The approach could expand understanding not only of the layout of elaborate networks in the brain, but also how the brain functions, what happens when there is dysfunction and how neurodegenerative diseases progress.

“When engineering a computer, you need to know the circuitry of the central processing unit. If you don’t know how everything is wired together, you can’t understand its function, optimize it or fix it when something breaks. We are approaching the brain the same way,” said study leader Boxuan Zhao, a professor of cell and developmental biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“Our technology enables simultaneous mapping of thousands of neural connections with single-synapse resolution — a capability that doesn’t exist in any current technology. It is directly applicable to understanding circuit dysfunction in neurodegenerative diseases and could provide a platform for developing circuit-guided therapeutic interventions,” he said.

The researchers published their work in the journal Nature Methods.

Traditionally, brain mapping has been a long, laborious process involving cutting the brain into very thin slices, imaging with different types of microscopes and trying to reconstruct neural pathways. Newer sequencing-based techniques can label thousands of neurons at once, but most trace only where a neuron reaches to — not which specific partner it connects with at the synapse, Zhao said.

Zhao’s group developed a platform, Connectome-seq, that uses RNA “barcodes” to tag each neuron. Specialized proteins carry the RNA barcodes from the neuron’s cell body and anchor them at the synapse, the junction between two neurons. The researchers then isolate the synaptic junctions and use high-throughput sequencing to read out which pairs of RNA barcodes ended up together, revealing which neurons are connected at large scale.

“We translated the neural connectivity problem into a sequencing problem. Imagine a big bunch of balloons. The main body of each balloon has its unique barcode stickers all over it, and some move down to the end of the string. If two balloons are tied together at the end, the two barcodes meet at the junction,” Zhao said. “Then we snip out the knots and sequence the barcodes in each one. If the same knot has stickers from balloon A and balloon B, we know these two balloons are tied together. We are doing this in the brain, just on the level of thousands of neuron cells. With this information, we can reconstruct a sophisticated map that represents the connections among all these seemingly floaty groups.”

The researchers used Connectome-seq to map more than 1,000 neurons in a mouse brain circuit called the pontocerebellar circuit, which connects two different regions of the brain. They revealed previously unknown connectivity patterns, including connections between cell types that were not previously known to be directly wired together in the adult brain.

“With improvements already underway in our lab, we are confident that we can make it even better and eventually reach the goal of mapping the whole mouse brain,” Zhao said.

Due to its speed and ability to map large areas, Connectome-seq has potential to accelerate research into neurodegenerative conditions, psychiatric disorders and other neurological conditions, Zhao said, by enabling comparison between connections in healthy brains and brains at different stages of disease.

“With sequencing-based approaches, the time and cost are greatly reduced, which really makes it possible to see differences in different brains. We could see where connections change, where the most vulnerable parts of the brain are, perhaps before symptoms even appear,” Zhao said. “For example, if we can catch where exactly the weak link is that kick starts the whole catastrophic cascade in Alzheimer’s disease, can we specifically strengthen those connections to where the disease slows or does not progress?”

A Neuro-omics Initiative grant from Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute of Stanford University supported this work, along with grants from the Elsa U. Pardee Foundation and the Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. Foundation.

The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs this week recognized Illinois for the 400 students who have received awards from the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program over the past 25 years.

Since the program’s inception in 2001, more than 50,000 Gilman Scholars have studied or interned in more than 170 countries around the globe.

“It has been so rewarding to work with such a talented group of students and see them flourish both as applicants and recipients of the award,” said David Schug, the director of the National and International Scholarships Program. “Witnessing the transformation of students from informational session attendees nervous about affording a study abroad adventure to confident, internationally skills presenters at the following term’s sessions is one of the highlights of my job. We are grateful for the support of the Office of Student Financial Aid and the various campus study abroad offices in sharing this opportunity with students and assisting in administering the award.”

The State Department announced its lists of top-producing institutions in celebration of the 25-year anniversary of the Gilman program. The top 25 institutions in four categories were honored: small, medium and large institutions, and associate degree-awarding institutions.

“I am interested in diplomacy and foreign policy work, specifically U.S.-Japan relations, with a long-term career goal of becoming a foreign service officer,” said Sophia Kumagai, a 2024 Gilman Scholarship recipient who studied in Akita, Japan. “The Gilman Scholarship made this exchange experience financially possible so that I could focus on my language studies, create connections and engage in cross-cultural communication, and explore the culture of rural northern Japan. The National and International Scholarship Program Office helped me every step of the way from the start of the application to hitting the submit button.”

Illinois alumna Jennifer Mendez, the director of the First Generation Student Initiatives at the U. of I., participated in a summer school at the National University of Singapore as a Gilman Scholar in 2013.

“I can say confidently that the experience continues to benefit me,” Mendez said. “I pursued doctoral coursework at Illinois with an interest in researching study abroad as a high impact practice for enhancing student success, retention and sense of belonging. Professionally, I am part of a working group through the Forum on Education Abroad that is developing best practice policy guidance for universities interested in enhancing first-generation student engagement with study abroad.

“I’ve lived abroad over a dozen times ― including in England, Thailand and Guatemala. I hope that my small yet consistent efforts continue to encourage more Illinois students to pursue study abroad,” Mendez said.

