Results of a new CU Boulder study show high levels of contaminants such as organic carbon, phosphorus and nitrogen can remain in water for years after a fire.

“We don’t really know too much as a field about the lingering effects of wildfires on water quality,” said Carli Brucker, lead author and former CU Boulder doctoral student. “One surprising thing was definitely seeing that some of these contaminants had significantly elevated concentrations even eight years after the wildfires.”

The researchers from CU Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences collected more than 100,000 water samples from 500 watershed sites in Colorado and across the western United States. About half of the watersheds where samples were collected were places where a wildfire had already burned, and the other half were untouched by a wildfire.

CU Boulder professor, CIRES fellow and study co-author Ben Livneh said the team sampled up and down the Front Range, including in the Poudre River.

“We were really wanting to know what the impact of wildfires on our water quality and typically how long does that impact last,” Livneh said.

Livneh said prior studies have shown that water quality changes in the immediate aftermath of a fire, but not a lot is known about the impacts on water quality multiple years after a fire. Additionally, those studies looked at specific locations rather than across state lines. Livneh said a big part of their goal was to compile a large data set.

“We knew there might be more to this story,” Livneh said. “There’s a mystery of how long does it last.”

Impacts to water quality, the study found, were worse in more forested areas and in areas where the fire burned closer to the main stem of the river.

Overall, the results showed that wildfires on average impact deeper layers of soil, burn larger vegetative structures and disrupt nutrient cycles to a greater extent than previously suspected, according to the study. This can have negative implications for people’s drinking water and freshwater systems.

Livneh said this is important for water suppliers and utility companies to know so they can better prepare and respond to wildfires. He added that organizations may reconsider their type of water treatment plan to use and whether water treatment needs to continue further into the future than a year or two.

“The biggest implications of these wildfires are for our water utilities,” Brucker said. “For our water utilities, the ones that I’ve talked to, this is already very much a priority … especially around Boulder and other wildfire-prone areas. I think my advice to community members in Boulder is to really just listen to your local water utilities. They have a lot of plans in place to deal with these impacts, and they’re going to ensure we’re always safe from these contaminants.”

The reality is that this type of artificial intelligence, or AI, isn’t far off. In some cases, it’s already here.

“It’s not a question of if generative ghosts are coming, it’s a question of when,” University of Colorado Boulder professor Jed Brubaker said. “And so it’s really important that we start thinking about what that’s going to look like now so that we can design them to be the most pro-social, most positive version possible, and we can be thoughtful and avoid unanticipated and negative outcomes that we want to make sure we avoid.”

AI ghosts, also known as generative ghosts, are AI agents designed to represent a dead person by acting on their behalf or acting as them.

CU Boulder graduate student Daniel Sullivan said it’s exciting to be on the forefront of something so new and strange.

“It tends to elicit a very visceral reaction, like that is a very scary or dystopian thing,” Sullivan said. “But I think there are just so many different perspectives and ways it can exist, and it already does exist in certain forms.”

The generative ghosts will be able to do more than an AI chatbot like ChatGPT because they can generate new content based on available data, like emails and videos.

“One way that ghosts might vary is what form of embodiment they might have, that’s the term we use,” Brubaker said. “A ghost that’s texting with you as opposed to talking with you on the phone, as opposed to virtual reality. The modality in which we’re going to interact with these things is going to vary, and that’s something we’re going to need to pay attention to, because what’s appropriate, what people like, what’s beneficial versus detrimental, in part has to do with what type of embodiment or what way people are interacting with it.”

Brubaker and his team of researchers at CU Boulder conducted an analysis and collected information about what’s already out there in terms of AI ghosts in a paper called “Generative Ghosts: Anticipating Benefits and Risks of AI Afterlives.”

In the paper, it outlined how some start-up companies are already offering services for people to create their own AI ghosts while they are still alive.

Re;memory, for example, offers a DeepBrain AI that creates an interactive virtual representation of a person after a seven-hour filming and interview session, so that friends and family can engage with the person’s memory after they die. HereAfter2 provides an app that interviews a user to create a post-death digital representation through a chatbot.

