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People who get their news from an ideologically diverse array of sources are more likely to get vaccinated, regardless of their political affiliation, .

“This study shows that being exposed to a range of perspectives encourages critical thinking and makes people less likely to get stuck in a bubble or misled by misinformation,” said senior author Leaf Van Boven, a professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.

Published in the journal Scientific Reports, the study is among the first to take a close look at how media consumption habits shape vaccine hesitancy, which the World Health Organization has named as one of the “top 10” global threats to public health. The study comes as nationwide, and remains lower than it was before the pandemic. President Donald Trump has also nominated outspoken vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

The researchers offer some advice for public health communicators wanting to boost trust and improve vaccine adherence: Encourage people to get out of their echo chambers.

“We as a society have kind of fallen into this belief that you can’t change other people’s minds, but this paper goes to show that when people are introduced to new ideas and evidence, they can make more informed choices and they are willing to change their beliefs,” said Dani Grant, first author of the study and a doctoral candidate at CU Boulder.

Media diet

As part of a larger project exploring public sentiments about COVID-19, Van Boven and Grant surveyed nearly 1,700 people in the spring of 2022, when vaccines and boosters were readily available to the public. The researchers asked respondents their age, ethnicity, education and political affiliation—factors that have previously been shown to shape vaccine adherence—and also asked them to rank how much they got their news from 20 different news outlets.

Outlets ranged from Breitbart News Network and Fox News on the conservative side to MSNBC and Democracy Now on the liberal side. The researchers determined a publication’s ideological tilt using bias ratings from All Sides and Ad Fontes Media, independent media intelligence organizations.

The team gave each respondent a media diversity score based on their answers.

At the time, 21% of those surveyed were not vaccinated, 17% were vaccinated, and 62% were vaccinated and boosted.

The study found that people who reported consuming more conservative media were significantly less likely to be vaccinated and boosted. The researchers noted that, for example, Fox News pundit Sean Hannity told viewers at the time that COVID-19 was made up by the “deep state,” and then-Fox business anchor Trish Regan characterized the virus as “a scam.”

Echo chambers

The most interesting finding, Grant and Van Boven said, was that when people consumed a diverse media diet, even if it included a range of conservative outlets, they still tended to get vaccinated.

“People who consumed news and opinions from a variety of political perspectives were more likely to be vaccinated, even after accounting for their political affiliation, age, gender, race and education,” said Van Boven.

When it came to trust in science, media consumption also had a notable influence. Those who consumed only left-leaning media had very high trust in science, while those who consumed only right-leaning media were highly skeptical.

The authors said that understanding the factors associated with vaccine hesitancy is critical not only for addressing the ongoing threat of COVID-19 but also for tackling other diseases like influenza, measles and whooping cough. Vaccination rates for all three diseases are declining in the United States.

“When people delay or refuse vaccines, we see avoidable deaths, illness and economic losses,” said Van Boven. “Vaccines are among our most effective public health tools, but their power depends on public trust.”

To regain trust, scientists and public health officials might also do well to step out of their own echo chambers, Grant said, sharing their perspectives and research with outlets they may not typically engage with.

“This is an opportunity for scientists to reflect on where we are not being as constructive as we could be,” she said. “I think that we should all be interacting across the media spectrum.” 

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If you feel stuck in your job, you’re not alone. New research sheds light on how feelings of defeat and entrapment in the workplace can not only heighten the desire to quit but can also trigger impulsive decisions to leave.

“We often assume that quitting a job is a rational decision motivated by a better opportunity,” said David Hekman, associate professor of leadership and information analytics and co-author of the study. “But our research shows that, for many, it’s not about finding something better. It’s about escaping a situation that feels unbearable—and that’s often an emotional decision, not a rational one.”

The study, published in July 2024 in the  and co-authored by Ryan Ragaglia, a doctoral student in organizational behavior at the Leeds School of Business, examines "perceived entrapment"—a form of negative attachment where employees feel so bound to their jobs that they see no way out.

“Traditionally, attachment was seen as a positive thing. The more attached an employee is to their job, the more likely they are to stay,” Ragaglia said. “What we found is the opposite … There's a point where you can feel so attached to your job, so stuck, that you actually start thinking about quitting.”

