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Prof focuses on the brothers behind the fairy tales

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 21:37:22 +0000

Prof focuses on the brothers behind the fairy tales Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/25/2025 - 15:37

Clint Talbott

��’s Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian Studies, publishes first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

Once upon a time, a professor volunteered to develop a college course on German fairy tales. She did as she promised, but that was not the end.

“Once I prepared the course and began teaching it, I was just smitten,” says Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian studies at the ��, now a world-renowned scholar of the Brothers Grimm.

�� scholar Ann Schmiesing is author of The Brothers Grimm: A Biography, published last year to wide acclaim and reviewed in publications from The New Yorker to The Times of London.

Schmiesing has written two books on the Brothers Grimm. The most recent, The Brothers Grimm: A Biography, was published last year to wide acclaim and reviewed in publications from The New Yorker to The Times of London. It is the first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose first names (and life stories) are less well-known than their usual moniker, the Brothers Grimm.

Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) are widely known as collectors of fairy tales, but they were also mythographers, linguists, librarians, civil servants and philologists who, among other things, strove to preserve key elements of German culture.

They produced a vast body of work on mythology and medieval literature, launched on a monumental German dictionary (which they had completed through the letter F by the time they both died), and made groundbreaking linguistic discoveries.

“By and large, people don’t know a whole lot about the Brothers Grimm, and that was one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book,” says Schmiesing, who is also the senior vice chancellor for strategic initiatives at ��.

While teaching the course on the Grimm fairy tales, she noted that students were often familiar with some version of the tales, principally through Disney versions or other contemporary retellings of stories like Snow White.

Teaching moral lessons

The Grimms released seven complete and 10 abridged versions of the tales, and the brothers revised the tales over time. Starting with the second edition, for instance, doves peck out the evil stepsisters’ eyes in Cinderella as a punishment for their wickedness. Violence in the tales is rarely gratuitous, Schmiesing says, but in Cinderella and other tales, the Grimms sometimes added violence to teach a moral lesson.

As they edited and revised the tales, she adds, they mediated among different versions and revised them to reflect 19th-century bourgeois norms. For instance, female characters in some tales contribute less dialogue in later editions, Schmiesing says: “Their thoughts are simply paraphrased.”

Similarly, the Grimms adjusted “Hansel and Gretel” to reflect then-contemporary notions of women. In an earlier version, the culprit was their biological mother but in a later version of this tale, a stepmother abandons the children.

“They change that because they feel like they can’t possibly suggest that a biological mother would abandon her children,” Schmiesing says, adding, “Again, that's playing into their 19th-century ideas of women and motherhood.”

The Brothers Grimm: A Biography by �� Professor Ann Schmiesing is the first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose first names (and life stories) are less well-known than their usual moniker, the Brothers Grimm.

Additionally, some female characters are initially more independent than they appear in later editions, “so the Grimms kind of lessened their independence and increased their dependence on male characters,” Schmiesing says.

Over time, the Grimms also made the tales folksier, adding rhymes and idioms. And the Grimms did not think the tales were just kid stuff. They saw the tales as being interesting to all ages and relevant to German culture, Schmiesing says.

Germany in the Grimms’ lifetime was not politically united, and it was wracked by the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Their own part of Germany was occupied by the French for a time, and “so they see collecting and publishing fairy tales and other texts . . . as a way forward for Germany,” Schmiesing says.

In the Grimms’ view, if Germans could appreciate their cultural heritage, perhaps they’d be able to assert themselves as a politically united entity: “So it might seem to be naive, but they really thought that their scholarly works, their collections, would also be a path out of the wars,” Schmiesing says.

Asking deep questions

Their scholarship was even broader, however. The brothers were interested in deep questions, such as how languages developed over time, how customs developed over time, how literary texts developed over time, “and that to them is all interwoven.”

Jacob Grimm, in particular, devoted much of his scholarly life not only to literature, but also to legal customs, linguistic study and his German Grammar, which includes his discovery of what is now called Grimm’s Law.

“It’s been said that Grimm’s Law was as important to the humanities as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is to the sciences,” Schmiesing says.

They did all of this on top of full careers as librarians, university professors, and, in Jacob’s case, a civil servant.

“It’s just extraordinary, the volume of scholarship that they produced,” Schmiesing says, noting their “sheer accomplishments” of “incredible breadth.”

Of the tales themselves, Schmiesing says Rumpelstiltskin is among her favorites. “It is one of the most enigmatic tales in the Grimms’ collection.” The tale can be viewed as being about the forced labor of female characters, disease and disability, or the meaning of spinning straw into gold.

In addition to these and other possible meanings, the tale changes significantly between versions, she notes. In an early version, the woman despairs not because she can’t spin straw into gold, but because she wants to spin yarn but can spin only gold.

“Also, who is Rumpelstiltskin, and what does he represent?”

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��’s Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian Studies, publishes first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

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Top illustration: by Walter Crane from "Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm" (1886).

�� scholar receives Fulbright support to study fossil mammals in Poland

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 19:23:11 +0000

�� scholar receives Fulbright support to study fossil mammals in Poland Rachel Sauer Fri, 08/22/2025 - 13:23

Professor Jaelyn Eberle will teach and pursue a hypothesis that a Cretaceous land bridge between Asia and North America was a dispersal route for land mammals at the time

Jaelyn Eberle, a �� professor of geological sciences and CU Museum of Natural History curator of fossil vertebrates, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award to study the extensive collection of Cretaceous (about 75 million years old) Mongolian mammals housed at the Institute of Paleobiology in Warsaw, Poland.

Eberle will travel to Poland Aug. 31 to begin work comparing the Mongolian mammal collection with fossil mammals that she and her colleagues discovered on the North Slope of Alaska, in the hopes of identifying some of the earliest mammals to cross from Asia into North America via Beringia, a prehistoric land bridge that once connected the two continents. Along with Professor Lucja Fostowicz-Frelik, Eberle also will team-teach a graduate seminar on the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary for the BioPlanet Doctoral School in Poland, which attracts PhD students in biology, geology and biochemistry from across Europe.

Jaelyn Eberle, a �� professor of geological sciences and CU Museum of Natural History curator of fossil vertebrates, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award to study the Cretaceous Mongolian mammals housed at the Institute of Paleobiology in Warsaw, Poland.

“Until now, my research has focused mostly on North American fossil mammals,” Eberle explains. “The Fulbright award allows me to broaden my research to include ancient Mongolian mammals and collaborate with the foremost expert on them, Dr. Fostowicz-Frelik. I am also excited to co-teach a class with Dr. Fostowicz-Frelik; this will build my knowledge of the Eurasian fossil record and inject new content, perspective and teaching styles into my courses at ��.