Some museum curators and archives are creating AI ghosts of historical figures for public use. Brubaker said he has colleagues at MIT who are working on a ghost for Leonardo da Vinci for a museum in Paris, for example. Holocaust studies as an academic field, Brubaker said, is trying to use AI to preserve memories and histories of the last wave of Holocaust survivors, as many of the last ones are nearing the end of their lives.

“Maybe there’s something to be said for these interactive ghosts that can help people connect with the past and honor historical heritage,” Brubaker said.

Brubaker’s lab is now studying how people feel about AI ghosts by bringing in participants to interact with AI ghosts and record people’s thoughts and feelings about them.

“At the end of the day, if you’re not taking into consideration people’s feelings, reactions and emotions, it will inevitably move fast and crumble easily,” graduate student Jack Manning said. “We’re trying to focus on the user to create something that will hopefully last and benefit the people who will be using it.”

Manning said he’s most excited about the question of reincarnation versus representation in AI ghosts.

“Should generative ghosts be designed to fully reincarnate the person they’re designed around, speaking and acting as them, or should it keep one level of removal?” Manning asked.

But there are also a variety of risks, including ethical concerns. One issue and major unknown is how an AI ghost will impact grief, an area Brubaker said needs to be researched. It’s unclear if an AI ghost would help people who are grieving or make it more difficult.

Another issue is whether a dead person intended to leave an AI ghost behind. Brubaker said if AI systems aren’t designed for death, there will be unintended harms or consequences.

“I think we’re about to enter into this era in the next three years where we’re going to start having agents for everything, and if we are not thinking about what should happen when we die, how should they handle them, we’re going to get a lot of accidental or unintentional ghosts,” Brubaker said.

The group’s paper outlines a host of other potential risks.

For instance, an AI ghost might expose true information that the dead person would not have wanted to be revealed, or provide false information. There’s also the potential for post-mortem identity theft and hijacking of AI ghosts to exploit living loved ones for financial gain. There’s also data and privacy risk if a third party is creating an AI ghost on behalf of someone else, or if someone is accessing a dead person’s data who shouldn’t have access.

Some people might even create malicious ghosts. For example, the team’s paper said an abusive spouse might develop a generative ghost that continues to verbally and emotionally abuse their surviving family members.

“In addition to ghosts that might engage in post-mortem harassment, stalking, trolling, or other forms of abuse of the living, malicious ghosts might be designed to engage in illicit economic activities as a way to earn income for the deceased’s estate or to support various causes including potentially criminal ones,” the paper read.

But there are also various reasons why someone might want to leave an AI ghost of themselves, Brubaker said. For example, a father with a terminal cancer diagnosis may want to write a letter for his child’s birthday every year he’s gone. With AI, he could turn it into a ghost rather than letters. Or, an AI ghost could help with planning memorials or clarifying final wishes as outlined in a will.

Brubaker added that grief changes over time. Maybe one year after a loved one dies, an AI ghost is too much. But maybe 10 years later, it’s nice to have the ghost speak in their voice again.

“Part of the lab work we’re doing now is figuring out those social, emotional and cultural factors that influence how people experience and benefit or not from ghosts,” Brubaker said.

The design, created by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, could help advance foams and padding that have been used for decades, improving safety and preventing head injuries.

“The need to protect fragile objects and human bodies is really widespread,” Lawrence Smith, an author of the study and CU Boulder doctoral graduate said. “It touches transportation, shipping and handling, sports, defense — all industries you’re trying to move things around safely.”

The researchers looked at how to improve the kind of foams found in items like bike helmets, football helmets or packing peanuts by focusing on structure and geometry. They discovered that their designs could absorb roughly six times more energy than standard foams made out of the same material and up to 25% more than other similar design structures.

“We’re doing this work to look at the relationship between material geometry and its ability to mitigate impact,” Robert MacCurdy, study author and CU Boulder professor in mechanical engineering, said. “Of course, it may someday be useful in helmets or pads or crash barriers or bumpers or packing materials, but we haven’t validated its use in any of these things. It’s just samples in the lab.”

Their goal was to find ways to improve impact mitigation, or minimize the impact from an outside force. For example, using foam within a football helmet to reduce the impact on a player’s head from a tackle during a game.