Feelings of entrapment may stem from a variety of factors, such as lack of career advancement opportunities, overwhelming workloads or simply feeling undervalued. But according to the study, the impact of these emotions is more profound than previously thought—it can push employees to make drastic decisions that may seem like self-sabotage.

Parallels to suicide research

To understand why employees might impulsively quit their jobs, the researchers drew insights from suicide research. Ragaglia notes that just like a person contemplating suicide may make an emotional, irrational decision despite no guaranteed better outcome, employees feeling trapped by their jobs may also quit in a desperate bid for control. The decision is often rooted in emotional distress rather than a clear-headed, logical evaluation of the future.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, call or text 988 or chat . Learn about suicide prevention resources at CU Boulder.

"The idea was based on my own experiences with suicidal ideation,” Ragaglia said. It also sprung to mind during Hekman’s organizational behavior seminar. “We were discussing withdrawal and how employees tend to pull back when considering quitting, and I thought to myself, ‘This sounds a lot like what I was doing when I was contemplating suicide.’”

“That set off a chain of thoughts in which I imagined suicide as a potential metaphor for turnover. We looked into the suicide literature, and that’s where we found the constructs of defeat and entrapment, which seemed very applicable to turnover,” he said.

A vicious cycle

Employees who impulsively quit often find themselves in a worse situation, forcing them to take the first available job that comes along—a job that often doesn’t align with their values or career goals. This leads to more feelings of entrapment, creating a “vicious cycle” of dissatisfaction and repetitive quitting, Hekman said.

The decision to quit can also lead to further emotional and financial instability, and again, makes them feel more trapped, he added.

The researchers are currently interviewing “chronic quitters” and studying common triggers and scenarios that lead to feelings of entrapment. So far, their findings point to a few causes.

“We’ve found that boredom, lack of career advancement opportunities and financial pressures are the primary triggers for feelings of entrapment,” Ragaglia said. “While this is still preliminary, we’re continuing to explore these factors in more depth.”

How employers can help

The research has critical implications for anyone feeling overwhelmed or stuck at work. While Ragaglia and Hekman are still studying solutions for employees, they have recommendations to help organizations reduce feelings of entrapment among employees.

“Employers and supervisors should focus on helping their employees feel like they are ‘winning,’” Ragaglia said. “This can be as simple as recognizing successes and setting achievable goals. We also suspect that employees will feel less trapped if there are opportunities for career advancement and if employers provide flexible work arrangements.”

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This time of year, millions of people turn to diets, exercise and medication to help them get their weight in check.

New CU Boulder research suggests another surprising tool could help them achieve their resolution: Exposure to beneficial bacteria.

The study, , shows that animals injected weekly with a microorganism found in cow’s milk and soil were essentially immune to weight gain from a high-fat, high-sugar diet.

“What is so striking about this study is that we saw a complete prevention of diet-related weight gain in these animals,” said senior author Christopher Lowry, professor of integrative physiology. “This suggests that exposure to beneficial bacteria can protect us against some of the negative health outcomes of the typical Western diet.”

How ‘old friends’ keep us healthy

The study is the latest to report the benefits of healthy forms of bacteria known as “old friends” that evolved alongside humans but that we have lost touch with as we’ve moved from farms to more sterile, urban environments.

“As we have lost contact with these old friends that served to regulate our immune system and suppress inappropriate inflammation it has put us at higher risk for inflammatory diseases,” said Lowry.

, Lowry found that inoculation with an organism called Mycobacterium vaccae (M. vaccae), present in cow’s milk and soil, can prevent stress-induced inflammation and associated health problems in mice.

Those and subsequent findings have prompted Lowry to explore the idea of developing a “stress vaccine” derived from dirt-dwelling microbes.

For the new study, he and first author Luke Desmond, a PhD candidate in his lab, set out to determine whether M. vaccae could also help counter some of the brain inflammation and resulting anxiety that can come with a poor diet.

They did not set out to do a weight loss study.

One set of adolescent mice was fed standard, healthy chow for 10 weeks. The other consumed the rodent equivalent of Big Macs and fries, with 40% fat, 40% carbohydrates (half of them from sugar) and 20% protein.