Applications for study abroad during winter break 2027, spring 2027, summer 2027 and fall 2027 are due Oct. 1.

Editor’s note: For more information, contact David Schug, director, National and International Scholarships Program, 217-333-4710; topscholars@illinois.edu

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Daytime Emmy® Award-nominated talk show host and Illinois alumnus Sean Evans will serve as the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Commencement speaker on Saturday, May 16, at 9:30 a.m. in Gies Memorial Stadium. Evans graduated from Illinois with a degree in broadcast journalism in 2008.

Evans is the co-creator and host of the popular YouTube show “Hot Ones,” where musicians, professional athletes and television and movie stars join Evans in eating chicken wings doused in progressively spicier hot sauces within the format of a talk-show interview. He notched a Daytime Emmy® Award nomination in 2021 for Outstanding Entertainment Talk Show Host and has won multiple internet entertainment awards. Evans also was named to Time magazine’s inaugural “Time100 Creators” list last year, heralding the most influential digital voices of the modern media industry.

“Sean Evans defined his own path and reimagined the role of a journalist and a talk show host in the modern media landscape,” said Illinois Chancellor Charles L. Isbell, Jr. “We encourage Illinois students and alumni to be innovative, and Sean created something no one else had. His work inspires us to continue to push boundaries, to challenge convention and to develop new ideas instead of just adopting old ones.”

Evans forged an affinity for the university long before he arrived at Illinois as an undergraduate student. His mother attended the U. of I., and Evans’ favorite holiday haul to this day was the morning he found a Sega Genesis and an orange-and-blue Illinois Starter jacket underneath his Christmas tree as a boy.

Once he stepped on campus as a student, a lasting imprint was left almost immediately.

“You walk out on the Quad, and it looks so quintessentially college,” said Evans, a native of Crystal Lake. “It looks like a college out of a film. There’s a scale and a history to it that really smacks you in the face. Walking onto the Main Quad for the first time, I had this feeling of being in a totally different place in my life and feeling a lot of comfort in it.”

Evans said he “trusted the incubation period” of the journalism program in the College of Media to build up his skill set. He recalled the high standards the professors expected out of students, and the meaningful experience he gained cycling through each production role on WPGU-FM student news broadcasts.

“Sean’s career is a wonderful illustration of where an Illinois education, one that nourishes creativity and confidence, can take you. We are so proud of his accomplishments and know that he will inspire students with his story,” said Tracy Sulkin, dean of the College of Media.

But like many young people entering the workforce in 2008, he found a flagging job market upon graduation. Evans returned to his old summer gig: a Chicago architecture tour guide.

“I remember feeling so hopeless,” Evans said. “There was this existential feeling to it. But even at that time, I had a passion for what I wanted to do. I would take every freelance project I could get. I knew I had a passion for this work and needed an outlet for it.”

His meteoric rise began after successfully pitching and developing “Hot Ones” in 2015, when he was working at Complex magazine. He wasn’t even the biggest fan of chicken wings. At best, Evans thought it could be a fun idea he and his co-creators would program on a quarterly basis. But the format of humanizing celebrities — and making them forget their media training — by putting them through blistering hot wing sauces worked in capitalizing on the attention economy. Notable guests have included Will Smith, Stephen Curry, Billie Eilish, Justin Timberlake, Gordon Ramsay, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Dua Lipa and many more across the show’s 400 episodes.

“I certainly never thought it would be my own media company,” Evans said. “We were working in cubicles at Complex and ended up making something that became bigger than these giant, hulking media companies it was incubated in.”

Evans remains deeply involved in the preparation for each “Hot Ones” episode and works late into the night formulating precise questions and perfecting his delivery of those queries to his guests. These nocturnal work sessions always transport Evans back to his time at Illinois, where he would sign up for the latest availability in the basement of Gregory Hall to edit his broadcast journalism projects.

“I always really liked going down there, having my headphones on, being the only person in the building and just lost in the basement of Gregory Hall cutting packages,” Evans said. “I still to this day work like that. I’ve written my best interview questions — and probably the most interview questions — after 10 p.m.”

As his own celebrity stature has grown, Evans has eagerly returned to his alma mater. He has attended sporting events, spoken to students and even hosted a special edition of “Hot Ones” with Illinois men’s head basketball coach Brad Underwood as the guest. It’s all a part of giving back to a place that has been special to him for most of his life, and Evans can’t wait to add to that legacy with his role as Commencement speaker.

“As somebody who loves this school, went to this school and now has this crazy pop culture platform, it’s fun to bring that energy back to Illinois,” Evans said.

For more information regarding the universitywide ceremony — including the stadium’s clear-bag policy, student regalia and parking instructions — visit commencement.illinois.edu.

How much has President Donald Trump’s second term reset the transatlantic U.S.-Europe relationship?

The transatlantic political order has been built on four foundational, interlinked pillars: security alliances; trade and finance; common institutions and rules; and shared democratic, liberal norms.

But to be blunt, that order as we know it is all but over.