“Most folks have tried to make better materials … that have a greater ability to absorb or dissipate impacts,”  MacCurdy said. “What we have done in our lab is not that. We have not tried to create some new material, instead what we’ve tried to do is discover a new arrangement of material.”

MacCurdy and Smith used a 3D printer to create testable samples of the foam.

“Bringing (samples) to life with a 3D printer and then smashing them with this test apparatus was really exciting,” Smith said. “A lot of the work we do in research is a little abstract and maybe even theoretical, so to have the chance to take real data on our actual designs in a real impact scenario was really fun.”

By using this design and geometry-driven approach, MacCurdy hopes they can make foams that have a broader bandwidth for mitigating impact. For example, when riding a bike, there’s no way to know in the event of a crash if it will be low-speed or high-speed. Regardless, the helmet needs to perform well. The team of researchers aims to create a geometry that performs well no matter the scenario.

MacCurdy said impact mitigation is widespread, and the need is universal.

“It’s just everywhere,” he said. “I used to play hockey until I had two concussions, for example, and hockey is not thought to be one of the more dangerous sports for concussions, but it affected me. People are talking about that in all kinds of contact sports. I continue to ride my bike and I wear a helmet when I do it, and I ski and I wear a helmet whenever I do that. So I’m hopeful that this approach is relevant in those kinds of applications.”

However, there is more work to do to demonstrate how the designs work in different scenarios. The samples the researchers tested were small, cubic samples with a 10 centemeters length on a side. MacCurdy said they think they can transform the sample to fit into a helmet but need to test it.

Smith said he hopes their research generates interest and gets more people researching so that eventually the technology is commercialized.

“Eventually, (I hope) this tech is commercialized and we can start making everything from helmets to knee pads to transportation packaging safer,” Smith said.

Tony Kong, professor of organizational leadership at the University of Colorado Boulder, found that performance-based pay can backfire, causing decreased productivity and negative attitudes among employees.

The factor that determines whether pay for performance will work relies on the leader being competent and personable.

“A leader’s competence … is beneficial for employees engagement and performance under pay for performance,” Kong said. “The takeaway from this research is having pay for performance in place is one thing and leadership development is also important.”

Michael Sturman is a professor at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations. He said researchers have known that pay for performance systems can and usually do motivate people to perform better, but that they don’t always work, and leadership matters.

“This paper takes the important step of combining research in these areas, and it then shows the process through which the pay-for-performance system works because of how leaders are involved in the implementation of those systems,” Sturman said. “Pay-for-performance is an important tool, but just rolling out a bonus plan across an organization doesn’t work on its own.”

The study surveyed more than 250 pairs of employees and leaders in 234 organizations across more than 40 industries in China. Kong said although the sample was from China, the results likely hold true in the U.S. because both countries have pay-for-performance-oriented cultures.

The study couldn’t be conducted in the U.S., Kong said, because many American companies don’t allow researchers the access needed to conduct a comprehensive study.

The results revealed that employees will increase work engagement and performance when they view their manager as competent and warm. If a leader is trustworthy, friendly and supportive, employees will feel more supported and less stressed at work.

“If my leader is cold, untrustworthy, unfriendly and unsupportive, then I’ll perceive pay for performance as a threat,” Kong said. “I’ll be super stressed and withdraw from my work, maybe coming to work late and leaving early. I will perform worse because I’m disengaged.”

Kong said many employees work in a low-trust environment where they can’t count on others and don’t thank others for their contributions due to feeling a need to protect themselves.

“We found appreciation is really important for people’s well-being and attitude,” Kong said, adding, “Think about how to make the work-life more positive and how to have a positive impact on other people.”

While leaders are important, Kong said, they shouldn’t be expected to have perfect behavior and decision-making.

“Leaders are humans,” Kong said. “They have limited attention, they have limited energy, they have limited resources … I do feel like we need to take a more realistic perspective on what leaders can do and what they should do.”

Mengjie Lyu, an expert in the field and visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois, said she’s excited about this research because the findings offer “great insights” that are in line with her own research on pay for performance.

“We want to use pay for performance to attract more productive workers and to reward high performers,” Lyu said. “But from this research, pay for performance might not be ideal in all situations because we have different workplaces and organizations. There are a lot of factors that influence the effectiveness of pay for performance.”

