Research

Art historian walks into the Middle Ages

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 22:27:17 +0000

Art historian walks into the Middle Ages Rachel Sauer Wed, 02/25/2026 - 15:27

Clint Talbott

�� Boulder Professor Kirk Ambrose set out to better understand art, doubt and medieval pilgrimages, but his 800-mile walk has modern implications

At some point during his trek, Kirk Ambrose felt that walking was “too fast.” Days stretched and the small loomed large. He and his wife would stop to admire a spider, then just talk about it.

“It really did change my perceptions,” he says. And that was kind of the point.

Kirk Ambrose (right), a �� Boulder professor of classics, walked nearly 800 miles along medieval pilgrimage routes, joined for part of the journey by his wife, Kim Dickey, a professor of art and art history. (Photo: Kirk Ambrose)

Last summer, Ambrose, a professor of classics at the University of Colorado Boulder, walked nearly 800 miles along medieval pilgrimage routes—much of it on the Via Jacobi, the Way of St. James, which threads through France toward Santiago de Compostela in Spain. His wife, Kim Dickey, who is a �� Boulder professor of ceramics, joined him for part of the walk.

Ambrose trained for the trek, but the goal was not athletic. It was scholarly. The long walk served as research for a book he’s writing about art and doubt in the 11th and 12th centuries.

“I wanted to get a sense of, as much as is possible in the modern day, what these experiences were like,” he says. “Pilgrimage has been a framework for understanding medieval art—especially the 12th century—and I wanted to probe that from the ground.”

He approached the journey with “a healthy dose of skepticism.” The romantic picture of pilgrims dutifully trudging from shrine to shrine, he argues, owes much to early 20th‑century American portrayals of pilgrimages.

Ambrose cites Arthur Kingsley Porter, a wealthy American scholar who toured Europe by chauffeured Rolls‑Royce and helped popularize the idea of being on the road as a way to understand the spread of medieval art. Porter’s writings reflected a privileged and American way of moving through the world, Ambrose suggests, adding that Porter’s perspectives differed from those of most Europeans.

The road and its surroundings

The walk itself focused Ambrose’s attention on the social fabric that makes pilgrimages possible. “What interested me, perhaps more than the pilgrim, was the whole support network,” he said. He met volunteers who cleaned bathrooms and retirees who opened bedrooms—chambres d’hôtes—and cooked dinner for strangers.

Many of these workers had left urban careers after the pandemic, moved by a desire to be close to a journey even if they could not make one themselves. “Again and again, I heard a version of the same idea: ‘I travel through the people I encounter, even though I’m staying in the same spot.’”

The observation seemed timeless. Medieval monks, often prohibited from physical travel, were encouraged to undertake “spiritual pilgrimages”—imagined journeys toward the divine. The modern hosts Ambrose met felt like their analogues, he said.

Ambrose trained for a year—backpack full of books—before setting out; he finished the walk in just over two months without a blister. But the physical feat was secondary.

One observation about pilgrimages, he says, is “how much time you are not in churches.” Most days were focused on ferns, salamanders, hunger and the logistics of the next bed. Sacred sites punctuated but did not define the experience.

Scholarship in motion

Kirk Ambrose's journey took him along Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. (Photo: Kirk Ambrose)

Some scholars have argued that artistic styles spread via pilgrim highways. Ambrose suggests otherwise.

“There’s an increasing body of scholarship that challenges the idea that artists simply ‘followed’ pilgrims,” he says. “Institutional affiliation and alliances often explain transmission better—monasteries, chapters, reform movements—networks that stretch across regions through personal relationships, not roads.”

The variety he encountered along the way—the “dizzying” mix of styles and architectural solutions—underscored that point.

He offers a contemporary analogy: Rather than assuming ideas spread evenly across a state, think of a university department with deep ties to a lab in the Netherlands—ideas may travel faster via that friendship than along any map. The medieval equivalents—papal circles, Cluniac reform, houses of canons—made and remade aesthetic choices at large scale and across geography.

Ambrose also questions the notion of the Middle Ages as just an “Age of Faith.”

“I’m trying to complicate the emotional landscape,” he says. “Doubt is a primary motivator.” In the 12th century, commentaries on the Book of Job—which wrestles with faith and doubt—were among the most copied texts.

