The Academic Minute

With money, trust is key. So how did Benjamin Franklin stop counterfeiters when paper money was so easy to fake? Khachatur Manukyan, research associate professor at the University of Notre Dame, looks into the past to find out. Faculty Bio: Khachatur Manukyan is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Nuclear Science Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame. His research combines materials science, chemistry, and advanced characterization techniques to study energy materials, nuclear materials, and historical artifacts. His recent work has used modern analytical methods to investigate the materials and manufacturing technologies behind coins and paper money, revealing previously unknown details. Transcript: As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, many people are reflecting on the ideas and individuals that shaped the nation. Less attention is paid to one practical challenge faced by the American colonies: creating money that people could trust.In the eighteenth century, shortages of gold and silver coins forced colonial governments to rely on paper currency to support trade, public projects, and economic growth. Unlike coins, however, paper bills could be copied, altered, and counterfeited.Recent scientific analysis of hundreds of surviving colonial paper money notes reveals that Benjamin Franklin approached this challenge as both a printer and an inventor. Long before modern security threads, holograms, or microprinting, he developed a collection of material-based security features designed to make paper money more difficult to imitate.Using advanced scientific methods, researchers examined the inks, fibers, fillers, and printing techniques used in eighteenth-century currency. The study showed that Franklin incorporated colored fibers into paper, used specialized carbon-based pigments, added translucent mineral particles, created distinctive watermarks, and produced detailed impressions directly from natural leaves. These features created notes that were difficult for counterfeiters to reproduce.Many of these details are nearly invisible to the naked eye, yet they become clear through modern scientific analysis. The findings reveal that Franklin understood a principle that remains central to currency design today: trust can be engineered directly into a material’s physical structure.By helping people distinguish genuine notes from counterfeits, these innovations strengthened confidence in a financial system that supported a growing colonial economy.Three centuries later, the challenge remains the same. Whether protecting colonial banknotes or modern currency, the goal is to create something valuable that is also difficult to fake. Read More: [The Conversation] - We analyzed paper money printed by Ben Franklin to uncover his anti‑counterfeiting techniques and materials innovations [PNAS] - Multiscale analysis of Benjamin Franklin’s innovations in American paper money This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Why do some bumblebee larvae become queens while others do not? Etya Amsalem, associate professor of entomology at Penn State University, looks for the answer. Faculty Bio: Etya Amsalem is an Associate Professor of Entomology at Penn State University. She earned her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Zoology from Tel Aviv University, Israel, and completed postdoctoral training at Penn State University and the University of Haifa, focusing on chemical communication, insect genomics, and bee health. Her research examines the evolution and mechanisms of social behavior in insects, integrating approaches from chemical ecology, evolutionary biology, functional genomics, behavior, and physiology. Transcript: When we think about a bee colony, we often imagine a queen ruling her kingdom. But in some social insects, the colony functions less like a monarchy and more like a self-organizing society. A defining feature of social insects is the division of labor between females. Queens and workers often share the same DNA, yet develop into individuals with very different roles. Queens are large, long-lived, and reproductive, whereas workers are smaller and typically nonreproductive. But what determines which larvae become queens? My colleagues and I investigated this question in bumblebees, seasonal social insects that are also vital pollinators. A single queen starts a colony in the spring and produces hundreds of workers that rear her offspring. Later in the season, workers begin laying their own eggs, while the colony starts producing new queens. To understand how the same DNA produces both workers and queens, we manipulated juvenile hormone levels in workers and larvae and tracked the movement the labeled hormone. Juvenile hormone regulates reproduction and development across insects, but it was unclear who controls caste development and how these signals reach larvae. Workers treated with juvenile hormone produced larger offspring and more queens. In contrast, treating larvae directly did not produce queens and often caused workers to eliminate them. We also found that larvae respond only during a brief developmental window. Most importantly, we discovered that workers transfer juvenile hormone to larvae during feeding, providing direct evidence that workers regulate queen development through hormone transfer. These findings reveal a bottom-up rather than top-down system. As workers mature, their hormone levels rise, increasing the amount transferred to larvae. Collectively, these interactions determine which larvae become the next generation of queens, showing that the colony’s future is shaped not by the queen alone, but by the workers themselves. Read More: [ScienceDirect] - The making of a queen: Hormonal regulation of female caste in the social bee Bombus impatiens This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

Being an influencer has become a popular career goal for young people. Matt Simoneau, professor of career and technical education at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, explores why. Faculty Bio: Dr. Matt Simoneau is a professor of Career and Technical Education at the University of Wisconsin–Stout. His research explores how young people develop career aspirations, with a particular focus on the influence of social media, career education, and vocational pathways. He collaborates with researchers in the United States and Norway to study how students imagine their futures and how schools can better support career development. His work has been featured in The Conversation and has been presented at national and international education conferences. Transcript: When a second grader in Norway drew a YouTube logo instead of writing down a career, my colleagues and I asked why. The child simply replied, “Because YouTubers are famous and make lots of money.”We expected that answer to be unique. It wasn’t.When we asked second graders in Wisconsin the same question, many gave remarkably similar responses. They also wanted to become YouTubers or social media influencers.Since 2021, my colleagues and I have been studying how children and teenagers in the United States and Norway imagine their futures.What we found surprised us.More than 60 percent of the middle and high school students we surveyed said social media influenced their career aspirations. For many young people, TikTok, YouTube and Instagram have become powerful sources of career information, second only to family members, teachers and friends.Social media isn’t always a negative influence. Some students told us they discovered careers like marine biology, filmmaking or engineering through videos they watched online.The challenge is that schools often rely on career assessments and planning programs developed before social media transformed how young people learn about work. Many students described these activities as repetitive or disconnected from the careers they were actually considering.One student even called a required career survey a “waste of time” because it recommended becoming a truck driver after she had already been accepted into nursing school.Young people are clearly thinking about their futures. But increasingly, those futures are being shaped not only in classrooms and counseling offices, but also through the content they scroll past every day.Understanding where students get their career ideas may be just as important as helping them decide where those ideas should lead. Read More: [The Conversation] - From Norway to Wisconsin, children want to be social media influencers when they grow up This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