The best way to help struggling employees is to make it easier for them to change jobs, Sturman said, but many employees are often stuck in toxic workplaces due to financial challenges.

For people who have a narcissistic or abusive boss, it makes it difficult to function, Kong said. Besides leaving their job, people can find support from coworkers. Research suggests that support from coworkers is just as important as support from leaders, he said. Happy hours and social gatherings can also connect people in the company. When people feel like they’re not alone, a positive culture will follow and create a safe environment for employees to speak up.

The research looked at gendered retention patterns among professors to understand if women and men leave academia at different rates.

“We found that women were more likely to leave at every career age, but it varied a lot across field as well as prestige and career age,” CU Boulder doctoral student Katie Spoon said.

The study analyzed employment records of 245,270 tenure-track and tenured professors from 391 universities that grant doctoral degrees, including CU Boulder.

The study found that the gender gap in retention grew for older faculty and faculty with tenure. Spoon said this finding was surprising because people tend to think “you’ve made it” when granted tenure. Instead, the study found more women were leaving at this career stage.

“It was surprising to us that there was a larger gender difference for older faculty,” Spoon said, adding, “We found that gender gaps were largest for full professors.”

Understanding the reason why, however, will require more research.

“It might not be as much about the job precarity of the appointment as people has thought about in the past,” CU Boulder Professor Aaron Clauset said.

To begin to answer the question of why, the team surveyed more than 10,000 current and former faculty members to understand the reasons why they’d leave their jobs.

The survey results showed women, especially tenured women, are more likely to feel pushed out of their positions due to harsh workplace climates, which can include dysfunctional leadership, harassment, discrimination and feelings of not belonging. In comparison, men are more likely to be pulled toward more attractive jobs elsewhere.

The study found leaving for work-life balance was not a major factor and women and men tended to leave jobs for that reason at about equal rates. Spoon said work-life balance is important, but not as gendered as the workplace climate, which could be a signal of shifting cultural norms.

“That was also another surprising result because most of the literature has emphasized work-life balance for women faculty in particular,” Spoon said.

The study also looked at retention in different fields, comparing STEM faculty retention to that of areas like business or social sciences.

In STEM fields, the study found, there’s less of a gendered retention gap. Gaps were larger in non-STEM fields which seems “counterintuitive,” Spoon said.

Clauset said this is one of the points where the study points to more work to understand the reason why the retention rate for women in STEM is more equal to men compared to other fields.

Additionally, CU Boulder was included as one of the institutions in the data set, Clauset said, because it is a large research university with lots of faculty.

He said the overarching results from the study would likely hold up when talking to women faculty at CU Boulder. One way to apply it is to dig deeper and ask questions to uncover why women are leaving the university.

“The data suggests that CU is not unlike the other institutions in our data set,” he said.

Spoon said it’s important to look at the reasons people are leaving rather than the rates to understand if gender equity exists in a department or university.

“It’s an unsatisfying answer, but our results show there’s not one single thing that needs to be done to solve gender retention,” Spoon said. “Instead it’s more of an approach to listening, including faculty and addressing the things they bring up.”

Clauset said workplace climate is understudied and underappreciated and he hopes the study will help change outcomes for women.

“The real question in the long run is whether something will change,” Clauset said, adding, “Our hope is that by providing a broad and detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of this issue it provides new ways to tackle this problem.”

James, the president of the Boulder County NAACP, said Coach Prime is encouraging Boulder’s Black community to be their authentic selves because he is unapologetic about his Black identity.

“He’s expanding, I think, how one may be themselves,” James said, adding, “If you can feel free to express yourself in a way that brings along your culture and your heritage, that’s got to be empowering and a feeling of freedom.”

Many Black people in the Boulder community commonly feel the need to “code switch,” James said, acting one way around each other and acting differently in a white-dominant place like Boulder due to fear of retaliation.

“(Coach Prime) is breathing some sense of community into Boulder that Boulder is severely lacking,” James said, adding, “It gives us something to rally for, and I think when you get to rally for one thing in an entire community it builds a stronger, more concerned, caring community.”