Half of each group also got weekly injections of M. vaccae.

All groups ate about the same number of calories, and all the mice gained some weight as they matured into adulthood.

As expected, the untreated junk food group began to gain significantly more weight at about six weeks than the healthy eaters. By study’s end, they weighed about 16% more than the healthy eaters and had significantly more visceral fat — the “bad fat” that collects around organs and can boost risk of heart disease and diabetes.

To Lowry and Desmond’s surprise, there was no difference in weight gain between the junk food group that got injections of good bacteria and the healthy eaters. The inoculated mice also had less “bad fat” at the study’s end.

“This finding suggests that M. vaccae effectively prevents the excessive weight gain induced by a Western-style diet,” said Desmond.

A dirt vaccine

More research is needed to determine just how exposure to a bacteria found in dirt could prevent weight gain, and whether it can do so in people.

But Lowry has some ideas.

He suspects M. vaccae may act directly on immune cells to tamp down inflammation, make fat healthier and boost metabolism.

He hopes to do more studies to determine whether M. vaccae taken orally has the same impact, and whether it could help someone who is already overweight lose weight.

With assistance from Venture Partners at CU Boulder, the university’s commercialization arm, he and his colleagues have launched a startup called Kioga to pursue new microbe-based ingredients for preventing weight gain and promoting health.

For now, Lowry says the best way to get exposed to helpful ‘old friends’ is to get out in nature, work in the garden and eat a variety of fresh vegetables (they soak up healthy microbes from soil).

Why not just ditch junk food? 

That’s easier said than done.

“More than half of the food sold in grocery is junk food. It’s everywhere and it’s hard to avoid,” Lowry said. “If we can simply restore our exposure to these old friends, we could potentially prevent weight gain and other health impacts even in the presence of our terrible Western diet.”

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Six months after the Marshall Fire destroyed more than 1,000 houses in Boulder County, Colorado, more than half of residents of surviving homes in the area reported physical symptoms—including headaches, sore throats or a strange taste in their mouth—that they attributed to poor air quality, has found.

A companion study showed that the air quality inside one home post-fire equaled that of downtown Los Angeles in the 1990s on a high pollution day, with hazardous gases lingering for weeks.

“Our research suggests that there could be important health impacts for people returning to smoke- or ash-damaged homes after a fire and that we need to have systems in place to protect them,” said Colleen Reid, associate professor of geography and co-author of the studies.

The papers, published this week in ACS Environmental Science & Technology Air, are the first to explore air quality inside smoke- and ash-damaged homes and to assess the health impacts on people who live in them. They come as fires in the Wildland-Urban Interface, like in Paradise, California, in 2018 and Lahaina, Hawaii, in 2023 grow more common.

“A lot of time has been spent studying wildfire smoke—what you get when you burn vegetation. But what do you get when you burn a home, with all its furniture and electronics and cars? Until now, there has been very little known,” said co-author Joost de Gouw, a professor of chemistry and fellow with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES).

A record winter blaze

Fueled by 100-mile-per-hour winds and record dry conditions, the Dec. 30, 2021, Marshall Fire burned 1,084 buildings in densely populated areas, took two lives and forced 37,000 people to evacuate.

Once residents returned home, scientists at CU Boulder, just 4 miles from the fire’s ignition, started getting calls.

“At first, they felt really lucky, but when they went into their homes they saw ash everywhere and it smelled differently—like a campfire or chemicals,” said Reid. “They asked: What should we do? We don’t know if it’s safe to go back in.”

With little research offering answers, the scientists began to investigate.

Ten days after the fire, de Gouw’s team erected field instruments in an intact home bordering a block where houses burned down. Over five weeks, they continually the presence of 50 gases. ( about the study here.)

Meanwhile, Reid and colleagues developed a survey to send to residents within the burn perimeter, as well as a random sample of those within 2 miles.

At six months, 642 people had responded; 413 had responded at the one-year mark.

Some 55% of respondents reported symptoms that they attributed to the fire at the six-month mark, and survey answers depended largely on the condition of their home when they returned home.

For instance, those who found ash inside were three times as likely to report headaches compared to those who didn’t find ash; those who reported an odd odor were four times as likely to report headaches compared to those who did not pick up an unusual scent.