“Being immersed in the language and culture of Poland for four months and teaching PhD students from across Europe will also give me perspective on how to better support CU students from international backgrounds, too.”

Fulbright U.S. Scholars are faculty, researchers, administrators and established professionals teaching or conducting research in affiliation with institutes abroad. Fulbright Scholars engage in cutting-edge research and expand their professional networks, often continuing research collaborations started abroad and laying the groundwork for forging future partnerships between institutions.

“Professor Eberle’s fascinating research is important not only because it advances scientific knowledge, it also expands the Museum Institute’s vibrant international collaborations, helping us to connect with scholars around the globe,” says Nancy Stevens, director of the Museum Institute and professor of anthropology.

Upon returning to their home countries, institutions, labs and classrooms, they share their stories and often become active supporters of international exchange, inviting foreign scholars to campus and encouraging colleagues and students to go abroad.

More than 800 individuals teach or conduct research abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program annually. In addition, more than 2,000 Fulbright U.S. Student Program participants—recent college graduates, graduate students and early-career professionals—participate in study/research exchanges or as English teaching assistants in local schools abroad each year.

Fulbright is a program of the U.S. Department of State, with funding provided by the U.S. Government. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the program, which operates in over 160 countries worldwide.

As a Fulbright U.S. Scholar, Eberle will further her study of fossil mammals, their evolution during past intervals of global warmth and their dispersal across the Northern Hemisphere when polar land bridges connected North America to both Asia and Europe.

“I hypothesize that some of the Cretaceous Alaskan mammals belong to Asian lineages; if true, this would provide direct evidence that Beringia was a dispersal route for land mammals at the time,” Eberle explains. “The Alaskan fauna preserves the northernmost known mammals of the Mesozoic Era (or Age of Dinosaurs), and our team’s latest findings mean it may also include among the earliest mammalian immigrants from Asia to North America.

Jaelyn Eberle (foreground, yellow jacket) and her colleagues quarry for tiny vertebrate fossils in Alaska's Prince Creek Formation. (Photo: Kevin May)

Many of the mammal teeth Jaelyn Eberle studies are the size of sand grains. This is a tooth of the tiny Alaskan mammal Sikuomys mikros (meaning "tiny ice mouse") that lived in northern Alaska about 72 million years ago. (Photo: Jaelyn Eberle)

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Professor Jaelyn Eberle will teach and pursue a hypothesis that a Cretaceous land bridge between Asia and North America was a dispersal route for land mammals at the time.

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Top illustration: James Havens

Video games don’t rot your brain—they train it

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 20:06:22 +0000

Video games don’t rot your brain—they train it Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/18/2025 - 14:06

Blake Puscher

�� scientists find that playing video games comes with small but significant cognitive benefits

Ever since video games began to gain widespread popularity, some have questioned how playing them consistently affects people, especially mentally. Like with TV, the internet, social media and AI, the tendency has been to assume negative effects. However, a number of studies have suggested that playing video games can help strengthen people’s cognitive abilities.

Despite similar research findings, many of the studies disagree on the size of this effect and to which areas of cognition it applies—perhaps, in part, because of the limitations inherent to their typically cross-sectional approach.

A team of �� scientists including Shandell Pahlen, Anqing Zheng, Robin P. Corley, Naomi P. Friedman, Sally J. Wadsworth and Chandra A. Reynolds, all members of ��’s team within the CATSLife project, aim to address these uncertainties with a longitudinal study on video games and cognitive health. CATSLife stands for Colorado Adoption/Twin Study of Lifespan behavioral development and cognitive aging.

Chandra Reynolds, a �� professor of psychology and neuroscience, and her research colleagues found small, positive cognitive benefits of playing video games.

“We can leverage the twins and siblings’ similarities and differences to understand aspects of behaviors and cognitive abilities,” Reynolds explains, a �� professor of psychology and neuroscience, “especially as they relate to how well people maintain their cognitive functioning, not only now, but eventually we hope to continue following them as they transition into midlife.”

Video games and cognitive health

Video games are an accessible way to engage one’s mind for several reasons. Like board games, video games do not require much in the way of physical ability, unlike sports and other such ways to exercise the mind. Additionally, video games are widely popular, with 2.7 billion gamers worldwide as of early 2025, according to Statista.

These traits suggest that video games could be used as a tool to support cognitive health, but this assertion raises some questions: What are the specific abilities that comprise generalized cognitive functioning, and how can scientists determine whether video games serve this purpose?

The study covered three important cognitive domains: processing speed, working memory and spatial reasoning. It included 1,241 individuals from CATSLife between 28 and 49 years old who had taken at least one of these tests. Some of the participants played video games and some did not, so the effects of playing video games were determined based on what video games they played. These games were categorized broadly into Action+, Puzzle+, and Other genres. The plus signs refer to the fact that the categories include genres that are not usually described with the base name, like life simulation games being included in Puzzle+ even though they aren’t puzzle games.

Reverse selection

One argument against prior studies suggesting that video games provide a cognitive benefit is the concept of reverse causation. In this case, reverse causation refers to certain people’s cognitive skills making them more likely to play video games, as opposed to playing video games causing an increase in cognitive skills.

Reverse causation is therefore part of the nature vs. nurture discourse, and as such, the point is not that engaging in an activity can’t improve people’s abilities, but that part of the correlation between activity and ability comes from those who already have above-average abilities choosing to engage in activities that take advantage of them. For example, a hypothetical study that compared Olympic runners with people who never run without accounting for reverse causation would overestimate the physical benefits of running, because a large part of the gap between the two groups is baked in: Most people can’t reach the level of Olympic athletes just by exercising.

This study factored in the participants’ baseline cognitive ability by looking at their adolescent IQ scores. “We’re fortunate that we had a longitudinal design,” Reynolds says, “and that we’ve assessed our participants multiple times over their earlier development into adolescence. Most studies of video games are cross sectional, and they don’t have indices of people’s cognitive performance at earlier ages.”

The researchers also considered several variables associated with performance on specific cognitive tasks. These included age, sex and educational attainment. The first two of these are especially important, because the genre of video games that people play varies within these demographics. Specifically, women and older adults are more likely to play Puzzle+ games, and men and younger people are more likely to play Action+ games.

�� researcher Chandra Reynolds and her colleagues found that spatial reasoning benefited most consistently from playing video games. (Photo: Unsplash)

“There are some sociodemographic differences in what kinds of games people are playing,” Reynolds says, “and we wanted to account for that to isolate the differences that might arise from the gameplay itself.”