Reiland Rabaka, the founding director of the Center for African & African American Studies at CU Boulder, said Coach Prime’s authenticity is inspiring, and bringing people together from all walks of life. He’s a relatable figure, with his tenacity in recent losses and determination to rebuild the CU Buffs football team – 4-8 in its first season under his direction – into something great.

“The guy is unapologetically African American and he can show that we can be who we are,” Rabaka said.

Jude Landsman, the vice president of the Boulder County NAACP, said Prime, named Thursday by Sports Illustrated as its Sportsperson of the Year, is providing an indirect positivity about Black people to the Boulder community.

“He presents a positive role model. He presents an invigorating role model,” Landsman said. “Coach Prime is unapologetically Black, and that is inspiring.”

Rabaka said Coach Prime, who as the electrifying athlete Deion Sanders is the only person to have played in both a World Series and Super Bowl (winning rings with both the San Francisco 49ers and Dallas Cowboys), has “completely energized” the Black community throughout Boulder County.

Sunday marks one year to the day it was announced that he would be the next head coach of the then-beleaguered CU football team, fresh off the debacle of a 1-11 season.

“Coach Prime has let the entire nation, if not the entire world, know that Boulder County actually has some Black folk out here,” Rabaka said. “That in and of itself is a win.”

Boulder’s racial climate

According to U.S. Census data, Black and African American people make up 1.3% of Boulder County’s total population. In Boulder, it’s 1.1%.

Rabaka said most people don’t think of any kind of Black community in Boulder County, which is why it’s such a big deal Coach Prime turned a spotlight on them.

“I have gone three, four, five days a week and not seen another African or African American living here in Boulder County,” Rabaka said. “Unless I go to the campus, you hardly see us. We’re erased or rendered invisible or, because of money, we’re boxed out of it financially.”

James said Boulder does not have the demographics it has by accident.

She said great people come to Boulder but rarely stick around because it’s not a community that has the cultural and professional amenities that many Black people want.

“They want good schools where their kids are going to be able to flourish and thrive. They want an opportunity to become a homeowner,” James said. “There are so many factors … and Boulder has these really inflated housing prices. The schools have never been the best places for Black children to go and thrive, and policing is always scary. Boulder has a lot of good, but it also has a lot of issues it needs to address.”

For many, some of those issues were underscored by the 2019 incident in which a Black Naropa student was confronted by multiple Boulder police while picking up trash on property where he lived. One officer, who drew both a stun gun and then his service weapon, has since resigned, prior to the conclusion of a disciplinary process. The city of Boulder agreed to settle potential civil claims brought by that student, Zayd Atkinson.

Katrina Miller and Beret Strong are the directors of the documentary “This is [Not] Who We Are,” an award-winning film that explores the history of Black people in Boulder and the lived experiences of its Black residents.

“White people in this community to this day don’t realize how early that history began,” Strong said.

She said Boulder was formed to be a racist community by being elite, and it started as early as the city’s founding. For example, the price of lots when Boulder was established cost $1,000, and in Denver, lots were free. Employment discrimination and expensive housing cut them out of Boulder, and they were refused medical care. Treatment in schools was also a huge issue that remains a problem today, Strong said.

“We’re still grappling with the fact that we are not where we want to be, and we have to keep working,” Strong said. “We’re just not there yet. We hear it from people regularly about what it takes, the fortitude it takes, to stay in the community as a person of color.”

Rabaka said the racism in Boulder is often very subtle. When first arriving in Boulder, Rabaka experienced “intense cultural alienation” and “incessant racial microaggressions” that made Boulder one of the most unwelcoming places Rabaka had ever lived.

“I think that there’s a lot of denial and complicity,” Rabaka said. “I think that Boulder has an image of itself that’s not reality. I think there’s a lot of fantasy in Boulder County, and the reality is that this is arguably one of the most culturally homogenous college towns in the United States of America.”

Rabaka has since stayed in Boulder for the last 20 years with a vision to make it a better place for Black people.

“I have chosen to stay out here because I can see the great promise of the University of Colorado Boulder, and the hiring of Coach Prime is one of the crowning achievements of this current cycle of diversity, equity and inclusion,” Rabaka said. “He immediately brought a kind of attention and let people know that wow, somebody at his level, a BIPOC person at his level, can be comfortable in Boulder.”