Ambrose notes that art from this period confronts doubt, raising questions such as: Which relic is genuine? Is the Eucharist literally the body of Christ or a symbol? What do I treat as true when I’m surrounded by competing claims?

Even images of damnation—liars punished, tongues ripped out—suggest a culture trying to distinguish fact from fiction. Today, humans face similar questions, he observes.

Ambrose speaks with delight about the people he met on the walk. “There’s a saying on the route that the kingdom of pilgrimage is 2,000 miles long and 5 feet wide,” he says. On that path, one might find an octogenarian walking from Budapest to Santiago—eight or nine months out and back—or a group of students between semesters, or a CEO on sabbatical. Most of the walkers he met weren’t religious.

He says the experience evoked what cultural anthropologist Victor Turner called the liminal experience—a phase between two stages of life, states of being or locations. “I met people from 18 to their 70s. We were all pilgrims together, regardless of motivation.”

Scenes from a (very long) walk

St.-Privat-d’Allier in France.

A fire salamander on the trail near Espalion, France.

The rooftops of Ste.-Foy, Conques in France.

Lungerersee in Switzerland.

View of Fribourg, Switzerland.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about classics? Show your support.

�� Boulder Professor Kirk Ambrose set out to better understand art, doubt and medieval pilgrimages, but his 800-mile walk has modern implications.

Traditional

White

Top photo: Kirk Ambrose on the trail. (All photos courtesy Kirk Ambrose)

Scholar considers language, identity and the fight over shared symbols

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:42:36 +0000

Scholar considers language, identity and the fight over shared symbols Rachel Sauer Mon, 02/16/2026 - 10:42

Cody DeBos

�� Boulder linguistics researcher Kate Arnold-Murray studies what a Facebook fight reveals about identity

In 2019, Washington, D.C.’s Pride celebrations became a flashpoint—but not just for the usual political tensions. Organizers of the annual Dyke March barred participants from carrying the Jewish Pride flag, sparking a wider debate about symbols and the meanings they carry.

Organizers claimed the flag too closely resembled the Israeli flag and could be insensitive to pro-Palestinian participants. Jewish LGBTQ+ activists, many of whom had marched in the event for years, were stunned.

“I was actually living in Washington, D.C., at the time,” says Kate Arnold-Murray, a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “I was out of town at the time, so I was looking at things involving the march on Facebook and saw all these arguments going on. I wanted to get to the root of what people were upset about—what people who presumably should be on the same page were arguing about.”

�� Boulder scholar Kate Arnold-Murray has studied how the six-pointed Star of David became the center of conflict in a space that promotes solidarity.

What began as curiosity while browsing turned into years of research for Arnold-Murray, culminating in her recent publication in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.

Her study looks at how a single symbol—the six-pointed Star of David—became the center of conflict in a space that promotes solidarity.

Bridging language and politics

In her doctoral work at �� Boulder, Arnold-Murray focuses on how language produces and reflects political identity in America.

“Most of my work involves language and politics on the left in the United States. This piece ties into that work because these are presumably mostly political actors on the left in arguments with each other,” she says.

In her paper, Arnold-Murray examines a trove of public Facebook comments from individuals and organizations reacting to the 2019 Dyke March decision.

“As a member of both the Washington, D.C., queer community and the Washington, D.C., Jewish community, it was like my two sides were fighting, and I wanted to understand why,” she says.

The problem of misrecognition

The controversy centered on the Jewish Pride flag: a rainbow background with a white Star of David in the middle. For some, the star was a proud symbol of Jewish identity that dates back thousands of years. For others, it was too reminiscent of the Israeli flag—and thus a political statement they opposed.

To understand the disagreement, Arnold-Murray turned to the concept of indexicality, or the connection between a sign and its social meaning.

“Indexical misrecognition is accounting for the possibility that we might have misunderstandings based on our lived experiences shaping how we interpret signs like a symbol or word,” she explains.

In other words, what one person sees as an expression of faith or cultural belonging, another may see as a symbol of state violence or exclusion.

“In this instance, each group came with a different notion of what the Star of David means based on their lived experiences—and that’s where we get that misrecognition.”

