Michele W. Berger

TV news top driver of political echo chambers in U.S.

Duncan Watts and colleagues found that 17% of Americans consume television news from partisan left- or right-leaning sources compared to just 4% online. For TV news viewers, this audience segregation tends to last month over month.

Michele W. Berger

Can nature-inspired designs affect cognition and mood?

A team from the Center for Neuroaesthetics created a biophilic room to test the idea. Preliminary findings from a small pilot show promise, but also spur many questions about how to best use such a space.

Michele W. Berger , Kelsey Geesler, Michael Grant

Solving the mystery of migration into Micronesia

Penn anthropologist Theodore Schurr explains how the use of both ancient DNA and modern genetic materials revealed five paths into this western Pacific region of Oceania, and uncovered subtleties about the society’s marital customs.

Michele W. Berger

Parental nicotine use and addiction risk for children

In research done using rats, Penn Nursing’s Heath Schmidt and colleagues found that males that engaged in voluntary nicotine use had offspring more likely to do so, too. Some offspring also developed impaired memory and anxiety-like behavior.

Michele W. Berger

Frontline voices from the pandemic’s early days

In his new book, “The Wuhan Lockdown,” Guobin Yang uses personal diaries from that city’s residents to recreate how it felt at the epicenter of what was then a scary and unknown new virus.

Michele W. Berger