Miller said she does feel like the racial climate in Boulder is improving and that Coach Prime is part of that shift. At the same time, she doesn’t feel like it’s Coach Prime’s job to uplift an entire Black community.

“What might be good (about Coach Prime) is that the things about Boulder that make it not so progressive and not so liberal, they’re not so under the rug anymore and they’re not so hidden,” Miller said.

“Some of these things are going to come out more, and there’s going to be more of an examination on it because Deion Sanders is here and CU has more attention on it. So, I hope that it holds our university and our community more accountable because people are watching. The country is watching us.”

Miller said she’d like to see Coach Prime become involved in situations regarding race on campus as they come up – by being a leader, calling it out and saying what’s needed.

“Again, he’s only human. And I hate to add so much pressure to a person who was here to do the job of football,” Miller said, adding, “But it would be wonderful if he did get involved in our local politics and knew who some of the Black leaders are here, and if he met us and got an understanding of what we have been doing and what we’re doing now and try to see where he can get involved.”

Coach Prime was not made available for an interview for this story.

Fighting racism

Rabaka said if Coach Prime sticks around, it could “absolutely” lead to Boulder, Boulder County and CU Boulder becoming more diverse.

“Coach Prime came out here for the same reason I did,” Rabaka said. “There’s incredible opportunities out here. There are rich resources, and if we use them right, we can do something unprecedented.”

James said the longer Coach Prime stays, the better the odds are of a shift in Boulder’s demographics.

“There’s always been Black people in this community, it’s just we’ve never been able to substantially grow our numbers and that’s for a lot of reasons,” James said. “I do think if Coach Prime stuck around a while, it certainly wouldn’t hurt, and it could be a positive move toward changing those demographics.”

Landsman said the welcoming of Coach Prime and promotion of his message is unusual, and it remains to be seen whether Boulder will become more welcoming.

“Let’s see 10 years down the line if Boulder has become a more welcoming place for Black people to go,” Landsman said.

James said Boulder’s welcoming culture has ebbed and flowed over time. It was a progressive, intellectual community when she first arrived, but she noticed those interests and values seemed to dissipate over time.

“Coach Prime is bringing back, in a different way, the interest in wanting to know different cultures,” James said.

Coach Prime is fighting racism in Boulder, Rabaka said, but not through conventional methods.

For example, on Feb 1, the Center for African & African American Studies held its grand opening at CU Boulder. Despite it being national signing day, Coach Prime attended the grand opening for more than an hour.

Rabaka said Coach Prime told him he would send his kids to the CAAAS, recognizing their needs for a community outside of athletics at CU Boulder.

Coach Prime is also fighting racism by disrupting stereotypes, Rabaka said, and simply showing up and doing his job at a high level.

“That’s saying everything without saying something,” Rabaka said, adding, “Deion Sanders helps to affirm African Americans’ full humanity.

“It may not be a conventional critique of racism or combating of racism, but I think that his excellence in athletics is yet another reminder of the grandeur and majesty of African Americans’ humanity.”

The parasite is already associated with risk-taking behavior and mental illness, according to a release, and the CU Boulder study found it may also contribute to signs of frailty including exhaustion and loss of muscle mass.

The parasite, called Toxoplasma gondii, affects about 11% of people in the United States, or roughly 40 million people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Rates tend to be higher in older people, and in some countries, more than 60% of people have been infected, according to the CDC.

“We often think of T. gondii infection as relatively asymptomatic, but this study highlights that for some people it may have significant health consequences later on,” Christopher Lowry, CU Boulder professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology, said in a release.

For the study, the team examined the blood of 601 Spanish and Portuguese adults older than 65 and looked at frailty, including unintentional weight loss, tiredness and loss of cognition.

About 67% of study subjects showed markers in their blood of a latent infection, or an infection by the parasite that was inactive in their body and showed no symptoms.

The researchers did not, as they hypothesized, find an association between an infection to T. gondii and frailty, according to the study. However, they did find that those with a higher concentration of antibodies to the parasite were significantly more likely to be frail.

A higher concentration of antibodies could reflect a more virulent or widespread infection, multiple infections or recent reactivation of a latent infection, the release said.