Arnold-Murray’s paper takes it further. She argues that not only do symbols connect with personal and cultural identities, but they can lead to conflict because their meanings are not fixed. That’s especially true when it comes to symbols like the Star of David, whose associations stretch across religion, nationalism, ethnicity and more.

“If we can find ways to stop arguing about symbols and come together a little more, we can have more political unity. But that has to start with listening to the voices of marginalized individuals and understanding that the signs we use might carry multiple meanings,” says �� Boulder linguistics scholar Kate Arnold-Murray. (Photo: Tom Morris/Wikimedia Commons)

“Another example is the phrase ‘Are you a friend of Dorothy?’ which has been used within the queer community to indicate that someone is queer. But to someone who is not queer, they might not share that same meaning and they might say, ‘Dorothy who?’” Arnold-Murray says.

One flag, many meanings

Arnold-Murray also uses the term bricolage to describe the Jewish Pride flag. In the art world, bricolage refers to a construction created from layers of different materials.

“Here, we have the Jewish Pride flag as a construction of bricolage, where there are the meaningful horizontal rainbow stripes of the queer pride flag and then the white Star of David, which can indicate Judaism or potentially Israel, depending on one’s reading,” she says.

The ambiguity of meaning in signs consisting of multiple parts is what often leads to misrecognition. Since the Jewish Pride flag combines two strong identity symbols, any interpretation is bound to stir deep emotions, Arnold-Murray explains.

“It’s when we have these signs that are so tied up with our identity and who we are that we get these big conflicts among, presumably, a queer community where a lot of people agree on political issues overall.”

For many Jewish participants in the 2019 Dyke March, banning the flag was more than a debate over a symbol.

“A lot of the commenters who were against the ban of the Jewish pride flag were claiming that the ban was anti-Semitic and against them as Jews and that they felt excluded from the march,” Arnold-Murray says.

For organizers, allowing the flag could have been seen as endorsing a political stance they didn’t share. It was a lose-lose situation made worse by how personal it felt for everyone involved.

What’s at stake

Arnold-Murray is careful to warn that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to symbolic conflict. But she does suggest that understanding how symbols work, and why layered meanings can spark conflict, can lead to more empathetic conversations.

“I think the stakes are huge. When we have these signs that are tied to identity, it can feel like a personal attack to be contesting what they mean,” she says.

“If we can find ways to stop arguing about symbols and come together a little more, we can have more political unity,” she adds. “But that has to start with listening to the voices of marginalized individuals and understanding that the signs we use might carry multiple meanings.”

In a political landscape increasingly fractured by culture wars and identity debates, that goal may feel out of reach. But for Arnold-Murray, it all comes back to understanding.

“Meaning isn’t fixed. When it comes to situations like this, what’s really important is listening, being willing to apologize, and being willing to move forward while being as inclusive as possible,” she says. “Understanding that meanings come from lived experiences is a good starting point.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about linguistics? Show your support

�� Boulder linguistics researcher Kate Arnold-Murray studies what a Facebook fight reveals about identity.

Traditional

White

Top photo: Ted Eytan/Wikimedia Commons

One safety step sparks another

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 22:15:23 +0000

One safety step sparks another Rachel Sauer Tue, 02/10/2026 - 15:15

Bradley Worrell

Research from �� Boulder environmental economist Grant Webster finds that wildfire risk mitigation and proactive evacuation preparation are complementary

The 2025 Los Angeles fires, the 2023 Lahaina Fire in Hawaii and the 2018 Camp Fire in northern California were rapid-moving wildfires that resulted in 196 combined fatalities, tens of thousands of displaced residents and billions of dollars in property damage.

Emergency preparedness experts have long recognized that wildfire risk mitigation and proactive evacuation efforts can both play important roles in lessening the risk of danger to people and property. And yet, previous research focused on those two efforts independently of one another, says Grant Webster, an environmental economist and postdoctoral research associate with the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Seeking to bridge that gap, Webster and his fellow researchers at the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey analyzed household survey data from the Wildfire Research Center (WiRē) collected in 25 wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities across five Western states, specifically examining both mitigation and preparedness measures.