In Trump 2.0, the U.S. has replaced cooperation and liberal trade with Europe with a zero-sum game of protectionism and tariffs. Trump’s repudiation of multilateral cooperation in trade and security, his shunning of the rule of law at home and international law abroad, and his nativist politics reject everything the transatlantic alliance has stood for.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that the alliance itself was always more than a simple handshake agreement among bureaucrats. It was a living, breathing set of commitments that guided Europe and America through difficult times. The alliance provided the institutional architecture for a world governed by multilateral cooperation. It offered best practices and pathways to respect sovereignty while binding national interests through common visions of peace and security. And it offered effective frameworks to link prosperity to democratic participation, human and constitutional rights, and equality.

How should the European Union deal with the changing transatlantic relationship?

Europe cannot afford to wait and see what might happen with the U.S., or to pretend things aren’t as bad as they seem. Europe must go it alone, and it must reorient itself now.

As someone who cares about rule of law and democracy here and in Europe, and has studied European institutions for a very, very long time, it’s been painful to watch this all unfold.

But I think Europe needs to be bold and brave. It needs to be more forward-looking and have a coherent security strategy with incontrovertible support for Ukraine. It needs to be a counterweight and push back where it can. It shouldn’t hide behind proceduralism, nor does it need to reflexively defer to the U.S.

As our recent co-edited report argues, the EU is in an excellent position to forge ahead as a leader in international cooperation, trade and security, and democratic values. To achieve this, the EU needs to continue to integrate its economic and financial policies and bolster existing coordination mechanisms. Our report suggests the EU must take a firmer political line and more coherent response to Washington, beyond appeasement and a wait-and-see approach.

In short, the EU has political and financial leverage and it should not be afraid to use it.

The last 70 years are, in many ways, a blip in history in terms of securing this kind of transatlantic stability and peace. And I think both sides of the Atlantic have grown very complacent in what it means to actually fight for that.

While this is undoubtedly a challenging time, the EU is in a strong position to build on and continue to lead in the areas that made the transatlantic relationship successful for so long, if the political will is there.

Is this one of the effects of a turn to political populism?

There’s been a global effort to destabilize the rule of law and democratic institutions, and Trump’s disdain for a global legal order has found common cause with populists around the world from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to Argentina’s Javier Milei.

One of the ironies of populism is that it’s antielitist and anti-institution, yet they move people into institutions and try to reshape them from the inside.

It shows how you need to protect institutions, because once you break faith in them, rebuilding it takes a generation. But destabilizing it only takes a matter of years. When you lose it, you lose it. So that means protecting the institutional and rights guarantees that we have is really, really key.

While formal political alliances may sort of rise and fall on the whims of leaders, the connective tissue that makes the transatlantic relationship meaningful and sustainable is the relationship of policy makers and scholars going back and forth. Despite all this bad news, that pipeline is still there.

So even in the face of things like populism or rising authoritarianism in Europe and the U.S., I still believe that America will find its way back from the wilderness. And if Europe acts now to uphold the promise of the broken alliance, the U.S. will have a seat at the table to which it can return when it’s ready.

A long-term study of the area is challenging scientists’ understanding of the cycles of destruction and repair that can occur on a coral reef. The new findings are reported in the journal PLOS One.

Thousands of organisms contribute to the life of a reef, and each plays a specific role, said Peter Edmunds, a professor of biology at California State University, Northridge, who co-led the new study with former CSUN research technician Kathryn Scafidi and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign earth science and environmental change professor Bruce Fouke. Scafidi is first author of the paper and now a Ph.D. student at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

Algae are one of the dominant life forms on a reef, Edmunds said.

“Many people have argued that a coral reef shouldn’t really be called a coral reef,” he said. “It would be better to call it an algal reef upon which corals are living because algae are now ubiquitous.”

The algae are as diverse as they are abundant. Some are symbiotic single-celled organisms that live in coral tissues and photosynthesize to produce oxygen, which the coral need to live. Others are multicellular and large, including a type of brown algae that tightly adheres to the dead corals’ hard surfaces.

“We found that this alga in its encrusting form has coated many of the dead corals after the bleaching event in Moorea and appears to be impeding the reef’s recovery,” Scafidi said.

An unexpected discovery led to this finding. In 2022, Scafidi and Edmunds were scuba diving to collect data from the Moorea reef as part of the Long-Term Ecological Research Network, a National Science Foundation initiative that collects ecological data over time from 27 sites across the United States, French Polynesia and Antarctica. Scafidi was recording the status of corals and Edmunds was photographing them.

“I happened to place my hand down on a dead coral skeleton, just to brace myself for a little bit of the surge and one of the branches broke off and it was completely hollow inside,” Scafidi said. She showed Edmunds.  

Coral is not normally hollow, said Fouke, who was recruited to analyze the hollow branches using advanced microscopy techniques.

“Coral reef systems are a living, breathing form of geology,” he said. “As soon as the coral is formed, it is already more than 90% skeleton, and you have a ready-made rock.” In a healthy reef, this skeleton forms solid coral branches. “Overlying this is a thin veneer of living tissue that contains tiny symbiotic algae. The algae give the coral most of its color and the skeleton is white.”

Coral branches are porous, allowing sea water to percolate through them, but they are not hollow, Edmunds said. In four decades studying coral reefs around the world, he said, he’s never seen or read about standing coral branches that had hollowed out. Normally, the dead coral breaks up and washes away in a storm, making room for juvenile corals to recolonize the reef.

