Communications | Penn Today

Rendering of a brain with signals insinuating AI and data.

Brain signals can predict how often a news article is shared online

A new study from the Communication Neuroscience Lab finds that, even across cultures, neural models can reliably predict whether an article is popular on Facebook.

Politico.com

‘Positive and negative, usually both’: In Central America, a booming economy comes at a cost

College of Arts and Sciences third-year Anusha Mathur from Los Angeles explores how the once-remote beach village of Playa Venao in Panama is grappling with the environmental and community costs of newfound prosperity.

WHYY (Philadelphia)

Camden County launches virtual reality training program to teach people how to use Narcan for drug overdoses

The School of Nursing and the Annenberg School for Communication have partnered with New Jersey’s Camden County to create a virtual reality training video for administering the opioid-reversing drug Narcan.

Axios

Jill Biden helps debut modern version of “Schoolhouse Rock”

A 2022 survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that less than half of U.S. adults could name all three branches of government.

MSNBC

Why I’m not expecting my friends to make social media posts about Israel

A study from the Annenberg School for Communication found that people primarily share information on social media that they feel is meaningful to themselves or to the people they know.

Top row, from left to right: Kurt Thomas Barnhart, Christopher B. Forrest, and Susan L. Furth. Bottom row, left to right: Desmond Upton Patton and Robert H. Vonderheide.

National Academy of Medicine elects five new members from Penn

Kurt T. Barnhart, Christopher B. Forrest, Susan L. Furth, Desmond Upton Patton, and Robert H. Vonderheide are among 100 new Academy members elected this year, one of the highest honors in health and medicine.

The New York Times

Trump is excited about these three things

Matthew Levendusky of the School of Arts & Sciences explains why a repeat Trump-Biden presidential showdown in 2024 could play out much like the 2020 and 2016 elections.

Stat

How headlines about the RSV antibody injection could cloud parents’ decision-making

In a co-written Op-Ed, Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center says that attention-grabbing headlines could conflate the new RSV antibody injection with anti-vaccine sentiment.

A doctor being interviewed for a podcast.

Five factors that assess well-being of science predict support for science funding

A new study from the Annenberg Public Policy Center introduces an assessment model to gauge the extent to which public perceptions align with the way scientists define their work.