Grant Webster, a postdoctoral research associate with the Institute of Behavioral Science and �� Boulder PhD graduate in economics, and his research colleagues find that wildfire risk mitigation and proactive evacuation preparation are complementary.

“Our interest was looking at whether there’s a relationship between them. Is there a trade-off, like some people deciding, ‘I’m really prepared to evacuate but I’m not going to mitigate my home,’ or vice versa?” he says.

After evaluating their findings, Webster and his co-authors determined that those two strategies are not competing priorities but instead are mutually reinforcing behaviors. They explain their conclusion in a recently published paper in Ecological Economics,

“When people think about their risk and take action in one area, they are more likely to take action in the other,” he explains. “There’s a spillover between the two.”

Webster says this means that a homeowner who takes proactive mitigation measures—such as trimming the vegetation around their home, clearing the area of combustibles (such as chopped wood) and upgrading building materials to make their home more fire resistant—are statistically more likely to plan safe evacuation routes, prepare “to-go” bags, identify where the household will evacuate to and talk with neighbors about evacuation strategies.

The finding also holds in reverse: Households that take no action in one area often take no action in the other.

“That’s the troubling part,” Webster says. “People living in the riskiest properties are often the least prepared to evacuate.”

Why would a household neither mitigate nor prepare to evacuate?

Webster says his study controls for factors such as income, risk perception and information sources. None of these fully explains the gap.

“It’s likely something unobserved, potentially simply not thinking about wildfire risk,” he says. “If people aren’t engaged with the issue—if they haven’t talked with neighbors or professionals, or if they haven’t experienced a fire—they’re less likely to do either mitigation or evacuation planning.”

Experience is a powerful motivator

The study also examined which households were most likely to have evacuation plans in place. Webster says three patterns emerged. First, people who have evacuated before—or who have lived through a close call—are significantly more likely to prepare. Second, households that understand their vulnerability tend to be more proactive. And third, conversations with neighbors or wildlife professionals can prompt homeowners to act.

“Talking with others gets people thinking,” Webster says. Whether it’s a community meeting or a casual conversation about defensible space, social interaction increases preparedness, he adds.

Interestingly, income was not associated with evacuation planning. Webster says the research found wealthier households were no more likely to have evacuation plans than middle class or lower-income households.

While the study found that all mitigation actions correlate with evacuation preparedness, Webster says a few stood out more strongly: clearing vegetation, replacing combustible siding and addressing attached combustibles, such as wooden decks.

�� Boulder researcher Grant Webster found that income is not associated with wildfire evacuation planning; wealthier households are no more likely to have evacuation plans than middle class or lower-income households. (Photo of 2023 Lahaina Fire: Wikimedia Commons)

Still, he cautions against viewing any single action as the “gateway” to preparedness.

“It’s not that there’s one magic measure that will make someone start planning,” he says. “It’s the overall process of thinking about risk and engaging with mitigation that appears to encourage evacuation preparedness.”

So, does that mean mitigation always naturally leads to evacuation preparedness, or does the evacuation preparedness sometimes lead to mitigation efforts? Webster says the question is a bit like the one posed as to which comes first: the chicken or the egg?

“In the paper, with our data, we look only at the direction of mitigation leading to evacuation preparedness. We can’t say anything causal the other way. Hazard literature suggests mitigation usually comes before preparedness, but in practice it could go either way,” he says. “We’re not saying it always does; we just estimate the causal effect in that direction.”

It’s also difficult to interpret from the study how large an impact risk mitigation has on evacuation preparedness for households, Webster says.

“For example, the results suggest that if a household were to change the distance to close vegetation around their home from 5 to 30 feet to over 100 feet, this would result in a household completing one more evacuation preparation action,” he says. “Although certain mitigation and evacuation actions require different levels of effort, making it difficult to quantify a typical effect.”

Implications for authorities and community organizations

Because the study reveals strong spillover effects, Webster says it offers validation for wildfire programs that address mitigation and evacuation together.

“There are teams out there talking to residents about both defensible space and evacuation plans,” he says. “Our findings show that is a good approach.”

Equally important, Webster says, is that even programs that focus on just one area—such as mitigation—are not crowding out the other.