Study co-authors Mayandi Sivaguru, an expert microscopist at the U. of I. Roy J. Carver Biotechnology Center, and Kyle Fouke, an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin Madison, used high-resolution microscopy to view the coral specimens.

The images they collected revealed a microcosm of organisms at work on the coral skeletons.

“The exterior surfaces were encased in algae, trapped sediments and other encrusting organisms such as worms and sponges,” Bruce Fouke said. “The interiors were riddled with holes of varying sizes, each the work of tiny mussels and fungi that appear to have mined the coral interior.”

These organisms are most likely looking for shelter, Edmunds said.

Scafidi also found that the encrusted dead corals appeared to be more resistant to breakage.

The findings suggest that one algal species, Lobophora variegata, is stabilizing the dead corals while the interiors of the coral branches are being hollowed out, Scafidi said. Because of this, a tropical storm that came through in 2024 did not dislodge the dead coral skeletons as previous storms had.

Juvenile corals need space to establish themselves and build a new reef, Scafidi said.

“Normally, these reefs in the South Pacific have rebounded after destructive events, as they did after a horde of hungry crown-of-thorns sea stars came through the Moorea reefs in the early 2000s, killing hectares of the standing coral,” she said. “In 2010, a large cyclone blew through and cleared out most of that dead coral.

“The coral cover was probably less than 5% at that time, and then by 2019, just before the bleaching, it was at about 75% live coral cover,” she said.

Edmunds said the findings reflect the many factors that affect the life, death and potential recovery of a reef. Marine temperatures are rising incrementally each year, a change that is almost imperceptible, but which adds up over time.

“On top of that, you have these signals that now are described as marine heat waves that are epic acute disturbances on top of the chronic disturbance,” he said.

Heat waves are not a new phenomenon, but they may have more, or different impacts as the temperature rises, causing more disturbance to the balance of organisms that are successful on the reef, Scafidi said. This may be making a reef more attractive to more competitive species.

“This gives us a fundamentally new perspective on the rate at which corals are breaking down in a human-perturbed world, and that is critical in understanding how or when or whether coral reefs will recover,” Edmunds said.

The NSF LTER program and the Barbara and Edward Weil Foundation supported this research.

Bruce Fouke is also a professor in the Cancer Center at Illinois and the School of Integrative Biology and the director of the Roy J. Carver Biotechnology Center at the U. of I.

Editor’s notes:  

To reach Peter Edmunds, email peter.edmunds@csun.edu.  
To reach Kathryn Scafidi, email kathryn.scafidi@postgrad.otago.ac.nz.
To reach Bruce Fouke, email fouke@illinois.edu.

The paper “Remnant hollowed out dead coral skeleton branches defer coral community recovery” is available online.

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0339527

What kinds of patterns have you seen emerge in the March Madness tournament bracket when analyzing which seeds reach which rounds?

Nearly 20 years ago, I became intrigued by how predictable some games were, while others were true toss-ups, based purely on what seed the teams were assigned by the selection committee. I posed this question to my student at that time, Douglas King, and we explored when seeds are informative and when they are not. This launched our research on March Madness, which eventually led to the creation of the Bracketodds website.

We have found that two or more No. 10, 11 or 12 seeds routinely win in the Round of 64. The Sweet Sixteen nearly always — 35 of the past 40 tournaments — has at least one team seeded No. 11 or higher. It is most common to have just one or two No. 1 seeds that reach the Final Four, even though it seems unimaginable that any of the No. 1 seeds could lose before the Final Four. In fact, having four No. 1 seeds in the Final Four is less likely than having zero No. 1 seeds.

Are upsets really as unpredictable as they seem?

Pinpointing which particular team will pull an upset is difficult. What is more predictable is the presence of upsets in a bracket. We know that at least one of the No. 11 or No. 12 seeds will win a game in the Round of 64. We just do not know which one it will be. Given that games are played on a court, not on a computer, this is why upsets occur.   

What advice can you give people putting together their brackets this tournament?

Be light on upsets in the Round of 64. Though a few will likely occur, these teams rarely advance beyond the Sweet Sixteen — except perhaps No. 11 seeds, which survive better than all other double-digit seeds. Also, build your brackets from the inside out. In fact, the optimal way is to start with the Final Four or Elite Eight teams and build around them.

What does the Bracketodds website provide? Does it use artificial intelligence?

The site houses data, lots of data, about how seeds have performed over the past 40 tournaments. For example, we provide information on how many games each seed is expected to win in the tournament based on their past performance. One would expect that the better the seed, the higher the number of expected wins. This is not completely the case. No. 11 seeds are expected to win more games than No. 9 and No. 10 seeds, for example.  

Given that there are over 9 quintillion possible brackets to choose from — that is a nine followed by 18 zeros — the sheer number of combinations is overwhelming. So we created an AI-generated bracket simulator that creates brackets based on historical data trends. Though predicting the perfect bracket is highly improbable, with a bit of data-driven AI smarts, the brackets our simulator generates are representative of what the past 40 tournaments have produced.

Given that Illinois is ranked in the top 10 teams in the country, where do you see them landing in the tournament? 

