Research

The Mahaffy Cache

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

The Mahaffy Cache Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/04/2024 - 00:00

Christie Sounart

In 2008, landscapers dug two feet into the ground of Patrick Mahaffy’s backyard, located near Chautauqua Park in �山��. They unearthed 83 stone tools from a packed hole the size of a shoebox. The cache was about 13,000 years old.

The tools — now called the “Mahaffy Cache” — were most likely left by nomadic hunter-gatherers known as Clovis, who lived in North America toward the end of the last ice age. The most distant tools likely originated in the Uinta Mountains in northeast Utah and traveled with groups of people to �山��, said anthropology professor Douglas Bamforth, who Mahaffy originally invited to inspect the cache. Others were made from stone found between the Uintas and �山��.

“One of the things that we have not emphasized as much as other aspects of the cache is how distinct it is,” Bamforth said. “It is like many Clovis-age caches in that the stone the tools are made from is from far away, but the diversity of different kinds of tools and artifacts in it is very unusual.”

The cache is one of two Clovis collections to undergo a blood protein analysis on the tools, which determined that hunters used them to butcher Ice Age horses, camels, sheep and bears. The tools include knives, blades and flint scraps.

“My favorite is the large biface made from Tiger chert that looks like a double-bitted ax,” said Bamforth. “I have never, ever seen another artifact like that.”

See the Mahaffy Cache in the CU Museum of Natural History.

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Photo by Glenn Asakawa

In 2008, landscapers dug into the ground of Patrick Mahaffy’s backyard in �山��. They unearthed 83 stone tools that were about 13,000 years old.

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Campus News Briefs: Spring 2024

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Campus News Briefs: Spring 2024 Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/04/2024 - 00:00

Consistent Yoga for Good Health

A �山�� study found yoga to be very beneficial to those who practice it — when done regularly. The study, which examined both typical yoga classes and those with only stretching, found the benefits of better emotion regulation, self-control, distress tolerance and mindfulness lasted about a week after either type of class. “One yoga class is not enough to reap long-term health benefits,” �山�� Institute of Behavioral Science research associate Charleen Gust told The Denver Post. Researchers hope further study will determine how often people must practice to experience benefits.

Study Abroad Hits Record Number

This spring, the number of CU students studying abroad exceeded the record-setting 900 students studying abroad at the onset of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. Nearly 1,200 students were enrolled to study abroad this spring, with Western Europe serving as the most popular destination. �山��’s study abroad program is ranked 15th-largest in the nation

CU Economist Tackles English Mystery

From 1761 to 1834 the mortality rate of English people dropped from 28 to 25 per 1,000 people, a statistic that has confused historians due to the population influx around that time. “With people coming into cities to work, you would expect, given the level of sanitation they have, that the big killer is water,” �山�� economics professor Fransica Antman told the BBC in December. Antman authored a study linking the change to the rise in tea consumption. In 1784, the tea tax went from 119% to 12.5%, boosting tea consumption. Boiling the water when making tea, Antman explained, killed off the bacteria that was prevalent in drinking water at the time, thus saving lives. In her study, Antman examined the quality of water sources for about 400 parishes in England and determined that the death rate declined even in those parishes with poor water quality due to the high prevalence of tea.

Heard Around Campus

“CU naturally attracts really outstanding leaders.”

— Stefanie Johnson, director of the Center for Leadership, told the Daily Camera in January after Time magazine and Statista named �山�� one of the top 100 best colleges for future leaders.

Digits: 2024 Total Solar Eclipse

4/8

Date of eclipse

11:28 a.m.

Time solar eclipse appears in �山��

1,500

Children participating in Fiske’s eclipse outreach program

U.S. states will experience total solar eclipse

Fiske Planetarium films related to the total eclipse

7,500

Public and K-12 visitors watched the planetarium’s eclipse films from May 2023 to January 2024

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Photos and illustrations courtesy Pixabay

Solar eclipse, benefits of yoga, historical research on tea and more.

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Should Your Child Take Melatonin?

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Should Your Child Take Melatonin? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/04/2024 - 00:00

Some young children, including preschoolers, routinely take melatonin as a supplement for sleep, with nearly one in five school-aged children and preteens also taking it regularly, according to �山�� researchers. The hormone is produced naturally in a person’s pineal gland to signal sleep for the body, but chemically synthesized and animal-derived versions are also readily available in the United States.