“If you’re spending resources talking about evacuation preparedness, you’re not making people less likely to mitigate,” he explains. “And if you’re talking about mitigation, you’re not reducing the likelihood that they’ll plan for evacuation. People can—and do—take both actions.”

Webster emphasizes that the paper is written primarily for practitioners—fire departments, emergency managers and local governments—that need evidence-based guidance when designing public education programs. Webster’s research is designed to give those practitioners a road map to:

Pair mitigation messaging with evacuation preparedness, as they reinforce each other and improve overall community resilience.
Target outreach to households with no experience or engagement, as they are the most likely to be unprepared in both areas.
Encourage neighbor-to-neighbor conversations, as social networks are powerful tools for spreading risk awareness.
Recognize that income is not a predictor. Preparedness campaigns should include all demographics equally.

“Once we collect and aggregate the data and provide it to the practitioners—those people working on the ground—they can better inform their programs and their policies to deal with the risks in their specific community,” he says. For many at-risk communities, especially rural ones, budgets and personnel are limited, so practical advice that can be easily shared is especially valuable, he adds.

More fires, more need for research

For Webster, this research is particularly timely.

“It’s not that there’s one magic measure that will make someone start planning. It’s the overall process of thinking about risk and engaging with mitigation that appears to encourage evacuation preparedness.”

“Wildfire risk is definitely increasing throughout the country and around the world, due to a variety of factors, including climate change,” he says. “With these fast-moving fires, like in California, it’s really important for people to be ready to evacuate quickly and also to mitigate their home so it’s less likely to be destroyed.”

In addition to the danger of increasing temperatures associated with climate change, Webster says there are two other primary wildfire risk factors: the historical suppression of fires, which has resulted in an accumulation of fuels at risk of catching fire, and the expansion of communities into fire-prone areas, putting more people and properties at risk.

Meanwhile, Webster says he sees the potential for scholars to produce more research on this topic as new data becomes available.

“Our dataset is always growing,” he says. “That allows us to replicate earlier studies on a larger scale and understand the changing dynamics of preparedness.”

He says further research may explore how specific education strategies influence behavior, or how emerging technologies (such as real-time risk maps or AI-driven alerts) shape community responses.

For now, Webster says one message is clear: Proactive steps matter—and households that take action in one area are likely to take action in another. As Webster puts it, “Improving engagement—getting people to think about their wildfire risk—is one of the most powerful tools we have.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about behavioral science? Show your support.

Research from �� Boulder environmental economist Grant Webster finds that wildfire risk mitigation and proactive evacuation preparation are complementary.

Traditional

White

Top image: U.S. Forest Service

Researchers learn new lessons from old butterflies

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:00:00 +0000

Researchers learn new lessons from old butterflies Rachel Sauer Fri, 02/06/2026 - 11:00

Alexandra Phelps

Research co-authored by �� Boulder PhD graduate Megan E. Zabinski and evolutionary biology Professor M. Deane Bowers reveals how museum butterfly specimens, some almost a century old, can still offer insight into chemical defense of insects and plants

You’re sitting in a field, a garden or another outdoor space, basking in a beautiful summer day. Clouds drift across the sky when something catches your eye. You turn to see a butterfly, its delicate wings and vibrant coloring shifting as it moves from flower to flower. For a moment it’s there, but soon, it moves too far away for you to see.

At first glance, butterflies appear to be just simple, dainty creatures that fly around feeding on plants. For University of Colorado Boulder PhD graduate Megan E. Zabinski and evolutionary biology Professor M. Deane Bowers, however, butterflies are anything but simple. Beneath their wings lies a complex system that plays an integral role in their survival.

In recently published research, �� Boulder PhD graduate Megan E. Zabinski (left) and evolutionary biology Professor M. Deane Bowers (right), emphasize the value that museum specimens have in current scientific research.

In a recently published study in the Journal of Chemical Ecology, Zabinski and Bowers researched how two Euphydrays butterfly species—E. phaeton and E. anicia—sequester certain chemical compounds, a process by which organisms capture and store substances from their host plants to defend themselves against their enemies. The researchers found that they were able to understand how these butterflies sequester substances using both historic specimens as well as fresh ones.