Increased processing speed

Spatial reasoning benefited most consistently from playing video games, with a significant effect measured in all three tests before and after adjustment for adolescent IQ, although the effect was about half as large after adjustment. There is also evidence that processing speed performance could increase after playing video games, as the results of one test remained significant even after adjustment. Working memory was the only domain that did not show evidence of improvement due to video game play, with non-significant numbers before and after adjustment.

Reynolds says that unimproved working memory results could be a consequence of the test used and the fact that only one test was used for this ability, compared to the three tests used for both processing speed and spatial reasoning.

“We can’t say a whole lot about working memory from one test,” he says. “In the future, we want to extend to other measures that would get more specifically at attention, working memory and other aspects of executive functioning.”

When video game play was broken down by the broad genre of game, there were some negative correlations: people who played Action+ games scored worse on processing speed, and those who played Puzzle+ games scored worse on spatial reasoning. However, these correlations were very small, and only statistically significant for one of the processing speed tests.

These results seem counterintuitive, which makes it particularly interesting to see if they will be replicated in other studies. As to benefits by genre, Action+ games had a particular association with spatial reasoning and Puzzle+ games had a particular association with processing speed.

According to the paper, the results for different tests may have been affected by how similar they are to video games. For example, with respect to spatial reasoning, Action+ gamers scored best on the Block Design test, which involves three-dimensional operations similar to those involved in playing many modern action games. By the same token, gamers may have performed worse on tests that were more divergent from video games due to their familiarity with related but substantially different tasks.

Future assessments

The researchers are currently collecting more data from the CATSLife sample, asking the same questions for further insight into how the observed effects change over the course of five or six years. “If people continue to play games, they’ll likely nominate newer games—it would be interesting to see if there is a long-standing influence or if new game play factors emerge,” Reynolds says.

Some changes could be made to the assessment of people’s gameplay to get more particular results. In the future, Reynolds says, “we would conduct more specific surveys of our participants: asking for more details about the games they play, the systems they use and how they approach gameplay. We asked questions that allowed us to get at the kinds of games they play, but not how they play them, and we’re making some inferences, so we’d want to dig deeper into that.”

“There has been some debate in the literature about the potential benefits or even detriments of video game play,” Reynolds explains, “but I think we found that, in a general sample that isn’t selected for pathological use or other characteristics related to playing video games, we found some salient, small positive effects.”

This brings up an important caveat, which is that even though there could be positive effects of playing video games, it is still possible to experience negative effects by engaging with them in a unhealthy manner. Because the positive effects are small, any negative effects due to playing video games irresponsibly, such as playing them for an excessive amount of time each day, are likely to outweigh the benefits.

“I think it will bear additional replication and future work,” Reynolds says, “but the benefits are quite interesting, and we’d like to see how this plays out with other kinds of activities as well.”

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�� scientists find that playing video games comes with small but significant cognitive benefits.

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Scholar dissects voter perceptions of transnational politics

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 21:24:57 +0000

Scholar dissects voter perceptions of transnational politics Rachel Sauer Thu, 08/14/2025 - 15:24

Bradley Worrell

�� political scientist Jeffrey Nonnemacher asserts that Western European national political parties use their affiliations with party families to signal their own political viewpoints

In the 2013 German national elections, the upstart political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) failed to gain a single seat in parliament. Just four years later, the AfD won 97 seats and became the third-largest political party in Germany.

The AfD made its historic inroads in the 2017 German elections at the same time it transformed itself from a Euroskeptic but relatively moderate party into a political movement that became much more closely aligned with radical right parties in the rest of Western Europe, says Jeffrey Nonnemacher, an assistant teaching professor with the �� International Affairs Program, whose research focus is political parties and elections.

In particular, Nonnemacher points to a decision by AfD’s party leader, Frauke Petry, in 2017 to host radical right leaders from across Europe, including Marine Le Pen with the French National Rally, Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party for Freedom and Matteo Salvini of Italy’s Northern League. That decision effectively telegraphed to voters the party’s shift to the right and signaled its embrace of the transnational radical right party label, says Nonnemacher, who recently published a paper in the British Journal of Political Science about voter perceptions of transnational politics.

�� scholar Jeffrey Nonnemacher is an assistant teaching professor in the International Affairs Program and the Arts and Sciences Honors Program and a lecturer in the Department of Political Science.

“My goal with this paper is to tackle the question of: Do voters care if the AfD’s leadership is spending a lot of time with France’s Marine Le Pen and the National Rally? Are voters getting some sort of information from the party family label attached to a party and the party’s relationship with that label?” he explains. In his paper, Nonnemacher contends that political parties in Western Europe are responsive to politics outside their home country—and that strategic choices to embrace a larger party family label, such as radical right in the case of AfD, do influence how parties are perceived by a country’s voters.

In a recent conversation with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine, Nonnemacher emphasized that a political party that embraces the party family signifies its commitment to the larger ideological goals associated with the party family, while parties that push back and work to distance themselves from their sister parties from other countries signal that they may not be credible champions for core issues. His answers have been lightly edited for style and clarity.

Question: Can you define what constitutes a transnational party family?

Nonnemacher: In political science—especially in comparative politics—one of the goals is to think about the ways we can compare political outcomes. One of the ways we do this is by looking at these so-called party families. These are basically categorizations of parties based upon shared histories, shared ideology and common networks of activists and leaders.

There are a whole host of party families. The largest families in Europe are the Social Democrats, which is your center-left, working-class parties, and the Conservatives, which are your traditional center-right parties. You’ve also got your Green parties, which are your environmental parties, among many other families.

These party families are now much more useful than what academics created them for, which was tools for comparisons. Today, parties within similar party families tend to behave the same, learn from each other and form groups that transcend national boundaries based upon shared ideologies.

Question: What motivated you to explore the topic of transnational parties as a source of voter perceptions?

Nonnemacher: The academic answer is that I felt there was a gap there. We know a lot about how voters in Europe today are concerned about integration and thinking about politics beyond their own borders. But we had not yet, as academics, come to terms with the consequences of this, for how they view their parties and the links between what information they’re getting and their political parties. That was the academic motivation.

The more topical answer was the rise of the radical right parties in these various countries and how these parties seemed to be learning from each other, copying each other and celebrating each other’s victories in a way that we hadn’t really seen before. You have Hungary’s Victor Orbán hosting CPAC (the U.S.-based Conservative Political Action Conference), and you have Marine Le Pen in France having these big rallies with other radical right leaders.

Hungary’s Victor Orbán hosts CPAC (the U.S.-based Conservative Political Action Conference). (Photo: Elkes Andor/Wikimedia Commons)

My motivation was trying to understand the consequences of this seeminginternationalization of right party politics especially, but also party politics more generally.

Question: What are some specific reasons why parties might choose to embrace a transnational party?