This concerns �山�� researchers, who conducted a survey of melatonin use published by JAMA Pediatrics in November 2023. They found that use among children has soared since 2017, when only about 1% of parents reported that their children used it. In their paper, the authors note a lack of safety and efficacy data surrounding the products, which are not fully regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

“We are not saying that melatonin is necessarily harmful to children. But much more research needs to be done before we can state with confidence that it is safe for kids to be taking long-term,” said lead author Lauren Hartstein, a postdoctoral fellow in the CU Sleep and Development Lab at �山��.

In a previous study, researchers at Cambridge Health Alliance analyzed 25 melatonin gummy products and found that 22 contained different amounts of melatonin than indicated on the label, or even contained other unlisted substances such as serotonin.

CU researchers caution that while melatonin can be used as a short-term option for sleep aid under the guidance of a pediatrician, other options may be a better line of treatment for continued use.

To learn more, visit �山�� Today.

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Illustration by Polly Noakes

�山�� study says long-term effects and safety of the supplement are unknown.

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Water Purification Through a Straw

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Water Purification Through a Straw Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/04/2024 - 00:00

Allison Nitch

To help alleviate health issues caused by pathogens in water, a team of �山�� mechanical engineering students collaborated on a senior capstone project last spring to create PureSip, a prototype for a water purification system.

Housed inside a bottle lid, PureSip uses ultraviolet LED technology to purify water through a straw as the user drinks — killing 99.9% of germs and eliminating the need for single-use plastic bottles.

To support product adaptability, the bottle lid can be used with common reusable water bottle brands such as Nalgene and Hydro Flask.

The purification process begins when the spout of the bottle lid is flipped open and can continue purifying for a total of 40 minutes before the batteries need to be recharged. With the assumption a user drinks at a certain pace, the team calculated that amount of time to equal 30 liters of water. On average, this would equate to 60 disposable plastic water bottles.

The PureSip team members — Jack Figueirinhas (MechEngr’23), Jack Isenhart (MechEngr’23), Mackenzie Lamoureux (MechEngr’23), Ella McQuaid (MechEngr’23), Marie Resman (MechEngr’23) and Carlos Yosten (MechEngr’23) — made a point of using lithium-ion polymer batteries because they’re rechargeable, have a long battery life and are more compact than other battery options.

The PureSip team pitched their idea at the 2023 New Venture Challenge, a cross-campus program and competition that gives aspiring entrepreneurs a chance to win money to fund a startup. The product received third place in the climate-focused section.

Lamoureux, PureSip’s product manager, said last spring, “We hope that our product can help reduce plastic pollution, and more particularly help eliminate the need for single-use plastic bottles.”

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Photo courtesy College of Engineering and Applied Science

The student prototype, PureSip, protects digestive health and the environment.

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Can Cloud Seeding Stem the Water Crisis?

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Can Cloud Seeding Stem the Water Crisis? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/04/2024 - 00:00

Christie Sounart

Katja Friedrich is a professor and associate chair in �山��’s Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences department. She is known for her work in cloud seeding, a process used to generate precipitation from existing clouds. In 2017, she helped conduct the National Science Foundation-funded project SNOWIE (Seeded and Natural Orographic Wintertime Clouds: the Idaho Experiment), which was the first experiment to accurately measure the amount of snowfall caused by cloud seeding.

How do you best describe cloud seeding?

Cloud seeding has been around for almost 100 years as a way to get more rain or precipitation out of a cloud. It was first discovered in a lab at MIT in 1946 that something similar to ice’s crystalline structure, like silver iodide, could be put in supercooled liquid to freeze the drops and create ice. People then applied this method to real clouds to generate precipitation. When we seed wintertime orographic clouds, we target clouds that contain supercooled liquid water, which are tiny water droplets that are too light to fall to the ground. After we seed these clouds with silver iodide, the droplets start to freeze into ice particles. These ice particles continue to grow and collect other droplets and ice particles and eventually form snow that is heavy enough to fall to the ground.

Does it work?

A problem with cloud seeding has always been showing how much more precipitation it can generate. We know it works because it works in the lab. However, we need to get the seeding material to the area that contains high amounts of supercooled liquid. It’s difficult to know where those areas are in a cloud, because we don’t have good measurements of supercooled liquid, and it’s difficult to fly in those areas because of aircraft icing. When we seed clouds, we often have to rely on numerical models which have a certain level of uncertainty. Also, once we seeded the clouds, we don’t really know how much precipitation a cloud would have produced without seeding.

