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In research recently published in Nature, Jinsong Huang, Louis D. Rubin Jr. Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Applied Physical Sciences, shared his group’s progress on a new type of photon counting detector that could offer safer medical imaging and enhance nighttime photography.
The conventional wisdom — backed by research — is that women, on average, achieve worse outcomes than men when negotiating. But Angelica Leigh ’20 (PhD) found that stereotype didn’t match her experiences as a Black woman.
Leigh, assistant professor of management and organization at Duke University, decided to explore the intersection of gender and race with Sreedhari Desai, associate professor of organizational behavior and Crist W. Blackwell Scholar at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.
Does being a member of two social groups that have experienced discrimination — Black and female — lead to worse outcomes, overall, in negotiations, with the double identity leading to greater disparities?
To find out, Leigh and Desai conducted three negotiation studies where they teased out differences based on race and gender, and they explored how different traits influence those results.
The results? The studies showed better outcomes, at least in some negotiations, for Black women compared to Black men and white women. On some social measures, such as wages, women of color still experience worse outcomes than white women and men of all races, Desai said, so there are still puzzling gaps.
“Oftentimes the generic advice given to women is that they will face backlash if they behave in assertive ways,” Desai said. “This backlash might not apply to Black women.”
She warns Black women “not to be derailed by such messages and to go play to your own strengths.”
In adult human brains, the hippocampus generates new neurons (adult-born neurons, or ABNs) throughout life, helping us maintain memories and regulate emotions. Scientists call this process “adult hippocampus neurogenesis.” In people with Alzheimer’s disease, this process is impaired, leading to reduced production of ABNs with poorer qualities.
Given that Alzheimer’s patients often develop both cognitive symptoms (such as memory loss) and non-cognitive symptoms (such as anxiety and depression) for which new neuron generation plays a critical role, one way to help Alzheimer’s patients achieve symptom relief could be to restore this function.
Published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, research from UNC School of Medicine scientists demonstrated that stimulating a brain region called the supramammillary nucleus effectively enhanced adult-born neurons in the otherwise impaired Alzheimer’s brains of mice.
After patterned stimulation of the supramammillary nucleus, Alzheimer’s brains developed more ABNs with improved qualities. Importantly, activation of these ABNs restored both cognitive and affective deficits in the mouse models.
“Ultimately, the hope is to develop first-in-class, highly targeted therapies to treat AD and related dementia,” said senior author Juan Song, PhD, associate professor of pharmacology and Jeffrey Houpt Distinguished Investigator at the UNC School of Medicine.
When Hurricane Florence made landfall on North Carolina’s coast in 2018, it brought record rainfall causing catastrophic flooding and damages to communities across the eastern portion of the state.
Estimating the financial impacts of household flooding is complex because direct damages often snowball into other financial risks, like a decrease in property value or loss of equity. Generally, post-disaster damage assessments focus on insured and uninsured losses, but these numbers do not account for the secondary impacts to households, lenders, local governments and other stakeholders who may also share in the financial consequences if a property owner defaults on their loan or abandons their property.
A new study published in Earth’s Future by researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill estimates $562 million in previously unquantified financial risks arising from property value changes and uninsured flood damages in eastern North Carolina as a result of Hurricane Florence
“The financial risks imposed in eastern North Carolina by this single hurricane exceed $500 million, compared to roughly $300 million in insured losses, and have not been estimated nor previously considered in flood-related recovery efforts,” said Greg Characklis, PhD, W.R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor, co-author of the study and director of the Center on Financial Risk in Environmental Systems.
“This work evaluates flood-related financial risk in a new way that extends the analysis beyond just an assessment of the insured and uninsured losses that property owners experience as a result of a flood.”
