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USA Today
‘Fruit Love Island’ goes viral, raises big questions about AI ethics
A new AI TikTok video series, "Fruit Love Island," is dominating social media. Woody Hood, director of critical and creative media and film and media studies, said the series is a culmination of fun, pleasure and poison, an "inevitable" amid the height of AI-generated content. "Even going back to claymation in films, we were laughing. That was part of the enjoyment of that stuff, too, going, 'Okay, there are limits on this, but claymation is charming because it has physics to it,'" Hood said. "Digital, I don't know. It seems less charming when it glitches out."
March 30, 2026
Asheville Watchdog
U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards is drafting a bill to increase the regulatory powers of the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in direct response to the four Immediate Jeopardy sanctions it’s leveled at Mission Hospital since 2021. The enhancement of powers would allow CMS to impose meaningful, but tailored consequences for hospitals, said law professor Mark Hall.
March 28, 2026
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia grapples with rounding change after the demise of the penny
The penny died months ago. Now, state lawmakers are giving their two cents on how to handle the dwindling supply of 1-cent coins. Robert Whaples, professor of economics at Wake Forest University, who has advocated for an end to the 1-cent coin, said that rounding prices to the nearest nickel isn’t likely to have much of an impact on consumers, as the total would be just as likely to be rounded up as it would be down.
March 27, 2026
Healio
Strength training fails to reduce knee stress in osteoarthritis
"The most important thing for older adults with osteoarthritis, or even older adults in general, is to keep moving. Mobility is really important," said health and exercise science researcher Stephen Messier. "When older adults lose their mobility, bad things happen. Let your body help you determine what days you can do more and what days you can do a little bit less, but keep moving and after a while, that pain is going to subside. It doesn’t really matter what exercise you do. Just do one that you enjoy and can do for the rest of your life.
March 27, 2026
Los Angeles Times
We shouldn’t treat Disney adults like cultural abominations
“Authenticity objection” is the belief that there’s something fundamentally wrong with visits to theme parks like the Magic Kingdom because they occur in a wholly manufactured environment," writes philosophy professor Adam Kadlac. "But in an age of curated social media accounts, influencer marketing and political doublespeak, the manufactured worlds of Disney might offer more authenticity than you’d think."
This article was originally published in "The Conversation."
March 26, 2026
The Washington Post
Wisconsin elections chair reminds voters they can’t bet on state races
The chair of elections in Wisconsin had a helpful reminder for voters in the state Wednesday: Don't place bets on a state election. It's illegal. Koleman Strumpf, a political economy professor who specializes in prediction markets at Wake Forest University, told The Washington Post that it would be difficult for Wisconsin officials to identify and prosecute individuals who violate the statute. “If you go and find John Q. Citizen betting $50 on an election, and you do something to this person, you’re going to look not so good,” Strumpf said. “It’s not worth the time.”
March 26, 2026
National Geographic
Newly discovered primate species could redraw the ape family tree
Researchers in Egypt have found the first fossilized ape from North Africa–or at least, part of its lower jaw and some of its teeth. Ellen Miller, a paleoanthropologist at Wake Forest and a National Geographic Explorer who has worked in Wadi Moghra but was not involved in the current study, says many of the fossils at Moghra are broken, so the recovery of such a well-preserved fossil is surprising and very welcome. “Almost everything we know from early Miocene apes comes from sites in East Africa, and then there are lots of apes known from middle Miocene sites in Eurasia,” Miller said. “So the recovery of Masripithecus makes it tempting to draw arrows on maps.”
March 26, 2026
The New Indian Express
While these wagers may seem light-hearted, betting around elections is far from new. A 2004 study by economists Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf, which analysed US presidential betting markets between 1868 and 1940, found that such markets were widespread, highly organised, and often remarkably accurate in predicting outcomes.
March 25, 2026
Washington Post Opinions
Trump is right about polls — and the better bet
Other countries, like Britain, have long allowed betting on elections. The practice was also well established in the United States between 1868 and 1940, with citizens trading hundreds of millions of dollars, and the New York Times providing “nearly daily price quotations from early October until Election Day,” As Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf wrote, these markets did a “remarkable job forecasting elections in an era before scientific polling.”
March 25, 2026
Charlotte Business Journal
Wake Forest launches ‘Talks at the Tap’ as Charlotte engagement expands
So an archeologist walks into a bar … In Wake Forest University’s vision, there’s no joke here, but there is a fun, informative evening with a welcoming, informal vibe. Talks at the Tap, as it will be known, is the University’s initiative to engage with the Charlotte community. The monthly gatherings will rotate between breweries and topics, each featuring a Wake Forest professor sharing insights from their area of expertise — from pop culture and current trends to big ideas shaping our world.
March 25, 2026
Inside Higher Ed
The real ‘diploma divide’ is about identity, not beliefs
In the past few years, people have talked a lot about the “diploma divide” as the new fault line in American politics. The prevailing wisdom is that higher education has recently begun to act as an ideological sorting machine, creating two Americas with radically different views on the nation’s most pressing problems. Some pundits blame “woke” professors and others working-class resentment. Higher education may not be dramatically shaping what Americans think about political issues, but it is increasingly determining which political team they play for. This is the real diploma divide. Although smaller than people often think, our research indicates that it is very real and growing. In an age of polarization and precipitously declining public trust in higher education, we would do well to heed this warning sign.
March 24, 2026
Miami Herald
Irrational decision or helpful evolutionary adaptation?
Is it irrational to avoid swimming in lakes on hot summer days? How rational is it to fear flying? These reactions raise a deeper question: What does it mean to call a response "rational" or "irrational"? What ultimately matters is not labeling people as rational or irrational, but being explicit about which conception of rationality is at work – and why. That choice, in turn, shapes whether public policy aims to nudge behavior, educate citizens or redesign environments so that human reasoning can operate at its best.
Originally published in The Conversation, this story was reprinted in more than 150 news outlets.
March 24, 2026