Research

2025 Nobel Laureate in physics once served as a graduate student mentor at CU Boulder

Kylie Clarke — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 18:46:26 +0000

2025 Nobel Laureate in physics once served as a graduate student mentor at CU Boulder Kylie Clarke Thu, 10/09/2025 - 12:46

Like many rockstar scientists, 2025 physics Nobel Laureate John Martinis spent time in Boulder��s rich scientific ecosystem mentoring graduate students and inspiring others in quantum computing.

In the 1990s, while working as a scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Martinis also held the position of a physics lecturer at CU Boulder. His university affiliation focused on research collaborations and mentoring graduate students as a research advisor in the Department of Physics.

��It was important to us to build partnerships with NIST scientists, to foster more research collaborations and opportunities for our students,�� said John Cumalat, professor of physics and chair of the department at the time of Martinis�� appointment. ��John was instrumental in recruiting graduate students to CU Boulder.��

It was important to us to build partnerships with NIST scientists, to foster more research collaborations and opportunities for our students. John [Martinis] was instrumental in recruiting graduate students to CU Boulder.

The Department of Physics history book lists Martinis as a lecturer from 1993 to 1999. He supervised several PhD students, some in partnership with John Price, emeritus professor of physics.

Price fondly recalls his research collaborations with Martinis. When Price was a new faculty member starting out in a related field, Martinis shared his circuit design and building expertise, helped make samples, and provided general guidance and wisdom.

��He was generously helpful with people who had aligned interests and wanted to see everyone do interesting science,�� said Price.

While at NIST-Boulder, Martinis worked on fundamental physics and technologies that were critical to the development of quantum devices now used in NIST electronic current and voltage standards.

"John enriched the scientific community not only in quantum computing related electronics, but also in several areas related to low-temperature microelectronics,�� said Price.

Much of Martinis�� work at NIST has continued under the leadership of Ray Simmonds (also a physics lecturer) and other group leaders, with physics graduate students continuing to conduct their doctoral research at NIST.

��This is the rich opportunity that our students receive �C�C it��s not only the classroom instruction, but also the broader scientific community,�� said Price.

Among today's quantum information superstars who worked at NIST are Kent Irwin (top left), now at Stanford, who helped to develop highly sensitive single-photon sensors and John Martinis (right). This photo was taken in the 1990s at the NIST-Boulder laboratories. Photo by NIST.

CU��s partnership with NIST has flourished over the years, both through JILA, a joint institute between CU Boulder and NIST, and through the Professional Research Experience Program (CU PREP) which provides research opportunities for students and postdoctoral researchers with scientists at NIST.

Martinis was one of the co-organizers of the inaugural Boulder Summer School for Condensed Matter and Materials Physics with Professor Leo Radzihovsky, which launched in 2000. He has returned to give lectures during the annual school several times since, maintaining connections with colleagues at CU Boulder.

Martinis later became a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, before working for Google and most recently co-founded a quantum computing startup Qolab.

The Nobel

Martinis shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Clarke and Michel Devoret ��for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in an electric circuit,�� according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

In the 1980s, Martinis was a graduate student in John Clarke��s lab at UC Berkeley, working alongside postdoctoral researcher Michel Devoret. Their experiments focused on electrical components called Josephson junctions �C devices made of two superconductors separated by a thin oxide layer that particles ordinarily can��t cross.

Martinis shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Clarke and Michel Devoret for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in an electric circuit.

However, thanks to a quantum effect called tunneling, pairs of electrons can pass through �C even though this defies the laws of classical physics.

The idea dates back to 1928, when physicist George Gamow used quantum tunneling to explain why certain materials give off radiation, or alpha decay. Gamow later became a professor of physics at CU Boulder and is the namesake to both the Gamow Tower in the Duane Physics and Astrophysics building and to the George Gamow Memorial Lecture Series.

Superconductors, when cooled to very low temperatures, allow electricity to flow without resistance. In this environment, particles behave as one unified wave, all moving together as if they are one.

Through a series of experiments, the team discovered that these large-scale quantum states acted like individual particles, showing behaviors of quantum mechanics like tunneling and discrete energy levels.

This work created the basis for using superconducting circuits to create qubits, the fundamental unit of quantum computers. It laid the groundwork for many researchers and companies now working to build the first operational quantum computers that have the potential to revolutionize technology in many areas, like drug discovery and cryptography.

Want to learn more? CU Boulder boasts five Nobel laureates, four of them in physics. Professor of Physics Paul Beale is interviewed about the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics at this link.

Get the latest info.

Like many rockstar scientists, 2025 physics Nobel Laureate John Martinis spent time in Boulder��s rich scientific ecosystem mentoring graduate students and inspiring others in quantum computing.

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Hindsight may be 20/20, but people feel more strongly about the future

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 21:57:27 +0000

Hindsight may be 20/20, but people feel more strongly about the future Rachel Sauer Fri, 10/03/2025 - 15:57

Blake Puscher

In reviewing psychological studies, CU Boulder researcher Leaf Van Boven and colleagues find that people prioritize thinking about the future over the past

Although time travel has typically been the domain of science fiction, whenever you take a moment to remember the past or imagine the future in detail, you are in a sense travelling through time. In psychology, these processes are called retrospection and prospection. Retrospection is thinking about and creating mental representations of the past, while prospection is the same thing but for the future.

Some work in the field of psychology has suggested that retrospection and prospection are functionally interchangeable, but intuitively, they seem to be very different. After reviewing the research in a recently published paper, Leaf Van Boven, a �� professor and department chair of psychology and neuroscience, along with research colleagues Eugene Caruso and Sam Maglio, finds that people think about the past and future differently because of several assumptions that people make about the nature of time (referred to as temporal axioms in the paper), and that people prioritize thinking about the future��a conclusion with implications for how psychological research should be conducted going forward.

CU Boulder researcher Leaf Van Boven, department chair of psychology and neuroscience, finds that people prioritize thinking about the future��a conclusion with implications for how psychological research should be conducted going forward.

Temporal axioms

The assumptions people make about time are called temporal axioms because they relate to time (temporal) and are self-evident (the primary definition of an axiom). There are some philosophies of time that disagree with the axioms; for example, block time theory argues that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously, like different places except separated by time instead of space. However, even if such philosophies are true, the axioms remain valid premises because they describe not only people��s perception of time but also their subjective experiences of the world. The authors propose three temporal axioms��one of direction, one of uncertainty and one of control.

The axiom of direction describes the way all things move through time. Specifically, everything moves only from past to future, with the reverse being��as far as humans know��impossible. For example, if you blow up a balloon with air and then open the end, not only will the air always come out, but it will also be impossible to get the air back in; the balloon can be re-inflated, but it won��t revert it to its original state because it will be filled with different air. In physics, this reality is called entropy, a term for the tendency of all things to progress from states of order to disorder (the collected air disperses) or high energy to low energy (the relatively high pressure inside the balloon is relieved). Entropy defines the direction of time.

The axiom of uncertainty details that as uncertain as people may be about the past, there is at least some information about it, whether in the form of memory or history. Meanwhile, to the extent that the future is known at all, it is because of inference based on information from the past. Therefore, even if people could make predictions with 100% certainty, the uncertainty about the future would be at least as great as the uncertainty about the past, and in reality, it is always greater because people cannot make perfect predictions. ��There are always different possibilities for any point in the future,�� Van Boven explains, ��and there are not different possibilities that actually exist in the past. There were many possibilities, but one of them did happen.��

The axiom of control describes how, because time has direction, the future is more uncertain than the past. This uncertainty creates a sense of control��of being able to choose between different possibilities by acting differently. While there are arguments against people having control over the future, people tend to view the future as more controllable than the past because of its relative uncertainty. Relatedly, according to Van Boven, ��people don��t think of themselves as having control over their interpretation of the past, which presents its own set of challenges about how we make sense of what has happened in our lives.��

Prioritizing proception

The way that people think about the future and past is often understood in terms of psychological distance, which is just what it sounds like: how removed a person feels from an event, whether it is in the future or past. ��There are many theories of psychological distance,�� Van Boven says, ��and within social psychology, one of the more prominent theories is Construal Level Theory, which is the idea that when things are in the distant future, they are interpreted on a more abstract level, whereas when they are in the very near future, we tend to think of them more concretely.��

This principle is fairly intuitive. For example, when you are given an assignment, it may not even feel real until the due date rolls around. However, although people think more concretely and feel more strongly about an event three days in the future than one three weeks in the future, they don��t necessarily think and feel the same about an event three days in the future as one three days in the past. In fact, Van Boven and his colleagues found in their review that people do not.

People pay more attention to getting ready for events in the future, and as soon as they pass, that attention quickly fades so they can refocus on what is coming next, says CU Boulder researcher Leaf Van Boven.

��When things are in the future,�� Van Boven says, ��our affective system is highly engaged. As soon as things move into the past, the affective system and our emotional reactions subside.

��A classic example would be, if you have an upcoming presentation, your emotional system will get really jacked up as it��s getting close, and then as soon as it has passed, even if it is still objectively close in time, the affective system down-regulates itself. The same is true with attention.�� People pay more attention to getting ready for events in the future, and as soon as they pass, that attention quickly fades so they can refocus on what is coming next.

The underestimation of proception

One question the review raises is why the prioritization of proception isn��t an established psychological principle when research in the field often involves people thinking about real or hypothetical events, which are necessarily either in the future or the past.

��That has to do with research methods,�� Van Boven says, referring to the example about the upcoming, stressful presentation: The fact that people feel more strongly about the event when it is in the future and then tend to move on shortly after it happens could be easily demonstrated in a laboratory setting, according to Van Boven. ��The problem is getting a scientific understanding of what exactly is changing. There are many confounds in that event moving through time.

��When we have an upcoming presentation, we still don��t know exactly what is going to happen in that presentation. We don��t know what the room is going to be like, we don��t know what the audience is going to be like. There��s a possibility that we might bomb, and that would have negative consequences. What we do experimentally is we try to create these situations where everything is exactly the same, and the only thing that differs is whether you��re thinking of it as something that��s in the future or in the past.�� This eliminates all of the temporal axioms except for direction; unlike in real life, in the lab there is no difference in uncertainty or control between past and future.