People with the same symptoms tended to cluster together, according to computer mapping analyses. For example, those living near destroyed homes, especially in the direction the wind was blowing the day of the fire, were far more likely to report a strange taste in their mouth.

“These findings are consistent with chemical exposures and suggest that residents of smoke- and ash-damaged homes may have experienced lingering air quality and physical health challenges months after the fire,” said Reid.

Long-term impacts uncertain

The authors cannot say which chemicals caused the health impacts that survey respondents reported. But measurements in one home found high levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) like benzene, a carcinogen found in gasoline and diesel exhaust.

Dust samples also showed high levels of copper, zinc, arsenic and industrial pollutants called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are known to cause eye irritation.

“If your home survives, and the neighbor two doors down burns, all those melted things can get into the air and find their way into your home” settling into furnishings, carpets and drywall, said Reid.

The authors stress that VOCs are only considered carcinogenic at levels much higher than what they found, and people are regularly exposed to low levels daily through pollution.

Their research found that simple measures, like opening windows and using low-cost, carbon-activated air filters, can substantially improve air quality.

One year after the fire, the number of residents reporting symptoms had declined to just 33% and most said confidence in their home’s air quality had improved.

Until more studies are done, the researchers cannot say whether such exposures can lead to long-term health problems.

Nonetheless, Reid urges anyone going inside a smoke- or ash-damaged home just after a wildland urban interface (WUI) fire to use caution, wearing KN95 masks and gloves.

They hope their ongoing research can lead to clearer guidelines for policymakers and insurance companies about when it is safe for people to return to smoke-damaged homes.

“This wasn’t just any fire. It felt personal,” said de Gouw. “Knowing that we could at least begin to provide some answers to our community has made the work extra meaningful.” 

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Law enforcement will be out in force this holiday season, with on the lookout for impaired drivers.

Yet 12 years after Colorado and Washington became the first U.S. states to legalize recreational cannabis, police still lack a reliable method for detecting whether someone smoked a joint or ate a gummy recently and whether they are too impaired to drive.

Researchers at CU Boulder and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) hope to help solve that problem, using a laboratory on wheels and state-of-the-art chemistry to map the peaks and declines of a cannabis high in real time.

Their new study of 45 regular cannabis users could help lead to standardized protocols for measuring impairment at the roadside and inform development of a new generation of cannabis breathalyzers.

“The ultimate goal is to develop a reliable tool that supports fair law enforcement and helps keep our roads safe,” said Cinnamon Bidwell, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience and co-director of CUChange, a lab that studies health risks and benefits of cannabis.

Needle in a haystack

Since the 1950s, police have measured ethanol in breath as an indicator of alcohol impairment.  With cannabis, it’s more complicated.

Unlike ethanol, which is exhaled in copious amounts in a gaseous vapor, the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis (tetrahydrocannabinol or

 THC) is exhaled in trace amounts via tiny aerosol particles.

After consuming alcohol, a person exhales 1 million times more ethanol with a single breath than they would in 12 breaths after consuming cannabis, according to one NIST study.

“With THC, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Tara Lovestead, a NIST chemical engineer who spearheaded that study.

THC also lingers in tissues, making it hard to discern with blood or breath whether someone used an hour ago or last week.

With alcohol, there is a clearly established BAC (blood alcohol concentration) above which someone is considered impaired (.08% in most states). Because there is no clear correlation between more THC in blood and breath and greater intoxication, there is no BAC equivalent for cannabis testing—yet.

Several cannabis breathalyzers exist on the market, some being tested by law enforcement. But it’s unclear whether they can be trusted, said Bidwell.

“Scientifically, we just aren’t there yet,” she said. “There are too many questions that need to be answered first in an unbiased setting. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

A two-breath test?

In a previous pilot study, the team concluded that while it’s possible to detect trace levels of cannabis in breath, a single breath measurement cannot reliably indicate when cannabis was used or whether that person is impaired.

That could leave the door open for someone to be wrongfully accused of driving under the influence.

“It’s a huge problem and a matter of social justice,” Bidwell said.

But what if you took multiple breath samples?