The other problem is that nature can be pretty efficient in producing precipitation, but not always. That’s why with our SNOWIE experiment in 2017 we wanted to gather enough information to run more accurate numerical models. Our idea was that because the models are now accurate enough to reproduce what’s going on in the cloud during cloud seeding, we could then run simulations with and without cloud seeding and see the precipitation produced for both. In SNOWIE, we were also able to show with our seeding line observations the entire chain of events from once we put the silver iodide into the cloud to how much snow we produced. No one had done that before.

The reason we are cloud seeding is because of water scarcity.

How much precipitation can one cloud-seeding event produce?

We showed that you can produce additional snowfall. Based on our study that included seeding during three days, the total amount of water generated by cloud seeding was about the equivalent of the volume of water needed to fill 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools in 20 minutes over an area of about 7,500 square kilometers.

What are some concerns you hear about cloud seeding?

The reason we are cloud seeding is because of water scarcity. It is becoming really important to show that we can produce some precipitation. Cloud seeding is not the holy grail if you think about how to generate water or mitigate droughts. But this is an important part because you can maybe produce additional water. I give this example of Lake Mead. Right now, the water levels are so low that hydropower can’t be run at full capacity. If we could cloud seed and raise the water levels just a little bit higher so we can still generate hydropower, this would have massive effects on large populations.

The downside is putting materials in the atmosphere. Other people say we’re manipulating the weather, which is true. The other argument I say is if you get into your car or are flying on a commercial airplane, you are also manipulating the weather. Every airplane that flies through a cloud of super cold liquid is doing cloud seeding because they’re putting particles in the cloud that can generate snowfall. So people need to be aware that we are manipulating the weather and the climate with everything we are doing.

What is one of the most extreme situations in which you’ve conducted research?

We are manipulating the weather and the climate with everything we are doing.

I have gone out for one hurricane, Hurricane Ike in 2008, when I had just started working at CU. This was one of the most amazing things that I’ve seen in respect to the weather. We were on these bridges and you saw the water coming in and everything was flooding around us, and we were in what felt like a carwash. We even deployed through the eyewall — for one hour it was totally quiet, and you could hear birds flying. Then came another five or six hours of this carwash feeling. The hurricane passed, and within half an hour you could see how the water trails out. And then I saw emergency boats coming in looking for people. … As for tornadoes, I have to say they look better on TV than in real life.

What else are you working on right now?

I’m looking at Colorado’s Front Range and other high plateau regions where thunderstorms produce large amounts of hail — so much that we call these hail-accumulating thunderstorms “snowplowable hail.” We built a warning system for the weather service, so they know which thunderstorms are producing a lot of hail that will be dumped on the ground. But also we are trying to understand why that happens and whether there is a way we can forecast it perhaps an hour ahead of time so we can coordinate resources like snow plows, which aren’t always readily available in the summertime.

What do you do outside of work?

When I’m not working, I like to ski. I like to mountain bike. I have two kids, so we are doing a lot of outdoorsy stuff. We like to camp. We like to travel. That’s what we do — things outside.

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Photos by Matt Tyrie

�山��'s Katja Friedrich is known for her work in cloud seeding, a process used to generate precipitation from existing clouds.

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Secrets from the Grave

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Secrets from the Grave Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/04/2024 - 00:00

Lisa Marshall

Centuries from now, if an archaeologist were to dig up Sharon DeWitte’s bleached and weathered bones, they’d find a 7-inch stainless steel rod and nine screws buried among them.

These remnants of her childhood bout with scoliosis would not be the only window into the life she led.

Her flaming red hair and the rich tapestry of arm tattoos would be long gone. But the carbon and nitrogen isotopes in her molars would hint at her mostly vegetarian diet. Her stout, calcium-rich foot bones would offer clues that she was a runner. And a bony bump on her right patella, or knee bone, would serve as a legacy of the bad fall she took on a trail one summer.

While imagining one’s remains may seem grisly, DeWitte has been doing it for as long as she can remember.

“Since I was a child I’ve been thinking about what happens to our bodies after we die and what stories people might make up about us based on what they find,” said DeWitte, seated cross-legged in her dark gray office, plaster casts of two human skulls and a femur perched on a shelf near her desk.