As a top seed, the Ilini have a good path to the Sweet Sixteen. After that, it depends on who they play. Their offensive analytics are very strong. They are one of the most talented offensive teams in the nation and perhaps even for several years. Their Achilles’ heel may be their defense. Any team that slows their offense could spell the Illini’s exit path from the tournament. If their offense stays in high gear, watch out!

The study, published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability, documents both environmental and societal outcomes and offers recommendations for the extraction of natural resources while minimizing their burden on the land and the people who live there.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor Jim Best, who’s research involves using satellite imagery to study the mutual relationships between rivers and people, collaborated with U. of I. graduate student Sadiul Chyon and Shah Atiqul Haq from Shahjalal University, Bangladesh, to highlight that decades of research have shown that mining too much sediment too quickly changes the river shape and ecology, and causes highly accelerated rates of downstream erosion.

The new methodology uses historical and contemporaneous satellite imagery to monitor landscape changes and estimate the number of migrant workers involved in gravel mining. This, combined with interviews with the locals and an environmental pressure group, helped develop a design for a fairer, more sustainable model for river sediment extraction in the Lubha River.

“Rivers are mined for sand and gravel to support construction projects in regions of economic growth, and the profits and jobs they provide can be a major economic and societal driver for a region,” Best said. “It is a worldwide practice but is particularly common in developing countries experiencing rapid growth.”

Before coming to the U. of I., Sadiul worked as an engineer in Bangladesh, designing embankments to shore up erosion in densely populated areas downstream of these types of mining operations.

“Resource extraction, which is necessary for economic development, has huge implications for the physical landscape and for the people living there,” he said. “I got to see firsthand how years of intensive sand and gravel extraction led to river degradation, loss of farmland and often yielded an economic dependence on mining.”

Then, in 2021, the Bangladesh government enacted a ban that halted gravel extraction in the Lubha River.

“The ban forced a compromise between need and destruction,” Sadiul said. “When enacted, local incomes and livelihoods were destroyed. The people had no other source of income, and many resorted to illegal activities, such as sugar smuggling. I spoke with students who said they had to quit school to find jobs to support their families because of the abrupt nature of the ban and lack of communication between locals and policymakers.”

The study found that 95% of locals reported unemployment after the ban, 88% pointed to economic decline, and 73% petitioned to reopen mining operations.

Access to historical and contemporaneous satellite imagery allowed the team to observe the progress of gravel extraction at high resolution in both time and space. In the past, researchers have treated river extraction as a bulk process, viewing the river as a single channel, and have not examined the river’s recovery after mining operations have ceased.

“But rivers don’t work like that,” Best said. “They contain many channels, some active, some inactive. What we’re able to determine is how much material was being removed from individual channels versus how much would have been coming into the system via natural processes.”

In this case, like so many others, the team found that too much sediment was being removed too quickly. In addition, the study documented that operators accelerated extraction in anticipation of the mining ban, resulting in an unintended negative consequence of the regulation.

The new approach allowed the team to develop a series of evidence-based recommendations to improve the river mining process and minimize environmental and human impacts, which can also be applied to other rivers in rapidly developing regions. These recommendations include where and how to mine, how much to mine, how to strengthen monitoring using remote sensing, better governance through community engagement and suggestions for managing the long-term transition.

The U. of I College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Jack and Richard Threet Chair in Sedimentary Geology funded this research.

Best is affiliated with earth science and environmental change, geography and geographic information science, mechanical science and engineering, civil and environmental engineering and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Illinois.

Editor’s note:   

To reach Jim Best, email jimbest@illinois.edu. To reach Sadiul Chyon, email mchyon2@illinois.edu. The paper “From extraction to recovery: Geomorphic and social transformations of gravel mining, Lubha River, Northeast Bangladesh” is available online. DOI: 10.1016/j.crsus.2025.100605

Civil and environmental engineering and mechanical science and engineering are part of The Grainger College of Engineering.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Social media users are more likely to watch TV programs that are endorsed by members of their political party, a recent study suggests. However, individuals’ racial identity and their perceptions of racial and political ingroup norms and the demographics of a program’s intended audience also play roles in their decisions.

Stewart Coles, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,

surveyed 1,259 Black and white Republicans and Democrats to see how their intentions to view a fictitious TV program were affected by their race and political party and those of the person endorsing it. Coles found that certain racial differences were much larger among Republicans compared with Democrats. Overall, the effect of endorsements from people of the same political group — as opposed to endorsements from members of the other party — was stronger for white participants. White Republicans reported the weakest intentions to watch the program regardless of who endorsed it, whereas Black Republicans reported the strongest intentions.

“Although prior studies found that Republicans have a more limited media and popular culture diet, the current study’s results suggest that these narrower preferences may be specific to white Republicans rather than generalizable to the entire party,” Coles said.

The findings, published in the journal Human Communication Research, suggest that the partisan divide in entertainment media usage is influenced by an array of factors, including users’ multiple group identities as well as political and racial ingroup norms — beliefs that others in their group watch and would approve of their watching a program and that the content is intended for people like them.