To test that approach, the research team will recruit regular cannabis users between age 25 and 50. Half will use a THC-based flower strain; the other half will use a THC-based concentrate. To ensure that participants use the same product, all will get their cannabis from the same dispensary, Native Roots Dispensary in Boulder, which has worked with CU Boulder on several research projects.

Because cannabis is federally illegal, researchers are not allowed to handle or administer it. So, Bidwell’s team uses a mobile pharmacology laboratory—a white Sprinter van equipped with specialized equipment—to bring the lab to the people.

“The van enables us to measure in real time the impact of legal market forms of cannabis that people actually use,” she said.

After undergoing a baseline test in the van, participants go inside their residence and use as much cannabis as they wish. Then they return to the van for 13 breath tests over two hours and a series of tests to gauge how high they feel.

Lovestead and chemical engineer Kavita Jeerage, who leads the NIST team, will analyze the more than 1,200 unique samples to provide a clearer picture of what a baseline level of cannabis looks like in the breath of a regular user and how that number rises and falls as their level of intoxication changes.

While they don’t intend to develop their own cannabis breathalyzer, the research could be used to help others accurately interpret breath samples.

A BAC for THC

in blood suggests that levels of THC peak within about 15 minutes of use, before dropping precipitously for the next three hours.

In theory, if a driver were to take two breathalyzer tests 10 to 20 minutes apart after using cannabis, their second reading would be lower. If they hadn’t used recently, the two numbers would be the same.

The new study will determine whether that theory could be put into practice with a multi-breath test to determine recent use.

Subsequent studies could also help establish a BAC for THC, that could determine if someone is safe to drive when combined with other field tests.

The new test could be useful not only for police, but also for cannabis users themselves.

“Most people who use cannabis, whether for recreational or medical reasons, want to do so responsibly,” Bidwell said. “If there is a tool they can use to assure they aren’t putting anyone at risk, that would be hugely beneficial.” 

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Why does the COVID-19 virus make some people sicker than others?

For years, scientists have looked to a critical piece of immune system machinery—known as the interferon pathway—for answers. There, when our cells sense an infection, they release a protein known as interferon, which warns other cells to fight the virus.

Studies show that when this signaling goes awry and leads the body to under or overreact, people are more likely to develop severe or Long COVID. Glitches in this pathway have also been implicated in autoimmune diseases and cancer.

But little is known about what, precisely, drives these immunological misfires.

A new CU Boulder study, published today , sheds light on the subject by identifying what the authors describe as an “immune system tuning dial,” which originated as a bug in the genetic code tens of millions of years ago.

“We’ve discovered that there is an entire class of under-appreciated protein variants that can have an immense impact on our immune function,” said senior author Ed Chuong, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and the BioFrontiers Institute. 

His lab demonstrated that one particular variant of a protein called IFNAR2 acts like a tuning dial to regulate interferon signaling.

“If we can manipulate this dial to turn the immune system up or down it could have broad therapeutic applications, from infection to autoimmune disorders to cancer.”

How evolution turned a bug into a feature

Chuong studies transposons, bits of DNA that infiltrated primate cells as many as 70 million years ago and now make up more than half of the human genome.

Some transposons, known as endogenous retroviruses, got there via ancient viruses. When reawakened, these genetic parasites can help cancer survive and thrive. Others, like the ones explored in the new paper, emerged from the genome itself, like random bugs popping up in a computer program’s source code.

“If you think of a gene as a sentence, a transposon is like a word that jumps into the sentence, making the instructions for the cell slightly different,” explained first author Giulia Pasquesi, a postdoctoral researcher in Chuong’s lab.

Cells normally suppress these bugs, ensuring only the correct version of the gene is spurred into action. So scientists have long viewed them as inert ‘junk DNA’.

Pasquesi set out to challenge this assumption, looking for gene variants formed by transposons that were actually important for human immune function.

When she analyzed state-of-the-art genetic sequencing data from human tissues and cells, she found 125 instances across 99 genes.

A break in the antenna

Pasquesi and Chuong focused on a variant of interferon receptor 2 (IFNAR2)—a critical protein which acts like a cellular antenna for interferon, turning on other genes that fight off infection and cancer. They found that the new “short” variant could sense interferon, but it was missing parts required to transmit the signal. Surprisingly, it was present in all cells, and often more abundant than the normal protein suggesting it played an important role in immunity.