��This is kind of analogous to an active control placebo in medical research,�� Van Boven explains. An active control placebo lacks the active ingredient of the actual medicine being tested but has similar non-treatment effects. This is intended to stop people from subconsciously distinguishing between the placebo and the medicine on the basis of the medicine��s expected side effects. ��The carefully controlled study gives you a very precise estimate of how big the effect is for the specific medicine you��re interested in,�� Van Boven says, ��but that��s not how big the effect is that people experience when they take the medicine in real life, because they��re embracing the placebo effect.��

Changing tense

��People who psychologically prioritize the future are happier and healthier than those who prioritize the past."

This review has a major implication for other research, which has to do with the necessity of taking the difference between prospection and retrospection into account, especially during studies that rely on people imagining different scenarios.

��To a large extent, researchers ignore whether things are in the future versus in the past,�� Van Boven says. ��It��s just that it has not historically been a dimension that people are really concerned about. So, a very common research approach is to use scenario studies.�� Scenario studies involve asking people to imagine different situations, then varying those scenarios to see how it affects people��s responses to them. For example, participants could be asked to imagine two people going on a date, then to say how well it went. The scenario would vary slightly between groups of participants��for example, who paid or how the bill was split may be different in each group��s scenario��and the experiment would measure the effect of this difference on how people viewed the situation.

Often in these kinds of experiments there is an implication as to whether the event already happened or is going to happen, even just based on the verb tense used to describe the scenario, and as Van Boven says, ��People have been sort of haphazard in terms of whether they present those kinds of scenarios in the future tense versus the past tense. Part of what our review and framework shows is that there may be ways in which we��re understating the effects of different scenarios when we happen to put them in the past (rather) than when we happen to put them in the future. It may be the case that the tense matters a great deal, and it��s something that we haven��t noticed because we haven��t varied that within our experimental context.��

Changing one��s focus between future and past isn��t just important in the context of research, however. ��People who psychologically prioritize the future are happier and healthier than those who prioritize the past,�� Van Boven says. Broadly, an orientation towards the future has been associated with positive outcomes in several areas, including financial success, health outcomes and life satisfaction. ��So,�� Van Boven continues, ��the axioms and resulting psychological patterns are not merely oddities or biases; they help people successfully navigate through life.��

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In reviewing psychological studies, CU Boulder researcher Leaf Van Boven and colleagues find that people prioritize thinking about the future over the past.

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And the heavyweight champion of TV is ... HBO!

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 23:11:23 +0000

And the heavyweight champion of TV is ... HBO! Rachel Sauer Thu, 10/02/2025 - 17:11

Jared Bahir Browsh

Fifty years after the Thrilla in Manila bout launched HBO as a national broadcasting powerhouse, the network continues to shape modern viewing and entertainment

The Thrilla in Manila, fought 50 years ago on Sept. 30, 1975, in Quezon City, Philippines, was the third bout between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier and is considered by many as one of the best, most brutal fights in boxing history. It also marked a new era in sports media as the first fight broadcast nationally through Home Box Office (HBO).

Television audiences had been limited in what sports they could watch since the 1930s. Broadcast networks had to fit sports in with their other programming, including news and scripted shows, so audiences that wanted to watch at home were limited to regional offerings or national games of the week. In 1948, a fight between Joe Louis and Joe Walcott was broadcast in theaters through closed-circuit television. Theaters were connected through private telephone or coaxial cable, and viewers bought tickets to see the bout projected from a special receiver.

Closed-circuit broadcasts of boxing matches and other sports events peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, earning millions of dollars for event promoters. Ali��s fights in this era were among the most popular closed-circuit events, but others, like the Indianapolis 500, also drew large audiences of sports fans to movie theaters. The famed Rumble in the Jungle between Ali and George Foreman earned $60 million in theater admission in the United States, with fans paying $20 ($130 today) to watch the event live as it occurred across the world in the former Zaire.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

The same year as the Louis-Walcott fight, cable television debuted, connecting rural homes too remote to receive a television signal over an antenna. Northeastern Pennsylvania was a test ground for this form of television, since it was close enough to New York City and Philadelphia to pick up broadcast signals with a strong antenna atop a building or a mountain, then connect households through cable. Later, cities in eastern Pennsylvania like Wilkes-Barre and Allentown were among the first whose residents subscribed to paid cable television outside of major cities like New York.

Businessman Charles Dolan was granted a franchise permit to build the first cable system, Sterling Manhattan Cable, in 1965, obtaining financial backing from Time-Life. A lack of quality programming beyond some events in Madison Square Garden hampered the growth of the system, which cost millions of dollars to install but only attracted a few hundred customers in the city. In 1971, during a cruise to France, Dolan conceived of a network that could be leased to other cable systems, which would air unedited films without advertising and was funded by subscriber costs, tentatively named the ��Green Channel.��

Along with convincing Time-Life that this was a viable business, Dolan also had to navigate Federal Communications Commission (FCC) scrutiny, which had limited the programs that could be broadcast on cable due to non-duplications rules and other regulations focused on supporting the broadcast networks. Also, consistent lobbying from movie theater chains and broadcasters hampered cable companies, since customers were bombarded with messages that cable was a threat to both the movie business and to free over-the-air content.

Undeterred, Dolan convinced Time-Life to support the Green Channel, which it did after the FCC gave preemptive authorization to launch a paid television service. Dolan and his Time-Life partners originally planned to launch through the Teleservice cable system in Allentown, but after an agreement to broadcast Philadelphia 76ers games collapsed, they launched through the same service 65 miles north in Wilkes Barre to avoid NBA blackouts. Wilkes-Barre was considered New York Knicks territory, and the network had the right to broadcast Knicks games through its agreement with Madison Square Garden. During this time, Dolan and Time-Life also selected a placeholder name for the network, Home Box Office, as they prepared to launch in 1972. The network was soon made available throughout the northeastern United States by relaying microwaves along towers across the region; some of the earliest programming included movies and New York Rangers hockey.

The following year, Home Box Office, Inc., was spun off from Sterling Communications, with Time-Life increasing its equity in the company. Dolan stepped down as CEO of Home Box Office and Sterling after disagreements with Time-Life, accepting a buyout that enabled him to expand his cable service across Long Island. Time-Life had a tentative agreement with Warner Communications to buy HBO, but ultimately that deal fell through. Time-Life later took over Sterling Communications, but the service continued to struggle, ending in 1973 with fewer than 20,000 subscribers and a high turnover rate as customers found the programming repetitive.

The Thrilla in Manila bout between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier marked a new era in sports media as the first fight broadcast nationally through Home Box Office (HBO).

The turning point for HBO came in 1975, when executives made a deal with RCA Americom Communications, a satellite communication company, to relay the HBO signal nationally through UA-Columbia Cablevision. UA-Columbia was a joint venture with United Artists that later took over the entire cable service from Columbia and partnered with Madison Square Garden to form Madison Square Garden Sports Network in 1977, changing its name to USA Network in 1980.

Sports = audience

The partnership between HBO and UA-Columbia, and later the formation of what would become USA Network, showed that even early cable service providers and networks understood live sports would attract audiences. This was confirmed when HBO first transmitted its programming by satellite, debuting the now national network through what is considered by many the greatest boxing match in the sport��s history. Between 1973 and 1980, HBO grew from a regional cable network to a national one, increasing subscribers from 8,000 in the northeast at the start of 1973 to more than 3 million nationally in that seven-year period. HBO��s model was also replicated in local markets through networks like the Z Channel in Los Angeles, which launched in 1974, and Prism in Philadelphia, launched in 1976.

Satellite transmission led to the accelerated growth of cable, with several networks launching in the second half of the 1970s. WTCG became the first superstation in 1976 after Ted Turner learned of the success of the Thrilla in Manila broadcast. He had received approval to buy the Atlanta station six years earlier, and on Dec. 17, 1976, WTCG became the first local station to be retransmitted nationally. The station obtained the rights to broadcast Atlanta Braves baseball games and Atlanta Hawks basketball games��Turner bought the teams in 1976 and 1977, respectively��so when WTCG was renamed WTBS in 1979 and went national, so did the broadcasts for both teams.

The success of WTCG/WTBS led Turner to launch Cable Network News, the first 24-hour news network, in 1980. He launched several other networks through the 1980s and 1990s, including Turner Network Television (TNT) in 1988, Cartoon Network in 1992 and Turner Classic Movies (TCM) in 1994, helping him become the first cable magnate and a billionaire before selling Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner in 1996��placing TBS and Turner��s other holdings under the same umbrella as HBO.

Competition in sports programming

Boxing had been a cornerstone of HBO��s programming since 1973, when the George Foreman upset of Joe Frazier was made famous by Howard Cosell calling ��Down Goes Frazier!�� HBO also broadcast the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974 before going national. Many credit ��HBO World Championship Boxing�� for the sport��s continued growth in the 1970s through the 1990s, even after Ali retired in 1981. The network also launched ��Inside the NFL�� in 1977, the first league-branded analysis show on premium cable, which was followed by the Major League Baseball-branded ��Race for the Pennant�� the following year. HBO aired Wimbledon matches starting in 1975 and set a standard for investigative sports journalism with ��Real Sports with Bryant Gumble,�� which ran for 28 years starting in 1995.

HBO was a fixture in boxing for 45 years, airing its last boxing match in 2018 as it shifted network focus away from sports overall due to competition from sports media companies, including those also owned by Warner Bros. Discovery like CBS Sports and TNT.

ESPN is another sports media company that emerged from the establishment of regional sports cable networks, including the Madison Square Garden Sports Network. It was originally conceived as a Connecticut sports network before founder Bill Rasmussen learned it would be cheaper to broadcast nationally over satellite from Bristol, Connecticut, than regionally, leading to the first national 24-hour sports network launching in 1979.