Nonnemacher: The argument I make in the paper is very much an electoral argument. Parties win elections when voters know what they stand for. That’s one of the big theories that we have about party competition, is that parties need to distinguish themselves from their competitors and be able to communicate to voters what they believe.

If a voter can’t tell the difference between one party and another, they’re unlikely to support them. And if a voter doesn’t know where the party stands, then they don’t know if they’re going to get what they want out of the party. So, parties need to distinguish themselves. They need to signal to voters what their positions are.

One of the motivations here for parties is: This label tells voters where I stand. If I’m seen alongside other Social Democrats, I can kind of bolster my credentials on being a Social Democratic Party.

The other electoral motivation is parties want to win elections, and they look to who won and say, ‘We should copy that.’ In 2021, when the Social Democrats won in Germany, Social Democratic parties across Europe all immediatelylooked to Germany and said, ‘What did they do? How did they win this election? What can we do to kind of copy that?’

Question: So, it’s not just radical right parties learning from radical right parties in other countries, but also leftist and centrist parties learning from their transnational sister parties?

Nonnemacher: Yes. One of the things I wanted to do in this paper was to make the case that it’s not just the radical right that’s doing this and benefitting from it. It’s the British Labour Party taking lessons from Germany’s Social Democrats, for example.

Green parties are an especially interesting transnational group, because inherently, they see fighting for the environment as a global issue. They view international cooperation and international learning as core to solving the problems that they are running on. Notably, almost all of them have ‘green’ in their name and almost all of them have the sunflower as their logo.

Question: What makes Germany’s AfD party a particularly noteworthy example of a national party forming associations with like-minded parties in Western Europe?

Nonnemacher: There’s probably two reasons for that. One is they exploded in Germany in terms of growing support from 2013 to 2017; the other is that by 2017, the radical right in Europe had exploded. There’s just a lot more attention on the far right, and it’s Germany, so whenever the far right does anything in Germany, people notice.

The AfD is an interesting case, because in 2013 they were not the far-right party that they are today. They have had a big transformation in the last 10 to 12 years. In 2013, they were really just angry about the European Union and the Euro crisis, and with Germany having to bail out the rest of the European Union. They were a Euroskeptic party first and foremost. They were anti-immigrant, but it wasn’t their main focus.

France's Marine Le Pen of the French National Rally has helped lead a far-right shift, particularly on immigration, in Europen politics. (Photo: Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick/Wikimedia Commons)

They had a disappointing election in 2013, where they barely missed out on getting seats in the parliament.Then by 2017, they shifted dramatically to the right on immigration. They really started to copy France’s Le Pen and other prominent, far-right leaders in Europe tobe this anti-immigrant party, just like the rest of these radical right parties, and that worked out really well for them. In 2017, they became the third-largest party in parliament, so it was a quite successful strategy for them.

By the elections in 2021, they plateaued a little bit, and then in February this year they became the second largest party in the Bundestag (the German parliament), and they’ve come to be embraced by the broader far-right movement.

Question: Why might a national party choose to distance itself from a sister party?

Nonnemacher: There are two family labels where this generally applies. The first is the radical right—or at least that was the case in the past—where if you were seen as too close to the radical right you were punished, because there was a lot of stigmas around being affiliated with that ideology.

With the AfD example, when they made the transition to embrace more radical right principals from other countries and hosted the rally with Le Pen, Wilders and Salvini to signal the AfD’s embrace of transnational radical right parties, this was incredibly controversial, both inside and outside of the party. It was a delicate balance, because there were some in the party who were very nervous that if they embraced the radical right movement they could face a backlash, because Germans are very conscious of their history. So, 10 years ago there was more hesitation about embracing their fellow party members abroad.

We see similar patterns on the left, especially when it comes to communism. Parties on the radical left are generally hesitant to embrace communists or things that look like communism because of the similar kinds of stigmas around that that exist in western and especially eastern Europe.

Question: Do you think voters are consciously recognizing these European family party associations and how their own parties are relating to sister transnational parties, or is it happening at a subconscious level?

Nonnemacher: We know from political psychology that voters rely on heuristics for a lot of things. So, just hearing the label—that a particular party is a radical right party, for instance, triggers for voters a set of assumptions about what a party stands for and what it’s leaders believe and what they are advocating for.

But I also believe that there is something much more active going on here, where voters start to make those kinds of connections between the party and the label and where voters deliberate what those labels mean in relation to their own politics.

Question: If a national party is not in alignment with its transnational party family on foundational ideological issues, does it cause voter distrust or just confusion?

Nonnemacher: I think it’s a bit of both. Definitely it causes confusion, because if you’re watching the news and you’re being told that Marine Le Pen is a radical right politician, but then let’s say you hear she is endorsing letting more immigrants into (Europe), you’re going to say, ‘Wait a minute; that doesn’t make any sense. How is she radical right, then?’

It also probably leads to distrust. If you see yourself as a Social Democratic voter and you believe in this center-left Social Democratic vision for Europe, but your Social Democratic politician is talking about de-regulating markets and shrinking the state, that’s probably going to make you say, ‘He’s not a Social Democrat. I don’t trust him to be an advocate for my goals.’

Question: Your paper focused a transnational politics in Western Europe. Do you think the paper’s findings have any relevance for the United States?

"Understanding how voters perceive their parties is a huge part of what makes democracies work. If voters don’t know what their parties are fighting for and don’t know where their parties stand, they check out."

Nonnemacher: I don’t know how well the paper’s findings travel to the United States. We have a very strong two-party system that doesn’t map as neatly to the multi-party competition in European elections. That being said, I think if we look at parties in the United States as factions of various ideological groups, we can see green factions of the Democratic Party, radical right and center-right Christian democratic factions of the Republican Party. I think for activists and people inside these parties, it matters a lot what kind of broader ideological movements that they are associated with are doing.

I’m skeptical that voters will derive the same utility, just because the labels don’t fit as neatly, and (American voters) tend to think we’re unique in our politics as voters, so we don’t tend to look abroad for political inspiration.

Question: Anything else relating to Western European voters and their perceptions of their political parties and transnational parties that you think is important to share?

Nonnemacher: I think understanding how voters perceive their parties is a huge part of what makes democracies work. If voters don’t know what their parties are fighting for and don’t know where their parties stand, they check out; they disengage, and we’ve seen that they become less satisfied with democracy.

I think anything that parties can do to really communicate their positions to voters and reaffirm for voters that they areserious about accomplishing their goals is important, because parties across Europe and the United States are having a credibility crisis right now.

What my paper does is highlight one such way that parties can go about communicating to voters what they stand for, which has a whole host of implications to address some of the big problems facing Western democracies today.

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�� political scientist Jeffrey Nonnemacher asserts that Western European national political parties use their affiliations with party families to signal their own political viewpoints.