A �山�� professor of anthropology and a pioneer in the niche field of bioarchaeology, she is now the one crafting those stories.

Through hours spent alone in museum basements, analyzing the fragile bones of those who died centuries ago in pandemics, she offers new insight into why some resist novel viruses and bacteria while others succumb to them. Her work also sheds light on how pathogens, like those during the Black Death, evolve and lend insight into the past lives of individuals, including women, children, the poor and racial minority groups.

“Skeletal evidence can provide us with information about people who aren’t necessarily represented in most historical documents,” said DeWitte, noting that those documents were often written by and about the wealthy and powerful. “I feel honored to be able to share something about people who were likely ignored while they were alive and are not represented in many surviving documents.”

Revisiting the Black Death

When you brush and floss your teeth, you’re actually looking at your own skeleton. ... They are an amazing repository of information about our lives.

In the spring of 2003, as tourists milled through the exhibits nearby, DeWitte pulled boxes containing complete human skeletons off the shelves in the Museum of London storage room. The museum’s famed Centre for Human Bioarchaeology is home to thousands of centuries-old skeletal remains, excavated from burial grounds around the city.

DeWitte was particularly interested in those from Black Death cemeteries, mass graves proactively set aside in London in the mid-14th century as the bubonic plague marched across the European continent.

“They knew it was coming, and they knew it was going to be terrible,” she said.

For months, she gingerly pulled the bones out of sealed plastic packages and placed them one by one onto a padded table to measure and inspect them.

As she explained, leg bone length can hint at someone’s stature and nutrition status, while abnormal bumps indicate injuries or infection. Porous lesions around the eye sockets can be remnants of anemia. Horizontal stripes on the surface of teeth, known as linear enamel hypoplasia, can indicate episodes of disease or malnutrition, and thick plaque can provide hints about a person’s hygiene or socioeconomic status.

“When you brush and floss your teeth, you’re actually looking at your own skeleton,” she said. “They are an amazing repository of information about our lives.”

The humanity of it all was not lost on her. She was brought to tears when she opened a bag containing the tiny bones of an infant, or another in which mother and child appeared to have died together.

“I wondered, ‘What were their last moments like together?’ Every day I would see something so sad,” she recalled.

She stressed that she is careful not to engage in the study of skeletal remains that are held against the wishes of descendant populations.

“I want to be sure the work I am doing never causes harm to living people.”

The Marginalized Hit First and Worst

DeWitte has studied hundreds of skeletons, publishing numerous papers that paint a sometimes surprising picture of the world’s most deadly pandemic. The Black Death did not, according to her research, kill indiscriminately. As with the COVID-19 pandemic, it hit marginalized communities, including the poor and the frail, harder.

“Premodern structural racism,” as the authors call it, may have also played a role in determining who lived or died, suggests a new paper DeWitte and colleagues published in the journal Bioarchaeology International.

For the study, DeWitte and collaborators at the Museum of London and Brandeis University examined the bones of individuals buried in the East Smithfield emergency plague cemetery in the mid-1300s and those in two other London cemeteries that were not plague burial grounds. Using anthropological tools to estimate the population affinity of the deceased, they found significantly higher proportions of people of estimated African affinity in East Smithfield. Through further analysis, they concluded that Black women — who were often subject to misogyny and anti-Blackness and kept as servants in London at the time — were significantly more likely to die of the Black Death than people of white European descent.

“This research shows that there is a deep history of social marginalization shaping health and vulnerability to disease in human populations,” said DeWitte.

Lessons from the Past

In other work, DeWitte collaborated with scientists to extract DNA from the teeth of Black Death victims. They found that the genome of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that killed as many as 50 million people, is not all that different from that of bubonic plague varieties circulating today.

What made it so deadly?

More research is underway to help answer that question, but one possibility, DeWitte said, may have been climate change.

The 14th century marked the end of what some refer to as the Medieval Warm Period, a 400-year span in which relatively warm conditions were the norm and, across the Northern Hemisphere, people were able to broaden and diversify crops.

“As this warm period started to end, population growth outpaced agricultural production, and you had a growing share of resources and money concentrated into the hands of very few people,” she said. “It was a lot like what you see today — climate change increasing social inequality, and then a new disease gets introduced.”