They followed up with experiments using cells with different combinations of the two IFNAR2 varieties. When they exposed them to immune challenges, including viral infections, they found that the short variant acted as a “decoy” that interferes with normal IFNAR2 signaling. When they removed the short variant from the genome, cells became much more sensitive to interferon, with stronger immune responses against viruses including SARS-CoV-2 and dengue virus.

The findings suggest that the balance between IFNAR2 variants acts as a “tuning dial” for controlling the strength of immune signaling, and this can vary from person to person. Individuals who express abnormally high levels of the variant might be more susceptible to severe infections, while people expressing low levels may have chronic inflammation, autoimmune issues like psoriasis or irritable bowel syndrome, or Long COVID.

“Different individuals are well known to exhibit differences in their immune responses, but the reasons why are still poorly understood. We’ve uncovered a new control dial that could be behind some of this variation,” said Chuong.

The team has filed for a provisional patent and begun developing and testing compounds to therapeutically target the dial.

Bigger picture, they believe that the story of IFNAR2 is the tip of the iceberg, and many other immune functions may be regulated by these long-ignored genomic hitchhikers.

“Our findings suggest that looking into the dark corners of the genome is key to making new discoveries to improve human health,” said Chuong.

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In CUriosity, experts across the CU Boulder campus answer pressing questions about humans, our planet and the universe beyond.

This week, Integrative Physiology Professor Ken Wright, answers: “What does an all-nighter do to your body?”

  Previously in CUriosity

Should you trust 5-star reviews?

Whether we’re cramming for finals, catching a red-eye flight, binge-watching rom-coms, or indulging in a bit too much cheer, the holiday season can wreak havoc on sleep.

Surveys suggest that of U.S. adults stay up all night at least once during the year, and report pulling an all-nighter monthly. But can just one night of missed sleep really hurt us?

“Absolutely,” said Integrative Physiology Professor Ken Wright, director of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at CU Boulder. “Pulling an all-nighter is a significant stressor, both physiologically and cognitively, to the body.”

Over the past two decades, Wright has invited countless paid volunteers into his lab for days-long, tightly controlled experiments. In in their 20s, he found that staying up all night and sleeping all day just once disrupted the levels and timing of 129 key proteins circulating in the blood, including those that regulate appetite and energy, keep blood sugar in check and fend off illness.  

Exposure to light when the body is accustomed to darkness can also throw off the timing of hormones, including melatonin (which, among other things, signals our body that it’s time to rest) and cortisol (the “stress hormone”). These shifts can disrupt our body clock, or circadian rhythm, making it harder to sleep when we want to.

Eating at a time when our body is not ready to process food can promote weight gain and boost Type-II diabetes risk—as studies show we store more calories as fat and are less efficient at turning sugar into energy at night.  

“A calorie is not just a calorie. If you eat junk food in the middle of the night, it can be even worse for you than eating that same junk food during the day,” said Wright.

The immune system also stands down, even when we are awake, during our “biological night” (a time when our body is conditioned to rest and recover and is not typically exposed to pathogens.) This makes us more vulnerable to injury and illness if they hit us in the wee hours of morning.

For instance, one study by another research team found that humans heal 60% faster when they sustain wounds during the day than at night. to viruses when they were supposed to be resting, those pathogens replicated 10 times faster than in mice infected during waking hours.

“Timing matters,” said Wright. “If you are awake in the middle of the night and you’re exposed to someone who is sick, you have an increased risk of getting sick.”

Lack of sleep can also do a number on our thinking the next day, with that skipping a night’s sleep is about the same as having a 0.08 blood alcohol level.

“If you drive after staying up all night, it is the equivalent of driving drunk,” Wright warned.

The sleep scientist has some advice for students cramming for finals: Don’t wait until the night before your test and stay up studying until dawn. Instead, study days prior to a test and review your notes right before bed because sleep can help consolidate your memories. If you do have to stay up late, make sure your midnight snack is as healthy as possible and avoid driving the next day.

Your body will thank you, and your grades might, too.

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