The same year, a local Columbus, Ohio, children��s cable network, Pinwheel, went national��renamed Nickelodeon for its April 1 launch. Warner-Amex owned Nickelodeon and launched MTV two years later in 1981, three years after HBO��s music video-focused ��Video Jukebox�� premiered.

Expanding cable

Cable��s growth was still limited through the early 1980s, with many municipalities blocking expansion to protect their own media. The Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 helped create regulations that ensured local stations would be available on cable while also requiring that a portion of cable subscriptions fund public, educational and government (PEG) access channels. As cable��s spread accelerated, HBO continued to break ground in television programming and larger culture.

The Sopranos (cast pictured) was one of the industry-changing shows that debuted on HBO duringthe late 1990s and early 2000s. (Photo: HBO)

When HBO launched, there were only a handful of comedy clubs in the United States, with only a few venues to see standup comics outside of New York or Los Angeles. On broadcast television, standup comedy was limited to five-minute sets on late-night and variety shows. HBO��s comedy specials changed the industry when comedian Robert Klein debuted on the network in 1975. HBO helped legendary comedians like George Carlin become stars, while providing viewers exposure to future generations of comedians by creating standup comedy shows like Def Comedy Jam. Other networks and platforms like Comedy Central and Netflix followed this lead and expanded their program offerings through standup programs and specials.

One of the draws of these specials was that they were uncensored. HBO and its sister network Cinemax, which launched in 1980, were unique because they aired uncut theatrical films and adult programming. As HBO spread, advocacy groups tried to block the network in some states, due to what they felt was obscene content. Utah passed several laws to try to block HBO, but ultimately, as a premium network that required a subscription, it was not subject to broadcast obscenity laws and was protected by the First Amendment.

HBO was also a pioneer in unscripted programming, becoming one of the top producers of documentary films and series. From concert films to true crime, the breadth of unscripted programming became an inspiration for reality programming across television and helped advance documentary filmmaking. HBO now releases a documentary film or series nearly every month and helped create a template for documentaries, especially those focused on sports or culture.

As other premium and cable networks encroached on HBO��s programming, the network stayed ahead of the pack and produced its own scripted programming in the early 1980s��including Not Necessarily the News, a satirical news program that inspired series like The Daily Show and HBO��s own Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

One of the true turning points for HBO and the sitcom genre was the debut of The Larry Sanders Show in 1992. The network saw a number of the comedians that launched their careers through HBO��including Jerry Seinfeld and Roseanne Barr��receive their own shows, so HBO worked with Garry Shandling to create the show based on Shandling��s life. The single-camera, behind-the-scenes, laugh track�Cfree show inspired similar series like 30 Rock, The Office and HBO��s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The true turning point

The true turning point for HBO came in the late 1990s, when the network helped launch what many consider the age of prestige television. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, HBO debuted a string of industry-changing shows including Oz, Sex and the City, The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, and The Wire, which inspired other networks to focus on higher-quality scripted programming like The Shield on FX and Mad Men on AMC.

During this time, HBO also launched the first video-on-demand service in 2001 through cable providers, initiating a shift away from appointment television and toward the current streaming environment, which HBO helped expand by launching HBO Go in 2010. Although Netflix launched its streaming service in 2007, HBO Go offered the network��s original programming and pushed Netflix to do the same; Netflix aired its first original series, House of Cards, in 2013.

HBO Go was supported by a new wave of highly produced series that brought cinematic-level production to television. Shows like Game of Thrones and Westworld helped support the continued growth of cinematic sensibilities influencing television production. Even with increased competition from streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu, HBO continues to be an industry leader despite questions regarding parent company Warner Bros. Discovery��s (WBD) future. HBO Max is the streaming home for the corporation offering HBO programming along with news (CNN), sports (Turner/CBS) and scripted and unscripted programming from across WBD��s many brands.

HBO��s growth from a small regional subscription network to the standard bearer of television internationally can be traced to the network��s national debut. That its first national broadcast happened to be one of the greatest boxing matches in the sport��s history is fitting, considering HBO��s impact on modern television.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

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Fifty years after the Thrilla in Manila bout launched HBO as a national broadcasting powerhouse, the network continues to shape modern viewing and entertainment.

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What��s all the buzz about?

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 21:23:44 +0000

What��s all the buzz about? Rachel Sauer Thu, 10/02/2025 - 15:23

Bradley Worrell

In a week celebrating both National Coffee Day and International Coffee Day, CU Boulder scholar and ��coffee-ologist�� Kate Fischer considers a good cup of joe

By her education and training, Kate Fischer is a cultural anthropologist. But she uses an entirely different descriptor to explain her research focus.

��I sometimes tell people I��m a coffee-ologist,�� says Fischer, an associate teaching professor at the �� in the Arts and Sciences Honors Program as well as a seminar instructor in the Miramontes Arts and Sciences Program. While the connection between her chosen career field and area of research might not be clear at first blush, she explains, ��My PhD is in cultural anthropology, which allows me to look at coffee from a lot of different angles��from biology and tropical plant science, to agricultural management, to labor conditions on the farms, all of the chemistry and engineering that goes into transforming it (into a beverage), and then the brewing and the baristas in the coffee shops who serve it. So, really it touches everything.��

For those who really, really love their coffee��including Fischer��this week was a special one, as Monday was National Coffee Day in the United States and Wednesday was International Coffee Day.

Kate Fischer, a CU Boulder associate teaching professor and cultural anthropologist, researched coffee in Guatemala and Costa Rica during her PhD studies.

With two days this week devoted to celebrating all things coffee, it seemed like the perfect time for Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine to ask Fischer about her thoughts on what makes for a good cup of java, the appeal of both new specialty coffees and old standards like Folgers and the pros and cons of becoming a coffee connoisseur. Her answers have been lightly edited and condensed for space.

Question: How did you come to be a self-described coffee-ologist?

Fischer: I started as a barista back in the day, and I had so many questions. Some people might have been happy to search online for answers; other people, like me, go and get PhDs to get their questions answered (laughs). And then still have questions.

My initial research was in Guatemala and then later in Costa Rica, where I lived for a year and a half while working on my PhD, looking to get the bigger picture of coffee. I was really fascinated by the idea that you could have this same crop grown in so many places, with some similarities but also many differences.

Question: How is it that coffee has become such a big part of the American experience when it��s not native to this country?

Fischer: Coffee has been a part of the United States for a really long time, but it particularly took off around World War II. Its ubiquity came from the fact that it became a part of soldiers�� rations, so when they came back from the war they were used to it and, as a result, we saw big increases in demand. With modernized packaging and shipping, it became easier to sell on store shelves.

It became this sign of a modern family to have your coffee in the home. Even if they weren��t drinking it as a kid, kids grew up with the smell of it in the parents�� and grandparents�� home. Even people who tell me they don��t enjoy the taste of coffee say they like the smell, because it brings back a lot of memories for them.

Question: Is there any data on how many Americans regularly drink coffee? And how coffee consumption today compares with past years?

Fischer: This year��s National Coffee Association report tells us that 66% of American adults drink coffee daily, which is more than any other beverage, and up nearly 7% compared to 2020. The average coffee drinker drinks three cups a day. While it��s up since 2020, over time our consumption of coffee has dropped, because there is so much more competition now.

Question: There is a perception that young people today don��t like coffee. As someone who teaches young adults, do you believe there is any validity to that idea?

Fischer: Again, I think one of the big things is that today there��s so much more competition in terms of drinks, especially ready-to-go drinks. In the 1980s, your big competition was soda and maybe tea. Today we have kombucha, boba tea, Monster and Celsius energy drinks and so many other choices, so the overall coffee share is probably a bit less.

"I encourage people who are interested in coffee not to get overwhelmed or turned off by some of those gatekeepers who have their opinions of what good coffee tastes like. There are lots of different ways to enjoy coffee," says CU Boulder coffee researcher Kate Fischer.

When I ask my students, especially first-years, how many of them drink coffee every day, it��s just a couple. Many of them have had other caffeinated beverages. But when I ask how many of them drink coffee at some point during the week, then it��s nearly everybody. So, it might not be every day, but they are drinking coffee at some point during the week. With juniors and seniors, there��s a definite increase in caffeine consumption, particularly coffee.

Question: How do you explain the appeal of coffee to people who don��t drink it or who say they don��t like coffee?

Fischer: For people who don��t love the taste of coffee, it is more of a caffeine delivery vessel, and maybe a sugar delivery vessel for people who like the lattes with the crazy syrups and other things in them. They want to hide the taste, but caffeine and sugar are strong appeals. For the people who really get into their coffee, there is the sensory side of it, like the way it��s roasted and ground, and how different preparation methods can make the same coffee taste very different.

I think a lot of people, when they say they don��t like coffee, really it��s bad coffee they don��t like. They don��t like hotel coffee, or dining hall coffee, or really dark roast coffee. There are so many other good alternatives to those types of coffee if they are willing to try them.

Question: What do you think makes for a good cup of coffee? Is it the beans? The grinding? The brewing process? Something else? Are there any commonalities?

Fischer: All of the above. What makes good coffee is a topic I��ve been looking at for a long time, and it has led me down many rabbit holes.

There are a lot of ways that people try to be empirical about what makes good coffee, which, as a cultural anthropologist, I tend to challenge the notion that you can be empirical about something as subjective as taste, but there are objective pieces to it.

The Specialty Coffee Association has come up with a grading system. For a long time, it was a numeric scale, and they said, ��Here��s how you��re going to prepare this coffee,�� and they had this whole checklist of things like the roast level, the grind size and all these different things. And then there is a specialized tasting, called cupping, where experts look at these different attributes and score them. And people are trained to do this, judging coffees on a straight scale of totally bitter to totally sweet, and anybody who has a trained palate will agree on this. They��ve done all kinds of blind tests on this and they are very consistent in their judgments. Today it has evolved to include more holistic assessments that do a better job of separating out objective qualities from preferences.

But really, the answer is: The best cup of coffee is the one you like the best. Like anything else, it��s a preference.

"For the people who really get into their coffee, there is the sensory side of it, like the way it��s roasted and ground, and how different preparation methods can make the same coffee taste very different," says CU Boulder scholar Kate Fischer.