How has our society’s view of hunger and response to it changed over time? Claire Strom, professor of history at Rollins College, explores the history. Faculty Bio: An agricultural historian, Claire Strom is a history professor and the Rapetti-Trunzo Chair of History at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Her areas of specialization include: Agricultural history; the American South; and the progressive era. She is co-author of the 2024 book Empty Plates: A History of Hunger Relief covering a worldwide review of hunger relief over the centuries until the 1960s, then delving deeper into U.S. domestic hunger relief and the national food bank movement through to present day. Strom earned her PhD from Iowa State University. For more than a decade, she served as editor of the Journal of Agricultural History. Her Professional Organizations include: Southern Association of Women’s Historians Southern Historical Association Agricultural History Society. Among her Awards and Honors: The Gladys Baker Lifetime Achievement Award, Agricultural History Society, 2021. Transcript: A deep dive into the history of hunger reveals that the lack of adequate food is ubiquitous in human history. No society has existed without hungry people. Methods of addressing hunger are equally old and have varied greatly over time. In England, during the reign of Elizabeth I, relief became a governmental responsibility with little sympathy for the able-bodied poor. This notion migrated from England to Colonial America, where some communities paid families to take in paupers, even auctioning them off to the lowest bidder. The Enlightenment and social Darwinism of the 18th and 19th centuries heightened beliefs that poverty was a moral failing, leading to the incarceration of many paupers in workhouses. The intense poverty and hunger of the Great Depression muted condemnation of the poor and increased governmental social programs. The years after World War II continued this expansion of governments’ involvement in their citizens’ welfare, with the development of the idea of universal human rights, in which food figured significantly. In the US, this culminated in reforms of the Great Society, including the Food Stamp Act of 1964.In 1967 businessman John Van Hengel opened the first food bank, relying on surplus food from fields and packing sheds. Food banks spread throughout North America and the world in the subsequent decades. And, by the 1980s, with the retreat of government from social justice, food banks and their corporate donors became increasingly important in combating hunger. Second Harvest, renamed Feeding America, has surveyed hunger in the United States since 1993, offering longitudinal data. The agency’s studies show that the problem of hunger is worsening, not improving. Such findings leave many food bank employees conflicted, stating that they recognize the need to feed the hungry but hope that government and corporate interests would devote more attention and resources to ending poverty itself. Read More: [Rollins] - Strom Publishes Book on History of Hunger Relief [Rollins] - Strom Receives Lifetime Achievement Award from the Agricultural History Society This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

The fourth wave of the opioid crisis may be receding, but progress is still uneven overall. Joseph Friedman, resident physician at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, examines this. Faculty Bio: Joseph Friedman, MD, PhD, MPH joined UC San Diego School of Medicine as a Psychiatry Research Medical Resident from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he completed his MD and PhD in Social Medicine. Before that, he undertook a master’s in public health and a three-year data science fellowship at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. His research combines epidemiological and anthropological approaches to studying substance use, drug overdose, mental illness and other socially-bound causes of mortality and morbidity. He has a particular interest in the US-Mexico border region, and has spent several years living and working in Tijuana, Mexico. Transcript: After years of record-breaking increases, drug overdose deaths in the United States fell sharply between 2023 and 2024. In our new study, we found that the national overdose death rate declined by almost a quarter, driven largely by decreases in deaths involving illicit fentanyl.These findings represent a significant turning point in the overdose crisis. Researchers often describe the epidemic as unfolding in four waves: prescription opioids, heroin, fentanyl and, most recently, fentanyl combined with stimulants such as methamphetamine and cocaine. For the first time, we observed declines in deaths involving both fentanyl and stimulants, suggesting that the fourth wave of the crisis may also be beginning to recede.This is a historic shift. After years of watching overdose deaths climb higher and higher, it is encouraging to see evidence that the trend is moving in the opposite direction. At the same time, the findings offer important reasons for caution. Deaths involving methamphetamine and cocaine without fentanyl continued to increase and accounted for a growing share of overdose fatalities. If these trends continue, stimulants may soon surpass opioids as the defining addiction-related public health challenge in the United States. We also found that xylazine, a veterinary sedative increasingly found in the illicit drug supply, was involved in a growing proportion of overdose deaths.The study also highlights persistent inequities. Although Black Americans experienced the largest decline in overdose death rates between 2023 and 2024, their rates remained substantially higher than the national average. American Indian and Alaska Native populations continued to experience the highest overdose death rates of any group we examined.The recent decline in overdose deaths is encouraging, but it does not mean the crisis is over. Sustaining this progress will require continued investment in addiction treatment, harm reduction and overdose prevention, while ensuring that the communities most affected by the epidemic are not left behind. Read More: [Wiley] - Charting the decline of the fourth wave: US overdose deaths by race, ethnicity and substance involvement This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org