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Is drought the new normal?

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:56:36 +0000

Is drought the new normal? Rachel Sauer Thu, 08/14/2025 - 11:56

Pedro DiNezio and Timothy Shanahan

Climate models reveal how human activity may be locking the Southwest into permanent drought

A new wave of climate research is sounding a stark warning: Human activity may be driving drought more intensely—and more directly—than previously understood.

The southwestern United States has been in a historic megadrought for much of the past two decades, with its reservoirs including lakes Mead and Powell dipping to record lows and legal disputes erupting over rights to use water from the Colorado River.

This drought has been linked to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a climate pattern that swings between wet and dry phases every few decades. Since a phase change in the early 2000s, the region has endured a dry spell of epic proportions.

�� scientist Pedro DiNezio, along with climate researchers around the world, assert that human activity may be driving drought more intensely—and more directly—than previously understood.

The PDO was thought to be a natural phenomenon, governed by unpredictable natural ocean and atmosphere fluctuations. But new research published in the journal Nature suggests that’s no longer the case.

Working with hundreds of climate model simulations, our team of atmosphere, earth and ocean scientists found that the PDO is now being strongly influenced by human factors and has been since the 1950s. It should have oscillated to a wetter phase by now, but instead it has been stuck. Our results suggest that drought could become the new normal for the region unless human-driven warming is halted.

The science of a drying world

For decades, scientists have relied on a basic physical principle to predict rainfall trends: Warmer air holds more moisture. In a warming world, this means wet areas are likely to get wetter, while dry regions become drier. In dry areas, as temperatures rise, more moisture is pulled from soils and transported away from these arid regions, intensifying droughts.

While most climate models simulate this general pattern, they often underestimate its full extent, particularly over land areas.

Yet countries are already experiencing drought emerging as one of the most immediate and severe consequences of climate change. Understanding what’s ahead is essential, to know how long these droughts will last and because severe droughts can have sweeping affects on ecosystems, economies and global food security.

Human fingerprints on megadroughts

Simulating rainfall is one of the greatest challenges in climate science. It depends on a complex interplay between large-scale wind patterns and small-scale processes such as cloud formation.

Until recently, climate models have not offered a clear picture of how rainfall patterns are likely to change in the near future as greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, power plants and industries continue to heat up the planet. The models can diverge sharply in where, when and how precipitation will change. Even forecasts that average the results of several models differ when it comes to changes in rainfall patterns.

The techniques we deployed are helping to sharpen that picture for North America and across the tropics.

We looked back at the pattern of PDO phase changes over the past century using an exceptionally large ensemble of climate simulations. The massive number of simulations, more than 500, allowed us to isolate the human influences. This showed that the shifts in the PDO were driven by an interplay of increasing warming from greenhouse gas emissions and cooling from sun-blocking particles called aerosols that are associated with industrial pollution.

From the 1950s through the 1980s, we found that increasing aerosol emissions from rapid industrialization following World War II drove a positive trend in the PDO, making the Southwest rainier and less parched.

After the 1980s, we found that the combination of a sharp rise in greenhouse gas emissions from industries, power plants and vehicles and a reduction in aerosols as countries cleaned up their air pollution shifted the PDO into the negative, drought-generating trend that continues today.

This finding represents a paradigm shift in our scientific understanding of the PDO and a warning for the future. The current negative phase can no longer be seen as just a roll of the climate dice—it has been loaded by humans.

Our conclusion that global warming can drive the PDO into its negative, drought-inducing phase is also supported by geological records of past megadroughts. Around 6,000 years ago, during a period of high temperatures, evidence shows the emergence of a similar temperature pattern in the North Pacific and widespread drought across the Southwest.

Tropical drought risks underestimated

The past is also providing clues to future rainfall changes in the tropics and the risk of droughts in locations such as the Amazon.

One particularly instructive example comes from approximately 17,000 years ago. Geological evidence shows that there was a period of widespread rainfall shifts across the tropics coinciding with a major slowdown of ocean currents in the Atlantic.

These ocean currents, which play a crucial role in regulating global climate, naturally weakened or partially collapsed then, and they are expected to slow further this century at the current pace of global warming.

A recent study of that period, using computer models to analyze geologic evidence of earth’s climate history, found much stronger drying in the Amazon basin than previously understood. It also shows similar patterns of aridification in Central America, West Africa and Indonesia.

The results suggest that rainfall could decline precipitously again. Even a modest slowdown of a major Atlantic Ocean current could dry out rainforests, threaten vulnerable ecosystems and upend livelihoods across the tropics.

What comes next

Drought is a growing problem, increasingly driven by human influence. Confronting it will require rethinking water management, agricultural policy and adaptation strategies. Doing that well depends on predicting drought with far greater confidence.

Climate research shows that better predictions are possible by using computer models in new ways and rigorously validating their performance against evidence from past climate shifts. The picture that emerges is sobering, revealing a much higher risk of drought across the world.

Pedro DiNezio is an associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the ��. Timothy Shanahan is an associate professor of geological science at the University of Texas at Austin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Climate models reveal how human activity may be locking the Southwest into permanent drought.

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Moose are on the loose

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 22:43:40 +0000

Moose are on the loose Rachel Sauer Wed, 08/13/2025 - 16:43

William Taylor , John Wendt and Joshua Miller

Moose have lived in Colorado for centuries—unpacking evidence from history, archaeology, oral traditions

Moose are on the loose in the southern Rockies.

In July 2025, a young wandering bull was captured roaming a city park in Greeley, Colorado. A spate of similar urban sightings alongside some aggressive moose encounters has elevated moose management and conservation into a matter of public debate, especially across metro Denver and the Colorado Front Range.

In Rocky Mountain National Park, a recent study found that moose and elk might be to blame for far-reaching changes to valley ecosystems, as their browsing reduces important plants like willows, depriving beavers of habitat and materials for their wetland engineering. Park wildlife are generally not managed through hunting, but the park has tried techniques like fencing moose away from wetland zones. Publicly, discussion has swirled around further mitigation measures to slow or eliminate moose populations.

�� archaeologist William Taylor is partnering with paleoecology and conservation paleobiology colleagues to study the ancient animals of the Rockies.

At the heart of this debate is a basic question – do moose belong in the southern Rockies at all?

During much of the last century, moose were apparently rare in Colorado. The animals are absent from some early 20th century official wildlife tallies. Then, in 1978, the Colorado Division of Wildlife – now Colorado Parks and Wildlife – released a group of moose into North Park in north-central Colorado. At the time, biologists understood their efforts to be a reintroduction, but in the years since, wildlife managers have shifted their thinking about the place of moose in local ecosystems.