The study population included equal numbers of Black Democrats and Republicans and white Democrats and Republicans. Coles showed the participants an image of four tweets endorsing a fictitious TV program. The display names and Twitter profile pictures of the endorsers were altered so that they appeared to be of the same or opposite political party and the same or different race as the participant. Coles assessed how these differing endorsements influenced participants’ intention to watch the TV show or to obtain more information about it. Participants completed questionnaires that asked about ingroup norms, such as how many people of their race and political ideology they believed were currently watching the show or would watch it during the next season. The participants also rated how much they wanted to view the show and if they would like to be sent to a website to watch a free episode after completing the survey.

Besides the actual content of a TV program, other information, such as cues about a program’s audience, may affect people’s intentions to view it due to their perceptions of their political and racial ingroup norms and their perceptions whether a program’s intended audience is people like them, Coles wrote. In the current study, Coles found that participants’ exposure intentions were affected by a combination of the race and political party of the participants and those of the endorsers.

When the white participants were shown endorsements by people of the other political party, white Democrats’ intentions to watch it were weaker when they believed the intended audience was white Republicans, as were white Republicans’ intentions when they thought the intended audience was Democrats of either race, Coles found. However, he also found that the intentions of Black partisans of either party were not significantly affected by who endorsed the program.

“As much as partisans might be attracted to different types of entertainment content, they — at least white partisans — are also sensitive to social signals about who else is watching,” Coles said.

The findings also demonstrated the power of social media exposure in shaping norms and behaviors surrounding media consumption.

“This was in a context in which norms should be the least influential — a relatively private behavior rather than a more public context — and when the sources of the norm-conveying communication were strangers on the internet,” Coles said. “How might offline endorsements from presumed co-partisans versus out-partisans influence people’s intentions? This study’s implications go beyond exposure intentions resulting from explicit political identity cues online.”

The work was supported by a grant from the Civic Health Project and Bridge Entertainment Labs.

Using data on children born around 1980, the researchers found that HBCUs improved local educational attainment and labor market outcomes for Black children. Specifically, they were 7 percentage points more likely to graduate from college and moved up 2 percentiles in the income rankings relative to Black children from control counties.

It’s well documented that there is less upward social mobility for Black people than white people in the U.S., which can partially be chalked up to differences in their surrounding areas and differences in their educational opportunities. Many see HBCUs as a public investment that could help close this gap and improve the social mobility of Black children, said Russell Weinstein, a professor of labor and employment relations and of economics at Illinois.

“We were interested in calculating the impact of historically Black colleges and universities on local social mobility for the children who grew up near them,” Weinstein said.

Weinstein’s co-authors are Greg Howard, a professor of economics at Illinois, and Namgyoon Oh, an economics graduate student at Illinois.

HBCUs are often touted as one way to improve social and economic mobility of Black students, “but it’s a difficult causal question to untangle because universities, including HBCUs, are not located randomly, and they might be located in places where we would expect people to have different levels of social mobility, even without the university there,” Weinstein said.

Leveraging an empirical strategy from their previous research, the researchers compared the historical assignment of what were once called “normal schools” —― that is, schools that were established by the state government to educate primary school teachers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries ― to the placement of state-funded mental asylums in order to pinpoint the effects of regional universities on the social mobility of nearby Black children.

After the Civil War, Southern states began opening segregated normal schools to train Black teachers to teach Black students. Around the time states were opening the segregated schools, many also opened segregated mental-health asylums.

“When southern states opened asylums after the Civil War, Black and white patients were often segregated. Some asylums had separate wards for Black patients, or separate buildings on the same property as the buildings for white patients,” Weinstein said.

The site selection criteria for a normal school or a mental asylum were quite similar, with state legislatures either directly choosing locations or setting up commissions to determine the locations. The researchers focused on the asylums opened only for Black patients, “as we think the counties receiving these institutions are plausibly most similar to those receiving a normal school for Black students,” Weinstein noted.

At the time, both institutions were viewed favorably by the local community.

“In our previous work, and also in this one, we show by looking at old newspapers as well as legislative histories, where we can look at the votes and the debates surrounding the establishment of these institutions, that the local communities seemed to have desired those institutions in their counties,” Weinstein said

Most normal schools eventually evolved into regional universities, while most state-funded mental asylums were converted into psychiatric hospitals or other rehabilitative facilities.

“To really identify the impact of an HBCU, we needed to have some strategy for identifying that causal impact,” Weinstein said. “And that, for us, was going to involve a control group of counties that we thought were a good counterfactual for what the counties that got the HBCUs would have looked like if they had received a different state institution instead.”

The researchers found that Black children from counties with a normal school to train Black teachers were 7 percentage points more likely to graduate from college and move up 2 percentiles in the income rankings relative to Black children from control counties with state-funded mental asylums.

“The results were very similar when comparing to counties with asylums for Black individuals, or comparing to all same-state asylum counties,” Weinstein said. “The effects are large because the mean of the likelihood of getting a four-year college degree in the asylum counties for Black children is about 20%, and we’re finding a 7-percentage point increase in that, so that’s a really large percentage increase in the fraction getting a college degree.”

The researchers did not find these effects for white children, according to the paper.