Their project points to the value museum specimens can have in scientific research. By comparing historic butterfly specimens from �� Boulder’s Museum of Natural History (��MNH) with freshly collected and laboratory-reared butterflies, their research demonstrates the benefits, as well as the limitations, of using preserved insects to study chemical defenses decades after collection.

Hatching a plan

Although museum collections house billions of specimens, only a small fraction are used in research after they are acquired. Recognizing this gap inspired Zabinski to begin her research. While Zabinski was still a graduate student, an encounter with Bowers helped shape the trajectory of her academic career.

“Deane came up to me one day—I was in the EBIO club—and she told me she had a job for me. And I thought, ‘A job! You mean I can quit waiting tables at Applebee’s?’”

This opportunity allowed Zabinski to explore her interest in insects and plant-insect interactions within a laboratory setting.

“I absolutely loved being in the lab, doing the physical work with my hands, (whether it was) being able to be outside in the field or looking after the plants,” she says.

Working alongside Bowers—whose research also focuses on how insects interact with their environments—Zabinski began developing her own research questions. She specifically focused on how butterflies in different developmental stages consume and store defensive chemicals to use them later.

Zabinski became interested in whether museum butterfly specimens—which have rarely been investigated and examined for their chemical defenses—could still be helpful.

“We thought about how detecting sequestered defenses in museum specimens really has rarely been done,” she says. “The world of sequestration hadn’t really delved into museum collections. So, we were curious if there was utility there.”

The project was made possible in part by Bowers’ extensive research background and personal butterfly collection, which is housed at ��MNH. The collection includes the species used in the study. When combined with outside specimens, this collection, which includes the species used in the study, allowed Bowers and Zabinski to enrich their understanding of the butterflies.

The Euphydryas anicia butterfly is able to sequester compounds that plants create in defense against herbivores. (Photo: Robert Webster/Wikimedia Commons)

“There has been work done on detecting chemical compounds in plants,” Bowers says. “But there had been less done on insects, and Megan’s thesis had centered on looking at how this particular group of compounds in my lab has worked on particular compounds. We thought it would be really interesting to see if we could find them in old specimens.”

For Zabinski, the combination of Bowers’ expertise and insects available for research made this experiment uniquely valuable.

“It’s kind of the perfect storm for a good experiment. You have a colony in the lab; you also know where there is a field lab where you can get fresh specimens. You know that the museum also has them, but one of the species we had sequestered a high amount, so we thought that … even if there was some degradation, we would still be able to detect them,” she says.

Crawling toward a new understanding

Zabinski and Bowers analyzed specimens from two checkerspot butterfly species in the genus Euphydryas: Euphydryas anicia and Euphydryas phaeton. The species were selected because they are known for their high sequestration ability, abundance in the ��MNH entomology collection and the ease of obtaining live adult specimens. Their research aimed to better understand how the insects use and store these compounds after consuming them as larvae.

Both species sequester iridoid glycosides (IGs), which Zabinski explains are “compounds created by the plants in defense against the herbivores. They’re trying not to get eaten, but there are certain insects— including these butterflies—that capitalize off this process.” Bowers adds, “I’ve tasted (iridoid glycosides), and they’re really bitter. So they are a really good defense against predators and diseases.”

“They’ve been able to find a way to store these compounds in their own bodies and then they can confer some defense against predators,” Zabinski says.

In an initial pilot experiment, the researchers chemically extracted from only one set of wings—a forewing and a hindwing—from historic specimens to determine whether IGs could be detected from the wings alone. Previous experiments have determined that, because in butterfly wings there’s hemolymph (a circulatory fluid similar to blood), it’s possible to detect IGs there. Unfortunately, the results showed extremely low concentrations. To obtain detectable amounts, they found it necessary to analyze both the body and a pair of wings together. For documentation and future research, the set of right wings from each specimen was removed and preserved.

With their methodology established, they chose six E. phaeton specimens from the ��MNH that had been collected from 1936–1977. For comparison, E. phaeton larvae were collected from Burlington County, Vermont, brought back to Boulder and raised in the laboratory with their host plant, white turtlehead, Chelone glabra. Once the butterflies reached adulthood, they were freeze-killed and analyzed for their IG content.