In the decades that followed, the moose expanded their range and numbers. Today, informal estimates by Colorado Parks and Wildlife put the moose population at around 3,500 animals. Under increased moose browsing pressure and a shifting climate, some mountain wetland environments are changing.

Should these changes be thought of as human-made ecological wounds caused by releasing moose? The National Park Service seems to think so.

Statements from 2025 on the park service website, and other public messaging from wildlife officials, assert that Colorado has never supported a breeding population of moose – only the occasional transient visitor. The factual basis for this idea seems to hinge heavily on an unpublished internal report from 2015, which identified only a few archaeological or historical records of moose near the park.

We are a team of archaeologists, paleoecologists and conservation paleobiologists studying the ancient animals of the Rockies.

Understanding moose and their interactions with people centuries ago means carefully analyzing different traces that survive the passage of time. These can range from the bones of animals themselves to indirect clues preserved in everything from lake sediments to historical records.

Are moose actually native to Colorado?

As scientists studying the past, we know that reconstructing the ancient geographic ranges of animals is difficult. Archaeological sites with animal bones can be a great tool to understand the past, especially for tracing the food choices of ancient humans. But such sites can be rare, and even when they are well preserved and well studied, it can take lots of care and scientific research to identify the species of each bone.

Harder still is determining the intimate details of ancient animals’ lives, including how and where they lived, died or reproduced. Such key details can be especially opaque for moose, who are solitary and elusive. Because of this, moose may not end up in human diets, even where both species have established populations. A comprehensive review of archaeological sites from across Alaska and some areas of the Canadian Yukon, where moose are common today and have likely been present since the end of the last Ice Age, found that moose were nearly absent until the past few centuries. In fact, moose often comprised less than 0.1% of the total number of bones in very large collections, if they appeared at all. In some areas, cultural reasons like taboos against moose hunting can also prevent them from ending up in archaeological bone tallies.

In new research published as a preprint in advance of peer review, we took a closer look at the idea that moose were absent from Colorado before 1978. We combed through newspaper records, photo archives and early travel diaries and identified dozens of references to moose sightings in Colorado spanning the first records in 1860 through the decade of moose reintroduction in the 1970s.

Moose sightings appear in the very earliest written records of the area that would become Rocky Mountain National Park. In his 1863 diary, Milton Estes described happening upon a large moose alongside a band of elk while on a hunting trip.

“Since elk were common I picked out Mr. Moose for my game,” he wrote.

Milton thought he had bagged “the first and only moose that had ever been killed so far south.” He was wrong.

Our archival research turned up even earlier sightings of moose in the area, along with many more across the region in the decades that followed. Diaries, newspapers and photo records from the past two centuries show the presence of not only young bulls, which at times can range widely, but also cows and calves, a sign that local breeding was taking place in Colorado before reintroduction.

These sightings recorded in diaries and newspapers don’t have to stand on their own. Moose appear in older placenames around the state, like the area once known as Moose Park along the road from Lyons to Estes Park. Written accounts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries among Ute, Shoshone and Arapaho peoples describe moose stories, hunts and songs. And though historical records don’t go too much further back than the mid-19th century in Colorado, archaeological records do.

Our survey of Colorado sites turned up ancient moose at Jurgens, near Greeley, dated to more than 9,000 years ago, and even moose bone tools among the ruins of Mesa Verde, only a few centuries ago.

Diaries, newspapers and photo records from the past two centuries show the presence of not only young bull moose, which at times can range widely, but also cows and calves, a sign that local breeding was taking place in Colorado before reintroduction.

This question of whether moose are native to the southern Rockies is not just a philosophical one – its answer will shape management decisions by the National Park Service and others.

Official narrative minimizes moose presence

The contemporary idea of moose as non-native animals reflects a different understanding than was common only a few decades ago. In the 1940s, some biologists described moose as a native species that had been “extirpated except for stragglers.” As recently as the early 1970s, Rocky Mountain National Park officials understood their moose work as a reintroduction of “wild animals once native to the park.” Our findings suggest that the valid knowledge of earlier scientists has since faded or been replaced, repositioning moose as ecological outsiders.

As moose-human conflicts and shifting wetland ecologies prompt hard conversations over how to manage moose, a range of options have been discussed in public discourse. These include courses of action such as the reintroduction of carnivores like wolves, or targeted hunting access for tribes or the public.

If moose are ‘invasive,’ they can be removed

For federal agencies, labels like “invasive” or “non-native” carry legal connotations and can be used to enable other measures, like eradication.

In Olympic National Park, where mountain goats were deemed invasive and ecologically impactful, biologists undertook an extermination campaign that involved shooting the animals from helicopters, despite warnings from archaeologists as long ago as the late 1990s that the data behind their argument was flawed.

As the animal and plant communities of our Rockies change rapidly in a warming world, this kind of policy would not only be unsupported by scientific evidence, but also likely to impede the ability of our animal communities to survive, adapt and thrive.

The historical evidence indicates that moose are not foreign intruders. Archival, archaeological and anthropological data shows that moose have been in the southern Rockies for centuries, if not millennia. Rather than treat moose as a threat, we urge Rocky Mountain National Park and other agencies to work in partnership with tribes, paleoecologists and the public to carefully develop historically grounded management plans for this Colorado native.

William Taylor is an assistant professor of anthropology at the ��. John Wendt is a postdoctoral fellow in natural resources ecology and management at Oklahoma State University. Joshua Miller is an associate professor of geosciences at the University of Cincinnati.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Moose have lived in Colorado for centuries—unpacking evidence from history, archaeology, oral traditions.

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Telling the stories of loss and healing

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 21:52:08 +0000

Telling the stories of loss and healing Rachel Sauer Wed, 08/13/2025 - 15:52

Kathryn E. Goldfarb and Lucas Rozell

Colorado’s Marshall Fire survivors find healing and meaning through oral history project

The Colorado Marshall Fire killed two people and destroyed over 1,000 structures on Dec. 30, 2021.

The news cycle has long since moved on, but people impacted by the fire are still recovering. Part of that process is through storytelling.

The Louisville Historical Museum, which is located 10 miles east of Boulder, later joined by collaborators from the �� Anthropology Department, initiated the Marshall Fire Story Project to preserve the stories of people affected.

�� researcher Kathryn Goldfarb is an associate professor of anthropology.

“This is the first time we’ve actually sat down and taken this long to talk about it,” said Lisa Clark, one contributor to the project. “’Cause we’re always like, ‘(people) have better things to do. You don’t wanna hear our pain. You don’t wanna hear our stories,’ you know. But yeah, it’s been nice to do it.”

All project contributors are quoted using their real names.