Question: Do you have thoughts on specialty brands, such as Death Wish Coffee, that are designed to give you a huge jolt of caffeine and basically assault your senses?

Fischer: At that point, is it really any different than drinking a Red Bull or other energy drink? With something like Death Wish, that��s absolutely a branding style and choice of who they��re aiming it at, and I think they are trying to capture the energy drink crowd by giving them a drink that��s more (caffeine) concentrated.

Ultimately, I think that��s about knowing your customer and what the buyer is looking for. So, if you��re trying to sell that customer who wants Death Wish a fruity, really light, delicate coffee, you��re probably not going to do very well.

Question: Alternatively, there are those who just like basic black coffee without any special flavorings or other enhancements. Anything you would say to them to encourage them to broaden their horizons, coffee-wise?

Fischer: There are a lot of people out there who say, ��I don��t want my coffee to taste like cranberries�� or these other descriptors. They want coffee to taste like coffee, which for them might be something like Folgers. My father, for example, wants a nice, simple, comfort-food version of coffee, and for him, Folgers is comfort food. And for me, it��s just bitter and sad and needs a lot of help to disguise what it is. Which is not what I want in my coffee.

I try not to judge people for liking what they like when it comes to coffee, but developing a palate for coffee does ruin you. I��ve tried not to be a coffee snob, but once you��ve had the really good stuff and you know what it can taste like, it��s hard to go back.

Question: With two major events celebrating coffee this week, will you personally be doing anything to celebrate?

Fischer: I hadn��t planned to, but now I��m thinking I should. I would just encourage people to drink coffee and learn something about where it came from. With coffee, it��s one of those things that can be as complicated or as simple as you want it to be.

Also, I encourage people who are interested in coffee not to get overwhelmed or turned off by some of those gatekeepers who have their opinions of what good coffee tastes like. There are lots of different ways to enjoy coffee.

And it��s OK if coffee is not your thing. I don��t understand it, but it��s OK.

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In a week celebrating both National Coffee Day and International Coffee Day, CU Boulder scholar and ��coffee-ologist�� Kate Fischer considers a good cup of joe.

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Sometimes ��building back better�� doesn��t include everyone

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 23:14:40 +0000

Sometimes ��building back better�� doesn��t include everyone Rachel Sauer Mon, 09/22/2025 - 17:14

Cody DeBos

CU Boulder researcher Mary Angelica Painter finds that in post-disaster recovery, equity isn��t guaranteed

In the mountains of Colorado outside Boulder, a tight-knit community once made up of mobile homes and modest living has all but disappeared. Now, visitors will find the hills dominated by sprawling new homes and residents of a different tax bracket.

��We were driving through, and it was all these multi-million-dollar homes. A lot of talk about this community having more dogs than people,�� Mary Angelica Painter recalls after a recent trip to the town. ��It��s a very wealthy, affluent community.��

Painter, a research associate at the ��s Natural Hazards Center, knows the history of this town from the work of scholars in the hazards and disaster field. It was a place where lower-income, often elderly residents leaned on each other for care and social support. But after a devastating flood in 2013, everything changed.

Mary Angelica Painter, a research associate in the CU Boulder Natural Hazards Center, co-authored a paper defining ��hazard gentrification�� as the process that unfolds when natural hazards destroy a large portion of a community and residents are displaced by wealthier newcomers during recovery and rebuilding.

��After this event, most of the residents were dispersed and displaced. We saw one area where there was supposedly low-income housing, and we were told rent was ��only�� $1,800 a month. I was like, ��Wow.�� I had no other term to define it than hazard gentrification,�� Painter says.

It��s a familiar pattern she has seen while studying natural hazards and the subsequent recovery efforts of the affected communities.

In an effort to better describe the trend, she recently co-authored a paper defining ��hazard gentrification�� as the process that unfolds when natural hazards destroy a large portion of a community and residents are displaced by wealthier newcomers during recovery and rebuilding.

Unlike slower-moving forms of gentrification, such as those related to climate change, Painter says hazard gentrification is more rapid and has devastating repercussions.

Defining a new kind of gentrification

The term coined by Painter and her co-authors builds on years of disaster capitalism research��the idea that public and private entities exploit disasters to consolidate power and wealth.

��We often hear the term ��build back better,�� which leads to the question of ��build back better for whom?�� she says.

Sustainability gentrification, a similar but unique concept, has been coined recently as well. However, those takeovers tend to happen gradually.

��Hazard gentrification is much faster than other forms of sustainability gentrification,�� Painter explains, ��so that��s why we really felt the urge to write this short paper and punctuate this specific type of gentrification.��

She also warns that it isn��t a theoretical concern. From New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to the aftermath of wildfires in Lahaina, Hawaii, the pattern has played out repeatedly.

��We needed to name this phenomenon as its own thing so we can start identifying solutions,�� Painter says.

The forces at play

So, what turns a disaster into a reality-altering event for a local community? Painter says the answer is political as much as environmental.

��Disasters stem from social, economic and political choices that leave people in devastation. So, in my mind, disasters are very political.��

After a natural hazard hits, local governments often face pressure to restore services quickly and begin the rebuilding efforts. Much of that push comes from the loudest and most affluent voices in the community.

Structures and infrastructure in Jamestown, Colorado, were significantly damaged by 2013 floods (Photo: Steve Zumwalt/FEMA)

��There is a huge push to build back faster,�� Painter says, ��and because of that, there are fewer opportunities to involve local community members in the process of making decisions of how it happens.��

When participation is limited, she points out, redevelopment favors those with more money, time and connections. The dynamic also benefits outside investors and developers who are eager to move in where disaster presents an opportunity.

Who gets left behind

For many long-time, even lifelong, residents, rebuilding after a hazard hits simply isn��t an option.

��These populations that are more socially vulnerable tend to either be underinsured or not insured at all against hazards and disasters. They might be living paycheck to paycheck and don��t have the extra income or time to find secondary housing,�� Painter says.

��We actually know from research that white affluent people post natural hazard are actually better off after the disaster. They are able to get large insurance payouts, and if their house needs to be rebuilt or refurbished, the value can go up and they can sell it for a profit,�� she adds.

Those benefits aren��t present for people who live in mobile homes or manufactured housing, let alone renters. Painter explains that rental assistance is often insubstantial, and renters do not receive the same high priority as homeowners.

The loss of social safety nets, both formal and informal, compounds the trauma for local residents who rely on them.

��They lose their networks of support. There are just so many factors that come together that make it slower or impossible for them to recover,�� Painter says.

As a result, many residents find themselves priced out of the place they called home and are left to watch as the area is redeveloped without them.

How some communities push back

Despite the powerful forces at work, hazard gentrification isn��t inevitable. Painter points to a few examples, including Joplin, Missouri; Coffey Park in California; and Seattle��s Duwamish Valley. Here, early and meaningful community engagement helped limit displacement after natural hazards wreaked devastation.

People evacuate West Glenwood Springs, Colorado, in the face of spreading wildfires in 2002. (Photo: Bryan Dahlberg/FEMA)

She notes that Joplin��s story, one close to home, is especially striking. After an EF5 tornado nearly leveled the town in 2011, local leaders mobilized quickly.

��They really self-organized effectively. They were very engaging with the community in the rebuilding process and prioritized not leaving anyone behind,�� Painter says.

��Not every community is able to do that in that way, but it was something that really jumpstarted their recovery into a positive life.��

Painter notes that these engagement efforts helped preserve community bonds and gave residents a sense of ownership over the recovery.

��There seems to be much more cohesion and democratization when it comes to rebuilding like that,�� she says. ��The idea is that you need to bring communities together and let them share their voices. It��s so important.��

What needs to change

The question going forward, Painter posits, is whether policymakers will make bold choices to prevent displacement before the next hazard strikes.

��You can��t be prioritizing the stuff you��ve been prioritizing. If in the past it was something like economic development at the harm of lower-income and marginalized residents, that can��t be the way you go forward,�� she says.

In other words, more equitable recovery efforts must start with a cultural shift in how communities allocate resources. New policies promoting rent control, expanded insurance and better disaster assistance for renters can all help lower the burden in the wake of a hazard.

��People need to understand the idea of sacrifice for their neighbors,�� she says.

CU Boulder��s Natural Hazards Center is working to bridge the gap between research and real-world solutions.

��We aren��t just a research apparatus,�� Painter says. ��We��re also a connecting body. It��s important that we as researchers connect with policymakers and decision makers and are solution oriented.��

As climate change fuels more frequent and intense natural events, hazard gentrification will become more common. Naming the problem is just a first step, but also a necessary one. From there, Painter hopes society collectively adopts an action mindset.

��We need to find ways to be equitable and to provide for and support our communities, and to have plans for if there��s devastation, too. Academics are really good at identifying problems. However, we need to focus on how we actually solve these problems and how we can use our positions to vocalize and advocate for those solutions.��

Justin Stoler, Ethan Sharygin and Sameer Shah also contributed to this paper.

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CU Boulder researcher Mary Angelica Painter finds that in post-disaster recovery, equity isn��t guaranteed.

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Top image: Lahaina, Hawaii, was devastated by August 2023 wildfires. (Photo: State Farm/Wikimedia Commons)

Liberals hit the brakes on buying Teslas

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 13:30:00 +0000

Liberals hit the brakes on buying Teslas Rachel Sauer Fri, 09/19/2025 - 07:30

Bradley Worrell

Research co-authored by CU Boulder environmental psychologist Amanda Carrico finds CEO Elon Musk��s embrace of rightwing politics results in liberals being less willing to buy the EVs

Tesla CEO Elon Musk��s embrace of rightwing activism has not done him any favors with liberal-leaning Americans��the U.S. demographic group most inclined to purchase electric vehicles��while not resulting in any notable corresponding increase in purchase intentions among the country��s conservatives.

That��s according to a recent research paper published in Humanities & Social Sciences, which was co-authored by Amanda Carrico, an environmental psychologist whose research focus is on understanding people��s behaviors, attitudes and perceptions related to the environment. She is also an associate professor with the �� Department of Environmental Studies.