“One thing that I think is interesting about this setting is we’re comparing Black children in counties that got the normal schools to train Black teachers, and we’re comparing them to Black children in asylum counties,” Weinstein said. “And interestingly, the Black children in asylum counties had close proximity to a similar number of four-year colleges and universities. It’s just that they didn’t have proximity to an HBCU.”

The researchers also found effects on labor market outcomes.

“Black children who grew up in counties that received a normal school to train Black teachers were about two percentiles higher in the national income distribution as adults, which translates to about an 8% increase in annual income,” Weinstein said. “That’s definitely a nontrivial effect on income as well, and we also see that they are less likely to be incarcerated.”

One of the benefits of HBCUs is that they play a role in their local communities, specifically for Black children and their economic mobility, the scholars said.

“This research helps to quantify that, which we think should be an important finding for policymakers, especially considering that about half of HBCUs are public universities that are highly dependent on state legislatures for their funding,” Weinstein said.

A working paper of this research was released through the IZA Discussion Paper Series from the IZA Network @ LISER (Luxembourg Institute for Socio-Economic Research).

Leggett had been the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign since 1983. His research in theoretical condensed matter physics and the foundations of quantum mechanics won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids.

“Professor Leggett was a brilliant mind, always working on groundbreaking ideas and had such a down-to-earth, humble personality,” said Rashid Bashir, dean of The Grainger College of Engineering and professor of bioengineering at the U. of I. “The world has lost a legend and a wonderful person. He will be dearly missed.”

Leggett was a master of explaining superfluidity, the property of some fluids to flow freely without viscosity. His research extended the legacy of U. of I.’s contribution to the theory of superconductivity ― that some materials lose all electrical resistance when cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero ― developed by researchers John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and J. Robert Schrieffer, for which they received the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics.

His research was expansive and included considerable theoretical work on the applications of quantum mechanics to collective variables, and on ways to incorporate quantum dissipation, tunneling and coherence into the behavior of macroscopic quantum systems. Leggett’s theories directly led to experiments on macroscopic quantum tunneling and coherence by John Clarke, John Martinis and Michel Devoret, who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work.

Since the early 1960s, Leggett was interested in the problem of the superfluid liquid helium-3 — a rare isotope of helium that liquefies just above absolute zero. It could not be explained by the then-existing theory, which accounted for the superfluidity of helium-4. Leggett’s theory, developed between 1972 and 1975, provided the explanation for the phenomenon in terms of a new physical mechanism, a novel form of symmetry breaking that he introduced. This was the basis for understanding the superfluid phases of helium-3 as anisotropic pairing of helium-3 atoms.

In 1986, when high-temperature superconductors were discovered, Leggett proposed a test of the symmetry of the new superconductors, leading to an experiment performed at the U. of I. by Dale Van Harlingen, Donald Ginsberg and David Wollman. The 1993 experiment established that new superconductors had “d-wave” symmetry, unlike conventional low-temperature superconductors, which are isotropic.

Leggett was born in Camberwell, South London, in 1938. His mother and father were the first in their families to attend university, where they met and became engaged while students at the University of London.

He began his college education as a classics major, graduating from Oxford University with a B.A. in 1959. After completing his first degree, he began a second undergraduate degree at Oxford, this time in physics. In 1964, after completing his doctorate at Oxford, he joined the U. of I. physics department as a postdoctoral researcher with David Pines and John Bardeen.

“Having Tony as a warm and generous colleague over the years made being in Urbana truly worthwhile,” said Illinois physics professor Gordon Baym, who worked closely with Leggett during his time as a postdoctoral researcher. “He was always way ahead of the rest of us, owing not simply to his being smarter, but also to his boundless energy and working harder. Tony’s enthusiasm for physics and people continued to the end.”

From 1967 until 1983, Leggett was a lecturer at the University of Sussex, England. During that period, he visited Japanese universities on several occasions, as well as the University of Ghana, and then returned to the U. of I. to join the physics faculty until his retirement in 2018.

During his time at the U. of I., he also held a position at the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Canada. In 2013, he became the founding director of the Shanghai Center for Complex Physics and in 2023, he became the chief scientist at the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory, a research institute at the U. of I., which in 2023 was renamed the Anthony J. Leggett Institute for Condensed Matter Theory.

Leggett is survived by his wife, Haruko Kinase-Leggett, married in 1973; his daughter, Elizabeth Asako Kinase-Leggett; and his sisters, Judith Leggett and Clare Prangley.

Among his other numerous awards are the Wolf Prize in Physics (2022-23), the Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal (1999), the Paul Dirac Medal and Prize (1991), the Simon Memorial Prize (1981), the Fritz London Memorial Award (1981), and the James Clerk Maxwell Medal and Prize (1975).

Leggett was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Irish Literary and Historical Society. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics. He was an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 “for services to physics.”

“Tony was a much-beloved colleague. He was so soft-spoken that it was easy to overlook the remarkable extent of his accomplishments,” said Illinois physics department head Vidya Madhavan. “He felt a profound allegiance to both the department and the university. No matter how busy he was, he always made time for colleagues and students, and, despite his many travels, he remained a constant presence in the physics department. Together, he and Haruko opened their home to generations of colleagues, students and postdocs for which we are all very grateful.”

