When policymakers and city officials plan for climate change, they rely on economic studies showing how extreme heat impacts violent crime, public health, energy grids, and crop yields. However, a new study published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists reveals a hidden problem in that research: the temperature proxies used…
Categories: Research & Discovery
Archaeologist Terry Brock and a team of students are working to salvage artifacts from Historic Bethabara Park in Winston-Salem. Their efforts to conserve and catalog thousands of pieces of pottery and other items from Bethabara (pronounced beth-ab-uh-ruh) will shed light on the first Moravian settlement in North Carolina, which dates to the 1750s. A new…
Categories: Community Impact, Research & Discovery, Undergraduate research
Research underway in the lab of Rebecca Alexander, professor in Wake Forest University’s Department of Chemistry, is shedding light on a peculiar human bacteria, Mycoplasma penetrans. Alexander’s work to understand how and why this unique pathogen acts as it does could one day lead to new classes of drugs that better target illnesses associated with…
Categories: Research & Discovery
While rising sea levels, fierce storms and shoreline development eat away at wetlands along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the eroding soils dump 660,000 metric tons of carbon pollution into the ocean every year, according to new Wake Forest University research. That carbon can create a more acidic ocean, endangering oyster and clam growth…
Categories: Research & Discovery
For breast cancer survivors, new research shows that feelings of depression and perceptions of psychological stress make the biggest difference in whether they experience fatigue up to two years after chemotherapy started. Researchers had thought that damage to the heart caused by chemotherapy would be the main contributor to survivor fatigue. But that turned out…
Categories: Research & Discovery
Before you prompt AI to answer another question or perform another task, a Wake Forest computer scientist wants you to know it could expose your sensitive data. Ying Zhang, an assistant professor in Wake Forest University’s Department of Computer Science, studies security in software engineering. Her latest research, “How Your Credentials Are Leaked by LLM…
Categories: Research & Discovery
Biologist Josh Currie explains what he has learned about limb regeneration in axolotls so far and how it might apply to humans in the future.
Categories: Experts, Research & Discovery
With Federal Reserve communications, it seems intuitive that clearer, more precise information is always better—especially when dealing with money. But Wake Forest University economists Aeimit Lakdawala and Jinyoung Seo, together with Myungkyu Shim of Yonsei University, show that this is not always the case. The team’s new working paper, “On the Optimal Precision of Central…
Categories: Research & Discovery
Society often views happiness as a destination to be reached through self-help books and the advice of Instagram influencers. Christian Waugh, professor of psychology at Wake Forest University, says the pursuit of resilience—rather than happiness—provides a more sustainable framework for navigating life’s stressors. Waugh studies emotions, stress and coping and has published research on how…
Categories: Experts, Research & Discovery
Investigating a common gene in three very different species – salamanders, mice and zebrafish – scientists have discovered the potential for a novel gene therapy aimed at eventually regrowing limbs in humans, according to new research published this week. “This significant research brought together three labs, working across three organisms to compare regeneration,” said Wake…
Categories: Research & Discovery