A Brighter Future

Arizona State University anthropologist Jane Buikstra, who coined the term and founded the field of bioarchaeology, said DeWitte’s work resonates in the era of COVID-19.

“Her work speaks to the issue of vulnerability and the fact that people who are disadvantaged, often through no fault of their own, are at special risk for these emerging diseases.”

DeWitte joined CU’s Institute for Behavioral Science in 2023 and has plans to expand her work to Northern China, where she will soon embark on a study at a 5,000-year-old site of “catastrophic mortality” — likely a plague.

Despite the seemingly dark nature of her work, she exudes warmth and optimism as she talks about its potential for good.

By identifying the structural inequalities that made certain groups more vulnerable to disease and death in past pandemics, she hopes her work can inspire modern society to tear down those inequalities.

Hopefully, before the next pandemic hits.

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Photo courtesy Sharon DeWitte
Illustration by Paul Blow

By studying human skeletal remains, bioarchaeologist Sharon DeWitte is opening a new window into past pandemics and giving voice to the voiceless.

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The Buzzworthy Bee Research of CU’s Dr. Sammy

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

The Buzzworthy Bee Research of CU’s Dr. Sammy Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/04/2024 - 00:00

Erika Hanes

Before Samuel Ramsey became the world’s foremost expert on bees — and an assistant professor of ecology, entomology and evolutionary biology at �山�� — he was just another kid afraid of bugs. But one pivotal trip to the biology section of a local library changed Ramsey’s life forever.

“I was 7,” said Ramsey, known by most as “Dr. Sammy.” “My parents handed me a book on bugs and said, ‘People fear what they don’t understand.’ That was it.”

In opening the book, Ramsey opened a portal to another world, sparking a lifelong passion for all things creepy-crawly. Within the field of entomology, Ramsey quickly narrowed his research to bees, inspired by the many parallels between human and bee behavior.

“Take dancing, for instance,” Ramsey said. “Bees use what’s called a waggle dance to communicate. Every intricate movement and precise gesture provides vital information to the rest of the hive, such as locations for rich sources of nectar or where to build their next hive.”

Ramsey’s contributions to the study of bees have been substantial. His research encompasses various aspects of bee behavior, ecology and evolutionary biology.

One of his greatest research endeavors explores the “bee pandemic” — the mass decline of bee populations around the world — and its potential impact on our daily lives. Beyond the immediate threat to basic food crops, his research underscores the interconnectedness of the global food supply chain and the urgent need for bee conservation.

“The average person isn’t going to know there’s a problem until they see the impact on their wallets and tables,” Ramsey said. “The decline in bee populations impacts coffee, fruit, dairy and so much more. What happens when only the wealthy can afford a latte or limes? What happens when we can only buy certain fruits, nuts or vegetables seasonally? These are very real possibilities if we don’t act soon.”

As a professor, Ramsey has never forgotten his childhood lesson that fear often stems from a lack of understanding, which is why he emphasizes science communication in his classroom. Effective science communication, he argues, is not only vital for teaching but also critical for building public trust.

“If nobody can understand you, it doesn’t matter what your message is,” he said. “Unfortunately, we saw this concept play out during the pandemic — scientists couldn’t connect with the general public, even when the message was about life and death.”

Ramsey’s journey from a child afraid of bugs to an expert researcher and teacher of entomology exemplifies how knowledge can eliminate fear, and transform it into action. In and out of the classroom, Ramsey advocates for policy changes and offers practical steps that anyone can take to contribute to bee welfare.

“Refrain from using pesticides on your lawns,” he said. “Rewild your lawn by planting a garden, even a small one. Vote for representatives who will fund scientific research. You can even rehouse bees by drilling holes in a chunk of wood and placing it near plants.

“Little things can make a big difference.”

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Photo by John T. Consoli/University of Maryland

Assistant professor Samuel Ramsey's research includes bee behavior, ecology and evolutionary biology.