We are a cultural anthropologist and qualitative researcher who are collaborating with the Louisville Historical Museum on the Marshall Fire Story Project. Broadly, we are each involved with research that explores the importance of personal and community narratives for well-being.

However, the Marshall Fire Story Project is not a research project. We have no research questions. Contributors are simply invited to share what they would like about the fire.

While this project embraces the specificity of individual experiences, recent destructive fires in Maui, Hawaii, and Southern California show that the work we are doing is needed in many other locations.

Why oral history?

Recounting personal experiences is critical to the historical record.

Oral history has also become recognized as a powerful method for healing after trauma, both for individuals and larger community groups. Talking about traumatic events may be painful. However, narrative also facilitates meaning-making, strengthens ties within communities, and contributes to social justice efforts.

By telling their own stories in their own words, participants in the Marshall Fire Story Project shape what is remembered and how it is remembered.

Contributors to the project had diverse objectives in sharing their stories. Many welcomed the opportunity to contribute to the historical record, which Jessica Rossi-Katz described as “a record of experience.” Another contributor wanted to share their perspective as a lower-income person. Others mentioned the relevance of local stories as they apply to a global context of climate change.

As wildfires become ever more common, the themes that came up in the oral histories are increasingly relevant to community members, policymakers and scholars alike.

Stories of loss

Two people lost their lives in the fire, along with over 1,000 pets.

“I’d take losing my stuff over losing them,” said Anna Kramer, when describing the loss of her neighbor’s dogs. Kramer, an artist, did lose her stuff, including the majority of her artistic works.

Remediation workers clean the garage of Gigi Yang, a collaborator for the Marshall Fire Story Project. Due to concerns about toxins from smoke and ash residue in their homes, many residents opted for smoke remediation and deep cleaning of their homes. (Photo: Gigi Yang)

Abby McClelland’s family was away from their house when it burned.

“For a while I was really upset that we weren’t there and didn’t get a chance to take anything,” McClelland said. “And the more I think about what we would’ve taken, the more I’m like, that stuff is dumb.”

The family was able to replace their vital records and passports within weeks.

“But things like, you know, my grandmother’s rings or the Champagne cork from our wedding reception. Like things that I would’ve thought, oh, that’s so silly to evacuate that, those are the truly irreplaceable things.”

Mary Barry said the “fire was the ultimate downsizer.” She reflected on the objects she had lost – her daughter’s baby pictures, her sewing machines, a collection of books bound in blue and gold.

The fire also took Barry’s pet turtles, one of whom her husband had kept for over twenty years.

“Losing (a) house is like losing a person, where you mourn the loss of your comfort,” Barry said. This was particularly true in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, where people’s homes were their entire environment during quarantine.

Many of those whose homes did not burn suffered a different kind of ambiguous loss. Their homes were damaged by smoke, which carried with it heavy metals, hazardous chemicals and volatile organic compounds.

Shana Sutton’s family stayed in a hotel for six months while their home was being remediated. Like many others, much of the family’s belongings were deemed nonsalvageable.

“In my head,” Sutton recounted, “I was like, okay, I’m just going to pretend that they all burned.”

Concern with health impacts

As she watched the smoke from a distance, Brittany Petrelli told her brother on the phone, “I can smell how devastating this fire is.” Petrelli, a project contributor involved with the recovery effort, recounted that the fire smelled “like things that shouldn’t be burning. Rubber, plastic building materials.”

Residents with concerns about outdoor and indoor air quality as well as soil and water contamination contacted scientists at the ��, who, along with scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory, conducted air quality sampling. Ultimately, the publicized data for outdoor air quality showed little difference from other urban areas.

Residents whose homes survived but were affected by smoke continued to note symptoms such as sore throats, coughs and stinging eyes for six months and then one year after the fire.

Like others whose homes were damaged by smoke, Beth Eldridge had difficulty obtaining insurance coverage for mitigation. After she attempted to clean char and ash on her own, she experienced persistent health impacts.

After the Marshall Fire, area residents created notes of support for friends and neighbors at the Louisville Public Library; the notes were displayed in the library windows. (Photo: Louisville Historical Museum)

“Being part of an HOA (Home Owner’s Association) should give you two buckets of insurance,” Eldridge explained, “but in reality, everyone is divided and the system makes individuals fend for themselves. My insurance wouldn’t take any responsibility. The HOA insurance wouldn’t take any responsibility. … I was sick and I couldn’t get better and I needed help.”

Accounts from the project highlight uncertainty that remediated personal items were “really clean” – as Shana Sutton shared, it “makes you crazy.” Many people spoke of dissatisfaction with a lack of standards for remediation. Current standards, not specific to wildfires, do not engage the epidemiological and toxicological effects of fire byproducts, although experts in the field recognize these dangers.

Precarity and community solidarity

Being underinsured was a persistent theme in project stories, and some people recounted how negotiating with their insurance companies literally became a full-time job. After the fire, lower-income community members found themselves in an even more acute state of financial uncertainty.

A number of mutual aid groups sprung up in the aftermath of the fire, and several of those groups shared their stories with the project. Meryl Suissa started the Marshall Fire Community group on Facebook, which worked to help families replace items lost in the fire.

“I think what we’ve learned is like, yes, people are okay and they’re strong and they’re resilient and they’re gonna continue fighting,” Suissa said. “But we still have a long way to go to help them heal.”

Kate Coslett, who ran Operation Hotel Sanity, also highlighted how the community came together to contribute to organizations like hers, which delivered home-cooked meals to displaced residents.

“So many volunteers, hundreds of volunteers,” she said. “It’s September (2022), and there are still people making meals. It’s incredible … their empathy and their love, this community is just, I have goose bumps.”

Yet recovery means different things to different people. As Abby McClelland noted, there is a difference between “trauma on the individual level and trauma on the collective level.”

“I can rebuild the house,” McClelland said, “but I can’t rebuild all the houses in the neighborhood, and I can’t plant all the trees, and I can’t, you know, reopen all the businesses. I can’t reverse the trauma in the area. I can only control what’s inside my house. It’s hard to know what’s going to happen on that larger level, and how long that’s going to resonate.”

Like others who shared their accounts with the project, McClelland highlighted a necessity for policy change and governmental actions to prevent further climate-related disasters.

“Individuals can’t solve systemic problems,” she said.

Future of the project

For a community historical museum whose motto is “Be a part of the story,” first-person records constitute valuable resources for both the present and the future.

Our team is currently preparing written and oral project contributor submissions for archiving in a publicly accessible platform. In partnership with Marshall Together and the Community Foundation Boulder County, we are documenting recovery and rebuilding experiences as residents return to their homes.

The first storytellers in our project spoke of trauma and despair, but also gratitude for community. What will future stories tell us as neighbors continue to reunite and adjust to how the community has changed after the Marshall Fire?