Carrico and her co-authors conducted five surveys of Americans between August 2023 and March of this year about their willingness to embrace 30 actions that would reduce greenhouse emissions. Purchasing electric vehicles (EVs) was the most polarizing item among those actions, with positive intentions recorded for liberals and negative intentions among conservatives.

CU Boulder scholar Amanda Carrico is an environmental psychologist whose research focus is on understanding people��s behaviors, attitudes and perceptions related to the environment.

However, in the past three surveys (May 2024, July 2024 and March), liberals have pumped the brakes regarding their intentions to buy Teslas��and that decline is associated with Musk��s relatively recent embrace of rightwing politics, Carrico says.

��We definitely find that overall intentions to purchase Tesla seems to decrease over time, so there seems to be an intensification of rejection of Teslas among liberals as Musk��s conservative persona emerged,�� she says. That��s particularly significant given that liberals are the demographic group most inclined to purchase electric vehicles, she adds.

What's at stake when EV tax credits end Sept. 30?

��At the same time, conservatives have been pretty predictable across the entirety of the surveys: They just aren��t interested in EVs,�� Carrico says. ��As Elon Musk was shifting to the right, our initial theory was: Maybe we��ll see conservatives become more interested in EVs, because you��ve got this now conservative figure in the industry who is excited about EVs because of their benefit to the environment. We thought we might be on the precipice of EVs becoming a less polarized issue. However, that has not turned out to be true.��

To support their research on Musk��s impact on the Tesla brand, Carrico and her co-authors also point to a series of Morning Consult polls showing a steady decline in self-reported willingness to buy a Tesla among Democrats since 2023. Separately, a Data for Progress poll found two-thirds of Democrats and half of Independents reported that Musk had made them less likely to buy a Tesla.

Recently, Carrico spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine regarding the findings and implications of the research paper. Her responses have been lightly edited for grammar and clarity and condensed for space.

Question: Your team conducted five surveys between November 2023 and March of this year. Was it always the plan to ask specifically about Musk and Teslas, or did that come later?

Carrico: The idea came later, so it was opportunistic. It was interesting to us to see from the beginning that EVs were among the most polarizing action items, so we asked ourselves in 2024 if we should modify the question from EVs generally to Teslas.

There were two motivations for that. One was: How are people��s opinions shifting in response to this emergent political shift (by Musk)? The second was: We felt like we needed more information about people��s opinions about EVs generally versus Teslas, so some respondents were asked about EVs and some were asked about Tesla specifically, and that��s where you could see some delineation between those two categories.

Question: If Musk��s embrace of rightwing politics cost him the support of liberals without picking up notable support from conservatives, did he basically drive Tesla sales into a proverbial ditch?

"We thought we might be on the precipice of EVs becoming a less polarized issue. However, that has not turned out to be true,�� says CU Boulder researcher Amanda Carrico. (Photo: Dylan Calluy/Unsplash)

Carrico: I would not want to speculate on the underlying economics of Musk��s portfolio. A lot of his businesses are interconnected, and a lot of the technologies are interconnected.

But just purely looking at the impact of his political persona in relation to consumer interests in purchasing Teslas, and also the market data about purchasing Teslas, it does seem very clear that there is a decline in consumer interest in Teslas. Of course, business leaders and public figures make value judgments all the time, just like we all do. We don��t know if this decision (by Musk) was driven by economics or other factors. ��

I personally would stop short of making a judgment about whether that was a smart decision or an unwise one, but you can certainly see that relationship (Musk��s embrace of a conservative persona and a declining interest among liberals to buy Teslas) play out in our data and the market data that we were able to acquire during the project.

Question: Do you have thoughts as to whether Tesla could regain support, particularly support from liberals, if Musk either stepped away from his company or perhaps walked back some of his rightwing views?

Carrico: I think there are some insights we could look to, to make an educated hypothesis on what might happen there. I will say, I think once something becomes politically polarized, like becoming aligned with a political identity, it��s very hard to undo that. Politics are very sticky, so it becomes hard to shed that.

With consumer behavior, we have seen a lot of companies recover from these kinds of things. For example, Budweiser being boycotted several years ago in response to their alliance with a transgender influencer. That was different, though, because Budweiser wasn��t entering into the political arena.

This is a very different thing, with Musk being the figurehead of a company. Tesla is unique in how tied Musk is to Tesla. For comparison, I don��t know how many people in America could tell you who is the leader of Nissan or Suncor or other companies, but Musk is uniquely visible in his role with Tesla.

Question: Do you have any thoughts as to how other EV manufacturers should respond to the survey findings when it comes to branding or messaging?

Carrico: Clearly, liberals want to explore EVs. I think it��s clear that it��s aligned with their identity. One interesting thing in this study that was very surprising to us is that the disinterest in EVs that started to grow over the course of the study wasn��t just isolated to Teslas. We started to see it bleed over into interest in purchasing EVs in general.

I wondered if that wasn��t so much a rejection of EVs as a disinterest in one of the leading vehicles in the EV market. Teslas were considered state-of-the-art in many respects. The charging infrastructure for Teslas feels quite superior to other alternatives, so it does feel like there��s a consumer demand that��s not being met by other alternatives.

"Teslas were considered state-of-the-art in many respects. The charging infrastructure for Teslas feels quite superior to other alternatives, so it does feel like there��s a consumer demand that��s not being met by other alternatives," says Amanda Carrico, CU Boulder associate professor and department chair of environmental studies.

Of course, that��s easier said than done, but insofar as there are opportunities for other producers to fill this space��to offer purchasing opportunities that are not Tesla but that fulfill the same goals and amenities as Tesla offered��I think that��s a real opportunity, and I��m sure they are scrambling to take advantage of that.

Question: A number of media outlets have reported on the study��s findings. What kind of reaction has the paper been generating?

Carrico: It��s been very interesting because the reaction has depended heavily upon the political orientation of the news outlet, which is perhaps not surprising. If it was covered by a more liberal outlet��Mother Jones, for example��the main takeaway was, ��Look at Elon Musk. What a fool he was, shooting himself in the foot.��

Then if you look on the right��it��s been covered by Breitbart, for example��the narrative has been, ��Look at these liberals rejecting these products that solve the problem they care so much about,�� meaning climate change.

There��s been accurate depictions of the findings in the paper, but also it��s been interesting because anyone can take what they want out of the paper and spin it, or link it, to their political identity.

Question: Do you think this is a topic you and your co-authors will revisit, perhaps to see how opinions on EVs in general, and Teslas in particular, evolve over time?

Carrico: To be honest, we have not talked about it yet, but I would not be surprised if that happens. Writing papers like this, there��s a lot of work to get one completed, and the review process can be long and tedious. But the team (of co-authors) is still meeting, and so I anticipate that within the next few months we��ll be revisiting things, deciding what we want to focus on next and trying to understand how polarization impacts a range of behaviors.

There is an aspect of this project that is trying to understand things people do agree on. Specifically, where is there less polarization? Because those areas are appealing targets for public policy, with the idea (that) we can make progress on the areas we agree on and wait for things we don��t agree on to see if there��s opportunities in the future.

I hope that this moment fades, so that we can move away from this rancor around EVs. I��m really hopeful about the potential of decarbonization and how that is linked with a changing of the vehicle fleet (from combustion engine to EV), so I still think there��s a lot of potential there, and I��m hopeful we will still see some renewed interest in this technology. I think we will.

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Research co-authored by CU Boulder environmental psychologist Amanda Carrico finds CEO Elon Musk��s embrace of rightwing politics results in liberals being less willing to buy the EVs.

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Top photo: Dmitry Novikov/Unsplash

Charting the rise and fall of great sea powers

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:29:31 +0000

Charting the rise and fall of great sea powers Rachel Sauer Thu, 09/18/2025 - 11:29

Bradley Worrell

CU alum��s book examines how the fate of the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States as economic and political powers has been deeply intertwined with their ability to project power via the seas

Colin Flint, a �� PhD geography graduate and professor of political geography at Utah State University, researches the rise and fall of great world powers.

It��s a topic beyond simple academic interest to Flint, who was born in 1965 and raised in England during a period of seismic change in the country.

��At the time, Britain was still struggling to figure out that it wasn��t the world��s greatest power anymore, so my socialization and political coming of age was in a declined power,�� he says. Additionally, Flint says being raised in the busy ferry port of Dover made a powerful impression on him by highlighting the country��s long history as a maritime nation.

Colin Flint, a CU Boulder PhD geography graduate, researches the rise and fall of great world powers.

��Dover definitely has influenced me, being so close to the water,�� he says. ��My high school was on a hill overlooking the harbor, which at the time was the busiest ferry port in the world, with ships going back and forth to France and Belgium. So, the notion was very much rooted in me that Britain drew its power, historically, from the sea.��

At one point, Flint entertained the idea of joining the Royal Navy before setting his career sights on academia. He obtained his bachelor��s and master��s degrees in Britain, then pursued his PhD in geography at the �� thanks to fortuitous connections between his undergrad mentor and CU Boulder Department of Geography Professor John O��Loughlin.

��I moved to United States of America in 1990 to attend university, and the literature at the time and discussions were all very declinist. It was very much, ��America has gone down the tubes,�� he says. ��Broadly speaking, I moved from a declined power into a declining power, or so I thought at the time.��

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Flint says the idea of America as a declining power was largely replaced with a triumphalist narrative that saw the U.S. as the world��s only remaining superpower.

Ideas about what makes a country an economic and political superpower��and how a country can lose its status as a hegemonic power��had been percolating in Flint��s brain for years when he recently published his book Near and Far Waters: The Geopolitics of Seapower. The book specifically looks at the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States for context on how the countries used sea power to project their economic and political influence across the globe.

Flint spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about his book, while also offering insights on how current events are shaping the outlook for the United States and the world. His answers have been edited for clarity and condensed.

Question: What is the context for your book��s title: Near and Far Waters?

Flint: There are legal terms about coasts and the exclusive economic zone around the country��s coastlines, but I��m not using it in that way. I��m thinking about an area of ocean in which a country has interest and influence over and off its coastline.