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More than a Century of Mountain Research

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 07:00:00 +0000

More than a Century of Mountain Research Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/06/2023 - 00:00

Christie Sounart

A Few Courses:

A Few Courses:

Art and Environment
Forest and Fire Ecology
Field Ornithology
Field Methods in Vegetation Ecology

Research Examples:

Microplastics in Mountain Ecosystems of the Colorado Front Range
Temporal dynamics of plant-pollinator networks
Scaling the consequences of extended summers to arthropod communities at Niwot Ridge
Causes for the hybridization of black-capped and mountain chickadees in areas disturbed by humans
Spectroscopic measurements of chemical composition of organic aerosol particles collected at urban and rural locations

Just over eight miles north of Nederland, Colorado, and nestled off the Peak to Peak Scenic Byway lies a serene area dotted with tiny cabins, peaceful walking trails and ample forest land. And while the setting is very different from the bustle of �山��’s main campus, the amount of groundbreaking work happening there is the same.

�山��’s Mountain Research Station, located 25 miles from campus, is an interdisciplinary facility associated with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, which serves students and scientists interested in mountain-based study. The scope of projects is wide — ranging from arthropods to microplastics to weather — and as many as 80 people can be studying at the station at once.

“The Mountain Research Station is a place where,for over 100 years, scientists, students and the public have come together to advance our understanding and appreciation for mountains, which are inspiring, formidable and increasingly at risk,” said Scott Taylor, director of the station.

Key Dates:

1920

Mountain Research Station established in its current location

1945

Five professors taught 80 students.

1953

Former director John Marr founded the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), now the oldest institute at �山��.

1980

National Science Foundation starts its Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network, which funded the Niwot Ridge LTER.

CU owns 190 acres with an adjacent 1,775 acres of U.S. Forest Service designated research land

Located at 9,500 feet

Other Facts:

short interpretive trails open to the public

25–45

students conducting research, depending on the summer

110

largest amount fed in the dining hall at once

seasonal cabins

students in courses over a year

labs on the property

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Photos courtesy Mountain Research Station and William Bowman (mountains)

�山��’s Mountain Research Station, located 25 miles from campus, serves students and scientists interested in mountain-based study.

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Campus News Briefs: Fall 2023

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Campus News Briefs: Fall 2023 Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/06/2023 - 00:00

Accreditation for CU Art Museum

After a five-year process, the �山�� Art Museum gained its first accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) this summer. Only about 3.5% of the nation’s estimated 33,000 museums — including 26 in Colorado — have this designation. AAM awarded the art museum accreditation for its professional standards for education, public service and care of collections.

New Robotics Degrees

This fall, �山�� began offering a master’s and doctorate program in robotics. The program, which is one of about 15 like it in the nation, will equip students for careers in security, agriculture, healthcare, hospitality, manufacturing and first response. Specific courses include “Machine Learning,” “Medical Device Design” and “Introduction to Virtual Reality.”

In Couples, Opposites Don’t Attract

A �山�� analysis of more than 130 traits in heterosexual couples found that partners were more likely to have traits in common than not. The study looked at data from existing and new research for millions of couples, and found that partners were most likely to be similar in about 80% to 90% of traits, which can range from preferences in politics to religion or substance use habits.

“A lot of models in genetics assume that human mating is random. This study shows this assumption is probably wrong,” said the study’s senior author Matt Keller, who is director of the Institute for Behavioral Genetics.

The authors are studying same-sex couples in separate research.

Heard Around Campus

“You may tip your hairdresser, but do you tip your physical therapist? Probably not, but why?”

— �山�� economics professor Jeff Zax, who told �山�� Today this summer he believes the U.S. economy would be healthier without tipping practices and would like to see employees compensated more fairly instead.

Old Main Beehives

In August, �山�� extracted two beehives from Old Main that were nearly a century old. The bees will be rehomed.

8/15

Date beekeeper removed the hives

80+

Years old

~20,000

Bees in both of the hives

Pounds of honey collected

Feet long (larger hive)

2024

Old Main restoration project expected to begin

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Photo courtesy University of Colorado; iStock/izusek (robot)

Bees, CU Art Museum and a new robotics degree.

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A New Way of Learning in the Classroom

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 07:00:00 +0000

A New Way of Learning in the Classroom Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/06/2023 - 00:00

Christie Sounart

Sidney D’Mello is a professor in �山��’s Institute of Cognitive Science and Department of Computer Science. He is also director of the National Science Foundation AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming, which aims to develop artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to facilitate social and collaborative learning experiences for all students.

Can you talk about your research with AI and education?

There are five flagship NSF research institutes that focus on supporting learning with AI, and we were the first one. Schools right now haven’t changed in a hundred years — they’re focused on efficiency as an outcome. The use of AI in education has been to keep that vision of efficiency going where students individually work with computer programs powered by AI.