This article was written in collaboration with Sophia Imperioli, museum associate – Public History & Oral History, and Gigi Yang, museum services supervisor of the Louisville Historical Museum.

Kathryn E. Goldfarb is an associate professor of anthropology at the ��. Lucas Rozell (MAnth'24) is a research assistant on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Colorado’s Marshall Fire survivors find healing and meaning through oral history project.

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Top photo courtesy the Louisville Historical Museum

It takes a village of mothers

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 20:56:42 +0000

It takes a village of mothers Rachel Sauer Wed, 08/13/2025 - 14:56

Sona Dimidjian and Anahi Collado

How mothers supporting mothers can help fill the health care worker shortage gap and other barriers to care

For generations, women have relied on informal networks of friends, family and neighbors to navigate the complexities of birth and motherhood. Today, research is finally catching up to what generations of women have known: Peer support can be a lifeline.

Despite growing evidence, the unique wisdom and strength that arise when mothers help mothers has been surprisingly under‑explored in the scientific literature, but that’s beginning to change. Peer-delivered programs are beginning to bring together long-standing community traditions and structured, evidence-based approaches to support the mental health of new and expectant moms.

We are clinical psychologists at the �� Renée Crown Wellness Institute. Our work and research weaves together psychological science and the wisdom of mothers supporting mothers. Our program, Alma, supports women in restoring well-being in ways that are community-rooted, evidence-based and scalable.

Through the Alma program, researchers Sona Dimidjian (left) and Anahi Collado (right) aim to support women in restoring well-being in ways that are community-rooted, evidence-based and scalable.

Pressure on parents

Nearly 50% of parents report feeling overwhelmed by stress on most days. An even larger share, about 65%, experience feelings of loneliness, according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. These feelings hit mothers especially hard, the report says.

In 2025, mothers in the United States continue to shoulder most of the caregiving of children while also managing work, personal health and household responsibilities. The transition to motherhood is often marked by emotional and psychological strain. In fact, 10% to 20% of women experience depression during pregnancy, the postpartum period or both. Depression is one of the most common complications of childbirth. A similar number of women also face significant anxiety.

In many communities, mental health resources are scarce and stigma around mental health issues persists; therefore, many mothers are left to navigate such challenges alone and in silence. Antidepressants are widely prescribed, but research suggests that many women stop using antidepressants during pregnancy – yet they don’t start therapy or an alternative treatment instead.

Psychotherapy is the most preferred care option among new and expectant mothers, but it is often inaccessible or nonexistent. This is due in part to a workforce shortage of mental health providers.

The shortage has contributed to long wait times, geographic disparities and cultural and language barriers between providers and patients. This is especially true for underserved populations. In fact, more than 75% of depressed mothers do not receive the care they need.

Science of peer support

The science of peer support is part of a larger field exploring community health workers as one way to address the shortage of mental health providers. Peer mentors are trusted individuals from the community who share common experiences or challenges with those they serve. Through specialized training, they are equipped to deliver education, offer mental health support and connect people with needed resources.

A study that analyzed 30 randomized clinical trials involving individuals with serious mental illness found that peer support was associated with significant improvements in clinical outcomes and personal recovery. Researchers have proposed that peer support creates space for learning and healing, especially when peers share lived experience, culture and language.

In 2025, mothers in the United States continue to shoulder most of the caregiving of children while also managing work, personal health and household responsibilities. (Photo: Shutterstock)

As clinical psychologists, we heard from mothers in our work and communities that wanted to help other moms recover from depression, navigate the challenges of motherhood and avoid feeling alone. This insight led us to co-create Alma, a peer-led mental health program based on behavioral activation.

Behavioral activation is a proven method for treating depression based on decades of randomized clinical trials, including in new and expectant mothers. It helps new and expectant mothers reengage in meaningful activities to improve mood and functioning.

The Alma program

Alma is based on the principle that depression must be understood in context and that changing what you do can change how you feel. One strategy we use is to help a mother identify an activity that brings a sense of accomplishment, connection or enjoyment – and then take small steps to schedule that activity. Mothers might also be guided on ways to ask for help and strengthen their support networks. Alma is offered in English and Spanish.

Peer mentors typically meet with moms once a week for six to eight sessions. Sessions can take place in person or virtually, allowing flexibility that honors each family’s needs. Traditionally, peer mentors have been recruited through long-standing relationships with trusted community organizations and word-of-mouth referrals. This approach has helped ensure that mentors are deeply rooted in the communities they serve. Alma peer mentors are compensated for their time, which recognizes the value of their lived expertise, their training and the work involved in providing peer mentoring and support.

“This was the first time I felt like someone understood me, without me having to explain everything,” shared one mother during a post-program interview that all participants complete after finishing Alma.

To date, more than 700 mothers in Colorado have participated in Alma. In one of our studies, we focused on 126 Spanish-speaking Latina mothers who often face significant barriers to care, such as language differences, cost and stigma. For nearly 2 out of 3 mothers, symptoms of depression decreased enough to be considered a true, measurable recovery — not just a small change.

Notably, most of the depression improvement occurred within the first three Alma meetings. We also observed that peer mentors delivered the Alma program consistently and as intended. This suggests the program could be reliably expanded and replicated in other settings with similar positive outcomes.

A second study, conducted through a national survey of Spanish-speaking Latina new and expectant mothers, found that peer-led mental health support was not only perceived as effective, but also highly acceptable and deeply valued. Mothers noted that they were interested in peer-led support because it met them where they were: with language, trust and cultural understanding.

Supporting mothers works

Supporting mothers’ mental health is essential because it directly benefits both mothers and their children. Those improvements foster healthier emotional, cognitive and social development in their children. This interconnected impact highlights why investing in maternal mental health yields lasting benefits for the entire family.

It also makes strong economic sense to address mood and anxiety disorders among new and expectant mothers, which cost an estimated US$32,000 for each mother and child from conception through five years postpartum. More than half of those costs occur within the first year, driven primarily by productivity losses, preterm births and increased maternal health care needs.

Beyond the impact on individual families, the broader economic toll of untreated mood and anxiety disorders among new and expectant mothers is substantial. For example, it’s estimated that $4.7 billion a year are lost to mothers who have to miss work or reduce their job performance because of symptoms like fatigue, anxiety and depression.

Together – as individuals, families, communities and institutions – we can cultivate a world where the challenges of parenting are met with comprehensive support, allowing the joy of parenting to be fully realized. Because no one should have to do this alone.

Sona Dimidjian is director of the Renée Crown Wellness Institute and a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the ��. Anahi Collado is a �� assistant research professor of psychology.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How mothers supporting mothers can help fill the health care worker shortage gap and other barriers to care.

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