"Near and Far Waters" by CU Boulder alumnus Colin Flint focuses on the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States for context on how the countries used sea power to project their economic and political influence across the globe.

That is an important piece of ocean for a country because there��s resource exploitation, but it��s also a matter of security. If a country wants to protect itself from potential invasion, it needs to control those waters off its coastline��it��s near waters.

Some countries, once they��ve established control of their near waters, have the ability and desire to project beyond that, across the oceans into what would then become its far waters. If you think about Great Britain in the context of the British Empire, once it fought off European threats to its coastline��its near waters��it was then able to develop the sea power to establish its empire. It was in African far waters, it was in Indian far waters, in Middle East far waters and so on.

Another good example of this would be how the United States of America, over the course of history, pushed other countries out of its near waters. The Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico are good examples, where Spanish and British influence were ended over the 1800s and 1900s. And then by establishing control through annexation of Hawaii and the purchase of Alaska, America developed its Pacific near waters, too, which it expanded upon through the course of World War II, pushing the Japanese back and establishing bases in Okinawa, Japan; the Philippines; and Guam, etc.

Question: One of your chapters is titled ��No Island is an Island.�� What do you mean by that?

Flint: I was talking about how the projection of sea power requires the control of islands. Often, the geopolitical goal and benefit of controlling an island is not the island itself��it��s how it enables projection of power further, or how it hinders other countries�� projection of power by being near sea lines of communication that you can have a base to try and disrupt. For example, when Hawaii became part of the United States, it allowed the U.S. to project power across the Pacific. Again, it��s not the island itself��it��s the projection of power across an ocean.

Projecting sea power is about more than just having a strong navy.

Question: If one country��s far waters extend into the near waters of another country, that would seem to be a recipe for conflict, would it not?

Flint: That is the kicker, of course, that a sea power��s far waters are another country��s near waters. And it has historically led to conflicts and even wars. It��s always involved violence��and not just between great powers and lesser powers, but also violence against the people living on islands or in coastal lands where sea powers are looking to establish dominance and exploit resources.

Question: China has been rapidly expanding its navy in recent years. Is it simply beefing up its sea forces to protect its near waters, or is it looking to supplant the U.S. as the dominant sea power? Or are there other motives at play?

Flint: You often see in newspaper articles written in the United States and maybe other Western countries that China has the biggest navy in the world. This always makes me laugh because, yes, it��s got hundreds and hundreds of tiny little coastal defense vessels, but even now that it has two aircraft carriers, it does not have the ability to project power like the United States of America, which has 11 carrier groups. So, I think that should always be recognized.

The other sort of trope that��s often wielded out there, which I think we need to question, is: The West is worried about China developing a navy, because it will allow China to disrupt trade networks. Well, wait a minute. China is very dependent on imports, especially of fuel or energy. Additionally, it is the world��s largest trading economy, and it��s worried about the robustness of its domestic economy. They cannot maintain their economic growth based purely on their domestic market, so they need to have a global economic presence for markets and for securing inputs into their economy.

Putting those two things together, it makes no sense why China would want to disrupt global trade. In fact, the country��s reaction to President Trump��s sanctions tells us that the last thing China wants is global trade disrupted. They��re very worried about the fragility of their own economy and whether that leads to social unrest, etc. The flip side of that is how the West could really hurt China by blocking those trade routes to prevent energy imports into China and exports.

China is definitely trying to grow its navy. I think what makes it so interesting is its simultaneous attempt to have a navy that can defend its near waters while perhaps preventing the operation of the United States in its far waters. To what extent China is attempting to establish a presence in its far waters is less clear.

"A sea power��s far waters are another country��s near waters. And it has historically led to conflicts and even wars," notes scholar Colin Flint. ("Naval Battle of 1812," Painting, Oil on Canvas; By Rodolfo Claudus; 1962/U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command)

Question: From your book, it seems like you have some serious concerns about the potential for a serious conflict arising from disputes over near and far waters?

Flint: In fact, I��ve never been so concerned or worried in my career, to be honest with you. When I started teaching my class on political geography many moons ago, let��s say in the mid-1990s, I used to start off with some structural model of global political change, which essentially says, we have cycles of war and peace, for the want of a better term.

And I asked my students to try and get them engaged: ��Picture yourself in 2025. What are you going to be doing?�� It was staggering to me how many of them believed that they would be millionaires and already retired (laughs).

The point of that was that the model I was using predicted another period of global war, starting in 2025. I don��t do that exercise anymore, because it isn��t funny; it��s really quite serious. So yes, the risk of war is high, and I think it could emerge in a number of different places. One focus is on the South China Sea, the near waters of China, as that is clearly a potential flashpoint. Taiwan is the obvious focal point of what that conflict would look like.

I also wonder about potential flashpoints of conflict in Chinese far waters��and that could include the Arctic and the Northern Atlantic, because another factor that has to be considered is global climate change and the increasing possibility of a trade route through the North Pole, which would cut trade times from China into European markets considerably. Those waters represent U.S. near waters, so ��

Question: Do you envision any sort of viable alternatives to a conflict between world powers over near and far waters, especially in today��s environment?

Flint: My motivation with the book was with an eye to waving some sort of flag about how to think about peace rather than war. Most of our lenses are national lenses. If we keep on this pattern of a national lens, then I see a strong likelihood to repeat these cycles of near and far water sea powers, which have always involved a period of global war.

We need to change that lens. We need to have a global view as to why countries are always seeking far waters, entering other people��s near waters and why that can lead to conflict.

Today, we��re facing a humanity-scale problem, which is global climate change. Is that the thing that will tell us we need to work together, rather than compete? I��m not saying it is; I��m saying, if I see a glimmer of optimism to your question, that��s it.

Question: Based upon your research, if a country loses its status as a hegemonic power, can it later recover that status? And, in the context of today��s world, what might things look like if the U.S. lost its hegemonic status?

Flint: The short answer is no, based upon past history, a country that loses its hegemonic status has not been able to reclaim it once it��s gone.

But to your second question, it goes back to the question about what China��s intentions are. In American popular culture, where every sports team has to be No. 1, even if they are eighth in some Mickey Mouse conference, there is this obsession that there has to be a singular winner or champion.

What I��m saying is that we shouldn��t just assume that if the United States declines there will be another emergent dominant power in the world. It��s quite possible that if the United States declines, what might emerge would be a multipolar world, although I don��t know what that might look like.

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Top image: A squadron of the Royal Navy running down the Channel and An East Indiaman preparing to sail, by artist Samuel Atkins (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Television is a laughing matter

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 22:17:11 +0000

Television is a laughing matter Rachel Sauer Mon, 09/15/2025 - 16:17

Jared Bahir Browsh

In the 75 years since it was introduced, the laugh track has conditioned viewers to know when and how much to laugh

Some audiences love it, and some audiences hate it, but the laugh track��which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year��has a deeper, more psychological impact than many realize.

For months after I completed my book on Hanna-Barbera, I purposely avoided shows with laugh tracks. After hundreds of hours of over-the-top laughter that followed every Fred Flintstone fall or Scooby Doo pun, I became hyperaware of the laughter that accompanied my favorite shows like ��I Love Lucy" and ��Seinfeld.�� These shows returned to my TV rotation after this short detox, but similar to involuntary processes like breathing, once I begin noticing laugh tracks, I couldn��t stop, breaking the desensitization and conditioning that has occurred for many viewers after decades of watching sitcoms.

Like a number of early television shows, laugh tracks originated on radio before transitioning to television. Pioneering radio engineer Jack Mullin brought a tape recorder back from Germany after World World II, exhibiting the technology by recording musical performances and then playing back the music. In June 1947, he met the producer for Bing Crosby��s radio show, and after he demonstrated the technology, Crosby decided to pre-record his show.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

At the time, the few shows that were prerecorded were done so on acetate disc, which was fine for scripted content, but the low quality of the recording prevented the discs from being used to broadcast music. Crosby preferred a pre-recording in a studio, but NBC denied his request. He left NBC in 1945, then joined ABC in 1946 after the young network allowed him to record his show, the first major radio show to be recorded. The first season was recorded on disc, but when Crosby heard the quality of magnetic tape, he switched to tape recording the show.

The improved quality of the recording helped push the show to the top 20 during its second season. The technique allowed show producers to edit out less-entertaining segments or performances deemed inappropriate for radio. During the third and final season of the show, comedian Bob Burns performed a ��blue�� set, which led to raucous laughter but was too racy for broadcast. Producers kept the laughter, and when the studio audience was less than receptive to a comedy performance a few weeks later, Mullin added the laughter from Burns�� performance during post-production, and the laugh track was born.

Sweetening live laughter

In early television, shows that were not recorded live used a single camera, filming the same scene several times. CBS engineer Charles (Charley) Douglass noticed inconsistencies in the laughter, with some reactions shorter or longer than intended, especially after the third or fourth filming. Also, certain individual laughter could be distracting, overshadowing the performance when audience members laughed at the wrong time. Douglass began ��sweetening�� the live laughter by adding recorded laughs when the joke did not land, and even edited down laughter when it went on too long.

The first time recorded laughter was used not merely as a sweetener but as the sole source of laughter for a sitcom was in 1950 during ��The Hank McCune Show�� produced for CBS by Bing Crosby Enterprises. Although the sitcom lasted only 13 episodes, other shows began to pick up the practice. The recorded laughter not only helped to signal jokes in the program but was also used to cover bumps in the original recording.

Many early sitcoms and variety shows filmed in front of a studio audience, but the design of multiple-set studios blocked half the audience from seeing some scenes and performances, so the laugh track helped fill some of those gaps. ��I Love Lucy" was a famous exception, using mostly audience laughter and reactions in the original broadcast; however, even some of "I Love Lucy��s�� laugh audio was sweetened.

Douglass went on to create what was known as the ��laff box,�� a large, organ-like box that contained different laughs, many of which were originally recorded from segments of ��The Red Skelton Show.�� Douglass, who founded Northridge Electronics, was so secretive about his device that his family were the only ones to see inside it and just a few select technicians trained to use it. Douglass would often receive directions and edit in the laughter isolated from other producers and editors.