The vision I want for classrooms is a place where students are working together, being loud, and it’s a noisy, rambunctious environment where they’re challenging ideas, and they’re building social relationships. This vision is centered around a different perspective of learning, which is that learning is authentic to students’ interests and identities and so on. A key question we ask is how best to integrate AI within that vision.

How could your vision be implemented?

This is a vision that’s been articulated forever in the learning sciences, but it is difficult for teachers to implement because they can’t be listening in on several student groups at once. Some conversations may go off track, or perhaps some conversations are amazing, but the teacher is unaware of the discussion happening. So the question is, how can AI help support this?

Our idea is thinking of AI as this social collaborative partner immersed in these small groups to help them along. The AI is actually interacting with small groups, listening in on the conversations, analyzing nonverbal behaviors like pointing, and then figuring out how to facilitate those small-group conversations, but always by coordinating with the teacher. The teacher remains the centerpiece here. The AI is providing decision support around the teacher to help them orchestrate their classroom as they see best.

How are students responding to your research?

We know that with AI comes great responsibility. We didn’t want to build anything without first working with the students themselves.

We know that with AI comes great responsibility. We didn’t want to build anything without first working with the students themselves. We organized workshops with them to be transparent, acquire their trust and have their voices heard. However, we soon realized that it was challenging for youth to imagine what good collaboration could look like beyond what they had experienced in school.

So we took a group of students to this cooperative house in Berkeley, Colorado, where they learned how house members had to live together and collaborate outside of schooling. They were introduced to the idea of community agreements, which are mutually agreed upon norms of behavior that the house members themselves co-negotiate and use to hold each other account-able. The youth wondered if an AI could help them to generate and maintain such agreements and developed a design sketch to embody their ideas.

What happened as a result?

This led to one of our AI technologies called the Community Builder (CoBi). With the help of the teacher, students work in small groups to input their examples of agreements into the CoBi interface. As students engage in collaborative learning, CoBi analyzes student discourse for evidence, or “noticings,” of these agreement categories. The results are visualized by way of a growing tree animation that everyone can see, where the noticings are shown as flowers that bloom. Teachers and students use these visualizations to reflect and make sense about their adherence to their agreements.

Now this is where privacy becomes really important. By working with students and getting their sense of comfort, we learned they are terrified of any of their individual talk being known to the teacher. So we do not give the teacher any information on who's speaking and saying what. We don’t even say which student group. It’s all aggregated in this class-level interface, which is the tree.

Are students interacting with the AI interface?

We actually show them what the CoBi is doing, and then the idea is they can correct it if they see something off with its predictions.That gives us good data,and the students can help it improve itself. But more importantly, they can have a conversation about why it’s doing what it’s doing. Because, remember, we also want to teach youth how to learn and collaborate. And so they can have a conversation like, ‘Hey, CoBi, we thought this was an example of being respectful, but you missed it.’

What concerns do you have about ChatGPT right now?

I don’t think we should ban these tools, as that never works. But there's a lot of stuff that still needs to be addressed with these AI programs still. For example, when I’m talking, I’m gesturing and pointing. So I’m making meaning in that context. ChatGPT and all of those other programs are good for their language piece, but they are not grounded in the real world. That’s why we are working with foundational AI to integrate semantics of speech with gesture, gaze and social cues to make an understanding from multimodal, multi-party discourse.

How can teachers quickly be trained in AI?

Right now a phrase that’s used a lot is “responsible AI”.

You can get teachers caught up in AI, and we’re developing curricula for AI literacy for this very purpose. But it’s really a more foundational thing — how can we change learning? How do you design a curriculum that does 21st-century skills, collaboration, critical thinking, inquiry, disciplinary knowledge, experimentation, investigation and developing character at the same time?

You’ve talked a lot about ethical and equitable AI. What does that mean? Right now a phrase that’s used a lot is “responsible AI”. It’s not asking what AI can do, it’s asking what I should do, basically. We have a framework of responsible innovation that we implement in everything we do from the start, and it begins with ourselves — our values, our processes and our commitment to our students and teachers.

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Photo by Patrick Campbell

Sidney D’Mello is a professor in �山��’s Institute of Cognitive Science and Department of Computer Science, and is also director of the National Science Foundation AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming.

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