The study’s findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Nitrosopumilus maritimus and its kin account for approximately 30% of the marine microbial plankton population, and many researchers agree that the oceans depend on these microbes to drive the chemical reactions that support marine life. The ammonia-oxidizing activity of archaea makes them key players in the oceans’ nutrient cycling. By altering the forms of nitrogen available in seawater, they control the growth of microbial plankton — the base of the marine food chain — and help sustain marine biodiversity.

“Ocean-warming effects may extend to depths of 1,000 meters or more,” said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign microbiology professor Wei Qin. “We used to think that deeper waters were mostly insulated from surface warming, but now it is becoming clear that deep-sea warming can change how these abundant archaea use iron — a metal they depend on heavily — potentially affecting trace metal availability in the deep ocean.”

The study, led by Qin and University of Southern California global change biology professor David Hutchins, used controlled, trace-metal-clean experiments to expose a pure culture of Nitrosopumilus maritimus to a variety of temperatures and iron concentrations. They observed that increasing the temperature under iron-limited conditions reduced the microbes’ iron requirements and increased physiological iron-use efficiency, demonstrating that the microbes acclimate well to the stress of higher temperatures and decreased iron availability.

“We coupled these findings with global ocean biogeochemical modeling by Alessandro Tagliabue from the University of Liverpool,” Qin said. “The results suggest that deep-ocean archaeal communities may maintain or even enhance their role in nitrogen cycling and primary production support across vast iron-limited regions in a warming climate.”

This summer, Qin and Hutchins will serve as co-chief scientists aboard the research vessel Sikuliaq for a research expedition from Seattle to the Gulf of Alaska and then down to the subtropical gyre, stopping in Honolulu, Hawaii. Joining Qin will be 20 other researchers whose aim will be to validate the new experimental findings in a real-world setting and focus on the interactive effects of temperature and metal limitation on natural archaeal populations.

Qin is also affiliated with the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.

The National Science Foundation, Simons Foundation, National Natural Science Foundation of China, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Oklahoma supported this research.

Editor’s note:   

To reach Wei Qin, email weiqin@illinois.edu. The paper “Ocean warming enhances iron use efficiencies of marine ammonia-oxidizing archaea” is available online. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2531032123

Moses Okumu, a professor of social work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, led the study, which included more than 330 young people ages 16-24 who were living in one of five informal settlements.

“Our findings show that both past-year access to HIV self-test kits, HIV testing and consistent condom use remain markedly below national and international targets, despite respondents reporting moderate condom-use self-efficacy,” Okumu said.

Numerous factors at the societal, community and interpersonal levels affect use of HIV-prevention services in this population, highlighting the urgent need for multilevel, contextually tailored interventions that address intersecting vulnerabilities, Okumu said.

The participants — who had an average age of 21 and more than half of whom were women — were surveyed on how frequently they and their partners used condoms, their confidence in their ability to effectively use them, whether they had been tested for HIV in the past year and their access to self-tests.

Those in committed relationships and those with children were more likely to report that they consistently used condoms and were tested for HIV, the researchers found.

Although more than 62% had postsecondary education, an even greater proportion — more than 69% — were unemployed, the data indicated. About 19% had part-time employment and 11% worked full-time jobs. More than 91% of those in the sample reported they were food insecure, and more than half of the participants indicated they lacked adequate access to water, according to the study.

All of these factors — lower levels of education, financial precarity and inadequate access to food and water — are barriers to condom use self-efficacy, the team found.

“These findings show the critical need for interventions at the societal, community and interpersonal levels that concurrently address economic insecurity and promote education and employment as well as access to food, water and health care,” Okumu said. “For youths living in informal settlements, these could address widespread challenges that may prevent them from affording access to transportation to clinics to obtain HIV testing, self-testing kits or condoms. Education and literacy also play crucial roles in HIV prevention, as studies have found that individuals with greater education tended to engage more with HIV services.”

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research funded the work.

The study participants were part of a larger controlled trial that examined the effectiveness of HIV self-testing methods alone and in combination with mental health and livelihood programs. That project was led by University of Toronto researcher Carmen H. Logie, the Canada Research Chair in Global Health Equity and Social Justice with Marginalized Populations, who was a co-author of the current study, along with Paul Bukuluki, a social work professor at Makerere University.

Additional co-authors were Catherine N. Nafula of the Association of Volunteers for International Service Foundation; co-founder and the executive director Robert Hakiza and research manager Brenda Katisi, both of the Young African Refugees for Integral Development; and Peter Kyambadde, the managing director of the AIDS Control Program in the Uganda Ministry of Health.

Other co-authors were research coordinator Frannie Mackenzie, then-postdoctoral research associate Zerihun Admassu and doctoral candidate Lauren S. Tailor, all of the University of Toronto; and consulting director Daniel Kibuuka Musoke and research coordinator Aidah Nakitende, both of the International Research Consortium Limited.

Morris D.C. Komakech, a professor at the Nipissing University School of Nursing; David Okimait, a sociologist and lecturer at Kyambogo University; professor of health research methods, evidence and impact Lawrence Mbuagbaw of McMaster University; and Liliane C. Windsor, the Lillian F. Harris Professor of Social Work at Case Western Reserve University, also co-wrote the paper.