��I Love Lucy" used mostly audience laughter and reactions in the original broadcast; however, even some of the show's laugh audio was sweetened with a laugh track. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Psychology and social conditioning

The laugh track has survived 75 years on television, but not without challenges or controversy. The television comedy community has at best been ambivalent toward canned laughter, with some early television performers like Crosby, Milton Bearle and Bob Hope understanding how a laugh track could be used to project their desired reaction to a joke or routine. Many producers hated the artificial laughter, but because all the most popular comedies had laughter and most used a laugh track, they submitted to the trend at the time.

By the 1960s, most comedies had stopped filming in front of a studio audience, knowing the broadcast audience did not care whether the laughter was canned or real. They also knew the audience needed to hear the laughter to know a show is a comedy, so a laugh track was a requisite to any show categorized as a comedy. One of the most famous tests of this idea involved ��Hogan��s Heroes��: Audiences were shown early episodes with and without the laugh track, and the response was much better for the episodes with a laugh track. Shows like ��Hogan��s Heroes�� and ��M*A*S*H�� have had laugh tracks removed in rebroadcasts, leading to much darker shows around war themes.

The goal is for the canned reactions to match the assumed reactions of the audience, conditioning the audience to react or engage in the way intended. Media theorist Stuart Hall famously discussed encoding and decoding in his reception theory, although the audience does have the agency to decode, or create their own meaning, even when producers encode the content with their intended messages. The laugh track is another form of encoding in which the message��in this case the joke��is encoded with humor, and the laugh track is used to reinforce the message so the receiver, or audience, decodes the dialogue or action and finds it humorous.

Some creators pushed back against this, including Mel Brooks when creating ��Get Smart,�� Jackie Cooper in his show ��Hennessy�� and The Monkees, who thought the band��s comedy was intelligent enough to not require the track in their self-titled show. Brooks eventually relented, whereas Cooper and The Monkees finally were able to eliminate the laugh track in the third and second seasons, respectively. Both ��Hennessy�� and ��The Monkees�� were cancelled the season after they eliminated the laugh track, whereas ��Get Smart�� lasted six seasons.

Laugh tracks were also widespread in children��s television. When Hanna-Barbera created several shows, including ��The Flintstones" and ��The Jetsons�� for primetime, they included a laugh track similar to that in sitcoms, which they brought with them when they transitioned to Saturday morning. Hanna-Barbera��s Saturday morning cartoon budget was more limited than their primetime budget, so they and other animation studios created their own, more limited laugh track to circumvent Douglass�� monopoly, but would occasionally still employ Douglass laugh tracks for more high-profile productions. Other producers such as Rankin/Bass and Jim Henson also developed their own laugh tracks. The canned laughter not only showed animated viewers when to laugh, but it also extended scenes to reduce the amount of animation and, in turn, cost.

The Monkees thought their comedy was intelligent enough to not require the track in their self-titled show. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

However, some children��s television producers, like their live-action counterparts, hated laugh tracks and tried to broadcast without them. Ross Bagdasarian pushed back against a laugh track for ��The Alvin Show.�� Despite the popularity of The Chipmunks�� novelty music, the show was cancelled after one season, which was blamed partially on its lack of a laugh track.

Creators who won their battle against canned laughter were Charles Schultz, Jay Ward and Bill Scott. NBC assumed ��A Charlie Brown Christmas�� would fail without a laugh track, but 60 years later, the holiday favorite and Schultz��s other specials remain classics��without the laugh track. Ward and Scott were supported by the show��s sponsor General Mills when negotiating with ABC regarding the laugh track in "Rocky and His Friends/The Bullwinkle Show,�� and it was ultimately eliminated after the fourth episode.

Canned laughter��s introduction to children��s television contributed to the continued social conditioning of television audiences; laugh tracks both signal that the program is a comedy while helping audiences recognize jokes and know when they should laugh. The laugh track also creates a feeling of connection or community rooted in visual media transitioning from theaters, where audiences watched the show together, into homes where an individual or small group is watching alone.

Return of live audiences

A mix of old-school sensibilities, a crop of new producers and a shift in settings for sitcoms led to the return of live audiences in the late 1960s. When ��Here��s Lucy�� debuted in 1968, Lucille Ball insisted on a live audience for her third network sitcom. That era also saw a shift back to shows set in urban environments after networks earlier moved toward rural settings like those in ��The Beverly Hillbillies�� and ��Green Acres,�� attempting to appeal to middle America. This not only led to the rural purge in the early 1970s, as series returned to cities, but these urban sitcoms, created in larger, more accommodating studios, were more conducive to live audiences.

Writer and producer Norman Lear��s legendary career was built in front of a live studio audience, as his urban sitcoms like ��All in the Family�� and ��Good Times�� not only featured working-class Queens or the housing projects of Chicago but were also groundbreaking in bringing more diverse representation to television. Similar to theater, actors in these sitcoms allowed the audience reactions to simmer, ultimately pausing the scene until the laughter subsided. However, even as live studio audiences returned, showrunners continued to sweeten the laughs with laugh tracks.

Actors in sitcoms like "Good Times" allowed audience reactions to simmer, ultimately pausing the scene until the laughter subsided. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Comedy dramas (or dramedies) like ��Eight is Enough�� and ��The Love Boat�� even employed laugh tracks to help signal jokes, as they mixed comedy and more serious story lines and used the laugh track to help the audience distinguish between them.

Some games shows, like Chuck Barris' ��The Newlywed Game�� and ��The Gong Show,�� were also sweetened with laugh tracks, especially since audiences were less excitable due to the lack of prizes given or won. Mark Goodson��s productions, like "The Price is Right�� and ��Family Feud,�� were and continue to be famous for more raucous live audiences, but there still have been instances of occasional sweetening for broadcast.

As time went on, laugh track options were expanded, with the type of laughter increasingly customizable depending on the show. Both Douglass and the companies creating their own tracks, like Hanna-Barbera, ensured the laugh track for each show matched the tone, mood and pace of the show in which they were used. More subtle comedies featured more subdued laugh tracks, while more slapstick or over-the-top comedies used more raucous laugh tracks to match the program and encourage similar viewer reactions.

The laugh track continued to be nearly ubiquitous in sitcoms through the 1980s. However, as more satirical and animated sitcoms made it to broadcast, producers of this new crop of series began to move away from the laugh track to maintain flow and introduce more subtle humor. When ��The Simpsons�� debuted in 1989��the first primetime animated sitcom on a broadcast network since ��The Flintstones�� in 1966��the series departed from its prehistoric counterpart and trusted the audience to recognize the humor in the show. The shift also allowed for more visual humor and for producers to stack more jokes and allow dialogue to flow without waiting for the canned laughter to subside.

Yet, even through the 1990s, the most popular sitcoms, including ��Friends�� and ��Seinfeld,�� maintained the classic sitcom approach and both invited live audiences to tapings and sweetened laughter with more advanced laugh tracks that were increasingly digital and customizable. As television entered a new millennium, more single-camera comedy series, including mockumentary series like ��The Office�� and cult favorites like ��Arrested Development,�� ditched the laugh track. Also, cable dramedies like ��Shameless�� and ��Atlanta�� emerged, particularly on cable, balancing serious storylines with subtle comedy where laugh tracks just did not fit with the overall audience experience.

New generations of television (and streaming) viewers are now conditioned to watch comedies without laugh tracks, but there still is a place for traditional multicamera comedies that are either filmed in front of an audience whose laughter is sweetened or whose editors just insert laugh tracks. Audiences may be familiar with formulas or tropes in sitcoms, but laugh tracks still provide a feeling of communal watching even as appointment viewing and broadcast television slowly fades.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

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In the 75 years since it was introduced, the laugh track has conditioned viewers to know when and how much to laugh.

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When the microbiome is a family matter

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 16:00:54 +0000

When the microbiome is a family matter Rachel Sauer Mon, 09/15/2025 - 10:00

Cody DeBos

CU Boulder researcher Jessica Finlay wrote and recently published a book with her father about how microbes unlock whole-body health

When Jessica Finlay moved from Canada to Minneapolis for graduate school, she didn��t expect microbes to be part of her academic journey. Now an assistant professor of geography at the �� with a focus on health, neighborhoods and aging, she��s still an unlikely candidate to write a book about the body��s microbiome.

Yet, alongside her father, Brett Finlay, a professor of biochemistry and microbiology at The University of British Columbia, that��s exactly what she has become.

Together, the pair wrote The Microbiome Master Key: Harness Your Microbes to Unlock Whole-Body Health and Lifelong Vitality. Their new book blends cutting-edge science with practical advice for healthier everyday living.

Jessica Finlay (left), a CU Boulder assistant professor of geography, and her father, Brett Finlay (right), a professor of biochemistry and microbiology at The University of British Columbia, together wrote the recently published The Microbiome Master Key: Harness Your Microbes to Unlock Whole-Body Health and Lifelong Vitality. (Photo: Jessica Finlay)

But hiding below the science is a family story that bridges disciplines and perspectives to give readers a better understanding of the hidden ecosystem within everyone.

From aging in place to microbial studies

Jessica��s primary research focuses on how environments affect health, aging and quality of mid- to later-life. She regularly delves into what it means to grow old in different neighborhoods and seeks to understand what people need to stay safe, active and connected.

��I��m a health geographer and environmental gerontologist,�� she explains. ��I��d never considered microbes as part of my research, but in conversations with my dad, I realized that they are everywhere and underpin many of the processes I study.��

Her interest in aging began during grad school, when she volunteered at community programs for older adults in north Minneapolis. That experience��and the changing urban landscape she witnessed��helped her to develop a dissertation focused on the lived experience of aging in place.

One recurring fear she identified while interviewing 125 older adults was the threat of Alzheimer��s disease and related dementias. Hearing their concerns eventually propelled Jessica to study how neighborhood environments affect dementia risk.