How it’s spread

Wild and domestic cats are considered the definitive host of the parasite, while warm-blooded animals like birds and rodents are secondary hosts. When cats eat infected animals, T. gondii takes up residence and multiplies in their intestines, shedding eggs in their feces.

People are typically infected through exposure to litter boxes, contaminated water, dirty vegetables or by eating undercooked pork, lamb or other meat that’s infested.

Most people never know they’ve been infected and only about 10% initially have brief flu-like symptoms. Most healthy people recover from it without treatment, according to the CDC.

However, mounting research suggests that the parasite tends to linger dormant for decades, located in cysts in muscle and brain tissue with some serious impacts, the release said.

People who have been infected tend to engage in risky behavior, with research showing they tend to be more impulsive, more entrepreneurial and more likely to get in a car crash, the release said. They also have higher rates of schizophrenia, certain mood disorders, cognitive problems and are more likely to attempt suicide, according to research by Lowry and Teodor Postolache, a professor at University of Maryland School of Medicine and senior author on the new study.

Future research needed

The new study does not prove that T. gondii causes frailty, but it does identify a compelling association for further study.

Their research suggests that infection with the parasite could exacerbate inflammation that already occurs with aging. Because dormant T. gondii tends to hide out in muscle tissue, Postolache suspects it could also play a role in accelerating age-related muscle wasting.

“This paper is important because it provides, for the first time, evidence of the existence of a link between frailty in older adults and intensity of the response to T. gondii infection,” co-author Blanca Laffon, a professor at the University of A Coruña in Spain, said in the release.

For those infected with the parasite, certain medications or immune compromising diseases like HIV or cancer can enable a dormant infection to reactivate with adverse effects. Even in people with healthy immune systems, Lowry said in the release, immune function can decline with age, potentially enabling T. gondii to activate.

The researchers said in the release they hope their study will inspire more research into the relationship between T. gondii and frailty, and ultimately lead to new ways of keeping the parasite from doing harm.

For now, they encourage people — especially pregnant, elderly and immune compromised people— to take steps to avoid infection.

Prevention strategies improve changing the litter box daily and washing hands afterward, avoiding undercooked meat and rinsing fruits and vegetables. Keep cats indoors and avoid stray cats. If pregnant or immunocompromised, avoid changing the litter box if possible. Infection can cause serious problems during pregnancy to a developing fetus.

For those who may be infected, a health care provider can order blood tests specific for the parasite to determine whether there’s an infection and determine how recent it is.

For more information, visit tinyurl.com/puswnhrh.

A new 3-D technology the size of a Scrabble board may be the key to sending physical touch, like holding the hand of a loved one, over long distances.

University of Colorado Boulder researchers created a new shape-shifting gadget compact enough to fit on a card table that may be able to digitize touch. The device is made from a grid of robotic parts that can sense outside pressure and can move up, down and around.

“As technology has progressed, we started with sending text over long distances, then audio and now video,” said Brian Johnson, one of two lead authors of the study, in a news release.  “But we’re still missing touch.”

The technology has the potential to send touch digitally by creating 3-D images of a hand, for example. It could then send the image to another device across the country or world, allowing the receiver to hold the sender’s hand. The device can already change its surface, shake a beaker filled with liquid, generate scrolling 3-D text and move a ball around its surface without it falling off.

Researchers outside of CU Boulder have already developed similar devices. However, this tablet is faster, quieter and takes up less room. The robotic machinery within it can activate as much as 50 times per second.

The idea for the technology developed out of a different project to create synthetic organs. CU Boulder researchers secured funding in 2017 from the National Science Foundation to develop sTISSUE — organs that behave and feel like real organs but are made out of silicone-like materials. In developing that technology, the researchers came up with the idea of a tabletop device.

The innovation also builds off of soft, flexible robots created by researchers at CU Boulder called Hydraulically Amplified Self-Healing Electrostatic actuators. Now, researchers are working to find a way to shrink the actuators to increase the resolution of the display, which could do things like generate braille on a phone screen.

“You could imagine arranging these sensing and actuating cells into any number of different shapes and combinations,” Mantas Naris, co-lead author of the paper and CU Boulder engineering doctoral student, said in a news release. “There’s really no limit to what these technologies could, ultimately, lead to.”