But it wasn��t until she started talking more about her work with her father, a long-time microbial science researcher, that she considered an even smaller-scale environmental factor.

��Microbes are our invisible neighbors and lifelong partners that fundamentally shape our health and well-being,�� Jessica says. ��When participants in my study are able to exercise, get outside, and socialize, they are swapping microbes and picking up new ones.��

Eat dirt

In 2016, Brett published Let Them Eat Dirt: How Microbes Can Make Your Child Healthier, a popular science book focused on how early microbial exposure supports childhood development.

The public response was positive, but readers kept circling back to one question: ��What about the rest of us?��

Preparing for a follow-up, Brett knew his daughter would be the perfect collaborator. Together, they set out to explain gut health in accessible language and explore how microbial ecosystems influence nearly every part of the human body.

The Microbiome Master Key: Harness Your Microbes to Unlock Whole-Body Health and Lifelong Vitality blends cutting-edge science with practical advice for healthier everyday living.

��This book talks about microbiomes all over the body, not just the gut. It also looks at most of the body��s organs and the effect of microbiomes on them. It also provides a list of prescriptive things you can do based on science to improve your health,�� Brett says.

That holistic approach was important to both him and Jessica. While Brett reviewed thousands of publications across microbiology and immunology, Jessica took the lead in translating technical insights into clear, practical prose. She also infused the book with narrative storytelling, expert interviews and examples from everyday life.

��We wanted to distill an overwhelming breadth of information into key evidence and studies so that readers have the facts to make health decisions based on what��s right for them,�� Jessica explains.

Their core message? Taking care of your microbial health isn��t inherently complicated, but it often requires us to rethink how we move through the world.

As Brett puts it, ��Look after your microbes and they will look after you. Eat healthy, exercise, stress less, sleep well, and have a good community of family and friends. All these factors really impact the microbiome.��

Collaborating for a cause

Collaborating on a book is never easy. Doing so across disciplines poses its own challenges, and during the years-long process, Jessica and Brett had to overcome many of them. But they both found the experience deeply rewarding.

Jessica says, ��We wanted to continue the conversation from my dad��s first book. I was initially apprehensive to write together, since my depth of knowledge is health geography and environmental gerontology, not microbiology. But it was a true pleasure to collaborate and each [of us brought] distinct skills and knowledge to the book.��

Now, the Finlays hope their book will help people make informed choices about their health, whether it��s deciding if a probiotic is worth the hype or learning how to create healthier environments at home.

��Thankfully it��s relatively simple and hopefully affordable to support your microbes. Eat an array of plant-based foods. Get outside, move your body, and connect with people to swap both conversation and microbes,�� Jessica says.

For her, science is about bridging the gap between research and real life��and it��s reflected in her work.

��Life throws us many unexpected situations,�� she says, ��and knowing the current state of science and what sources to trust can help us make the best decisions for us and those we care about.��

Brett agrees, summing up their shared hope for the book��s impact, saying, ��I hope it makes readers aware of the microbiome and how it can affect our well-being.��

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CU Boulder researcher Jessica Finlay wrote and recently published a book with her father about how microbes unlock whole-body health.

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It��s not a glitch in the matrix, it��s a mathematical phenomenon

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 22:37:27 +0000

It��s not a glitch in the matrix, it��s a mathematical phenomenon Rachel Sauer Wed, 09/10/2025 - 16:37

Rachel Sauer

CU Boulder applied mathematician Mark Hoefer and colleagues answer a longstanding question of how to understand tidal bores in multiple dimensions

The photos and videos were all over Chinese social media last autumn: a grid-like pattern that suddenly appeared in two colliding waves on the Qiantang River and looked��if you didn��t know better��like a glitch in the matrix.

This rare phenomenon, called a matrix tide, is caused by two tidal bores��or events in which the front edge of an incoming tide forms a wave that travels up a river against the current��approaching each other from different directions, colliding and forming a grid pattern.

It��s visually stunning and, until very recently, mathematically confounding. However, in newly published research, Mark Hoefer, �� professor and department chair of applied mathematics, and his research colleagues detail how they��ve cracked the mathematical code of matrix tides.

Mark Hoefer, CU Boulder professor and department chair of applied mathematics, and his research colleagues recently cracked the mathematical code of matrix tides.

Previously, matrix tides were only studied in one dimension but, because of their characteristics, needed to be studied in two. Adding that second dimension, however, required developing computationally intensive numerical simulations and the mathematics to interpret the results, building on the previous work of mathematicians Gerald B. Whitham, Boris Kadomtsev and Vladimir Petviashvili.

��There are certain equations that model how these waves change in time and space, and those equations simplify when you��re working with just one-dimensional waves,�� Hoefer explains. ��They start out as Euler equations, the partial differential equations of three-dimensional fluid dynamics��basic models in engineering and science broadly��and when you restrict shallow water waves to move in one dimension, they can essentially be simplified. In some cases, you can simplify them further to ordinary differential equations, which is something we teach in lower-division, fourth-semester calculus. They are much easier and accessible to analyze mathematically.

��When you add more dimensions, you��ll inherently get a partial differential equation in time and space, and, for the matrix tide that we studied, the equation will be nonlinear and not reducible to an ordinary differential equation. Nonlinear means that the nature of the waves you see��how fast they move, their shape and the patterns they make��all depend on how big they are. These are all factors that challenge the mathematical analysis of the patterns in these multidimensional, nonlinear waves.��

Studying the matrix tide

In some truly propitious timing, Hoefer and his colleagues Gino Biondini and Alexander Bivolcic at the University of Buffalo had been working on the question of multidimensional, nonlinear waves when Hoefer's wife, Jill, showed him a video that his mother-in-law had sent.

��I started this research because the general field of study I work in is waves,�� Hoefer says, adding that he studies waves in a variety of applications, including the types whose expression can be seen in undular bores, which are tidal bores with smooth, wave-like profiles. ��Waves like undular bores arise in a variety of physical settings��from waves in water, air, light and even matter in quantum mechanics��and the fundamental mathematical reason why that��s the case is that all of them are modeled by similar partial differential equations.��

For a long time, the study of these wave phenomena focused on analyzing them in one dimension, in which they move in one direction and there��s no variation in the perpendicular or transverse direction. ��But my colleagues and I recognized that we really needed to extend their mathematical description to more than one dimension because the world is multidimensional,�� Hoefer says.

A numerical simulation of the matrix tide.

So, the researchers began studying undular bores in two dimensions. They had made good progress and had core results by fall 2024, which is when Hoefer��s mother-in-law sent an Instagram video to his wife, saying, ��These waves are so cool, you��ve got to show Mark!�� he recalls. ��I thought, ��Whoa, this is awesome!�� I immediately realized, ��Oh, these are the waves we��re predicting in our mathematical analysis.��

Hoefer contacted former CU Boulder applied mathematics PhD student Yifeng Mao, now a postdoctoral fellow at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and who is from China, and asked her to help him get to the bottom of the images and videos he was seeing on social media. She discovered that a tide association for the Qiantang River completed a tidal survey last fall, adding a new tide type to the eight previously identified ones. Piecing together that and other data, Hoefer and his colleagues identified the multidimensional waves they had been studying as what was seen on the river��s surface in the matrix tide.

Expanding the model

Among the challenges in studying waves in undular bores is that while certain physical effects can be disregarded at the outset when studying other types of waves, they must be considered with undular bores, Hoefer says. For example, when the wave oscillations are short enough, gravity causes them to move slower than longer waves. This effect, called negative wave dispersion, can be set aside in the mathematical analysis of longer waves because there are principles that account for it.

��In this setting, though, those effects are things we can��t neglect in our first pass-through,�� he says. He and his colleagues used a supercomputer at the University of Buffalo��s Center for Computational Research and graphical processing units to run many wave simulations in a few hours that would each take a day on a regular computer.

A simulation of the Mach stem and colliding undular bores.

They used shallow-water wave models, in which fluid depth is much less than the horizontal wavelength. ��Counterintuitively, shallow water models can apply even in the open ocean,�� Hoefer says. ��The reason is when you have something like a tsunami, where an earthquake suddenly shifts the ocean bottom and displaces huge amounts of water at the surface, it generates a wave that can be many, many miles wide. Fishermen may be on their boat and not know that a 200-mile wavelength wave is passing under them. There, the tsunami wave is so long that dispersion can be neglected. It��s only when it gets close to shore and the depth gets lower that the waves shorten, compressing the energy and creating destructively large waves. So, the same kind of dispersive wave model that describes near-shore tsunamis is what we used to describe this bore.��

Hoefer and colleagues�� mathematical analysis of two obliquely colliding undular bores predicts that, for a special collision angle, the biggest waves in the matrix tide are eight times the size of the original waves: ��This critical angle prediction was borne out in our wave simulations and marks a fundamental change in the shape of the waves from a matrix tide to another pattern called a Mach stem,�� he says.

Hoefer adds that the applications to describing these waves in more than one dimension extend beyond the surface of water��to fiber and crystal optics, quantum mechanical Bose-Einstein condensates and magnetic materials, meteorology and other applications.

��We have a number of directions to go,�� Hoefer says. ��We are looking for examples of the Mach stem from colliding undular bores. Maybe this will be the tenth tide type discovered during the next river survey.��

On the mathematical modeling, Hoefer adds that the model he and his colleagues used "is what we would consider in the field to be the simplest model to describe this setting. Another thing we assumed was that the waves are not too big, so they��re not breaking. But if you look at the Instagram videos of this phenomenon, you see them break. Another assumption we make in this model is that the variation in the direction that is transverse to wave propagation is not too large, so we want to quantify what that means and see if there are any other possible wave patterns.

��There are these assumptions in the model, so we want to gradually start adding more terms to the equations representing more physics and allow for more complications to see if new things happen. This will make the mathematics harder, but the challenge and reward of predicting new physical phenomena from mathematical models is why I keep doing applied math research.��

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CU Boulder applied mathematician Mark Hoefer and colleagues answer a longstanding question of how to understand tidal bores in multiple dimensions.

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Top photo: the grid pattern of a matrix tide (Photo: �� Creative Commons)

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