Zabinski and Bowers also examined nine historic E. anicia specimens collected between 1933–1998. Fresh adult E. anicia were collected from Crescent Meadows in Eldorado Springs, Colorado, freeze-killed and immediately underwent extraction for chemical analysis. Although it’s almost impossible to tell what plant the freshly caught butterflies consumed as larvae, the field they were collected from is known to have four catalpol-containing host plants. Catalpol, an IG that is found in these plants, allowed the researchers to determine whether the butterflies were sequestering these compounds, even if they weren’t sure what specific plant was the butterflies’ food source.

“Raising butterflies is not easy,” Zabinski says. “Plants can’t just be alive and available—they have to be high quality, because it’s been shown in studies with these plants that if the plant is not happy, it will not allocate energy to create those compounds. Then your caterpillars are not going to want to eat it.”

Shifting predetermined perceptions

Despite being preserved for decades, the historic specimens still contained detectable traces of sequestered chemical defenses. While IG concentrations were significantly lower in museum specimens than in freshly collected butterflies, Zabinski’s results demonstrate that even after nearly a century, chemical traces of larval diets can still be detected in preserved specimens.

Euphydryas phaeton butterflies have "been able to find a way to store (plant defense) compounds in their own bodies and then they can confer some defense against predators,” says researcher Megan E. Zabinski. (Photo: Joshua Mayer/Wikimedia Commons)

By focusing on the detectability of chemical compounds in older specimens, Zabinski’s work contributes to a broader discussion about preservation methods. She notes that museums often have little control over how donated specimens were originally collected or preserved. She says that despite this, “If you’re a collections manager and you have a researcher that conducted a research experiment and would like to donate them to your collection, if you have the capacity to access them, you’re probably not going to say ‘no.’”

Zabinski explains that previous research demonstrating how preservation methods affect scientists’ ability to detect DNA in museum specimens really shifted how people preserve certain organisms.

“Most insects are preserved as dried specimens, although some are preserved in alcohol,” she says. “In other groups of organisms, like vertebrates and other invertebrates besides insects, they’re often preserved in alcohol or formaldehyde. We now know that using formaldehyde destroys DNA, and so I think the protocol for specimen preservation has changed, trying to preserve the DNA. That’s been one change that museums have been trying.”

Zabinski’s project and others like it are creating an incentive. “As more research comes out about the extended museum specimen and the utility of specimens—particularly with standardization—museums will find a draw to create some uniformity,” she says.

Soaring to new heights

On that summer day, someone who was watching the butterflies move was Bowers.

“I started collecting insects when I was a little kid,” she says. “In undergrad, I did some independent research on butterflies, [and later,] in graduate school, I had a really supportive advisor who told me to spend my first summer going out and looking at butterflies and seeing if I could find some interesting questions. That’s been the focus of my research since.”

Recognizing Zabinski’s curiosity and potential, Bowers recalls, “I brought Megan into the fold.”

“We hear a lot about climate change and we don’t really hear about these smaller interactions that are quite literally under our feet every day,” Zabinski reflects. She says this paper offers one example of how museum specimens are not just remnants of the past, but tools that can be used to better understand specimens today. As technology advances and more research is conducted into chemical defenses, Zabinski says museum specimens can prove to be even more valuable in understanding how organisms interact with their environments long after they’ve been collected.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about ecology and evolutionary biology? Show your support.

Traditional

White

Top image: Euphydryas anicia butterfly (Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife)

What’s that knocking in the trees?

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 21:44:37 +0000

What’s that knocking in the trees? Rachel Sauer Wed, 02/04/2026 - 14:44

Kayleigh Wood

In new book, �� Boulder folklorist Jack Daly bridges the gap between academic research and Colorado legend

It was well into the evening when Jack Daly and a small group of legend trippers, organized by the Sasquatch Outpost in Bailey, Colorado, made their descent into the forests just 30 minutes outside of town. Owned and operated by Jim and Daphne Myers, the site hosts numerous Bigfoot events, from meetings to night hikes led by Bigfoot researcher Jim Myers himself.

During these hikes, which occur about once a month, Myers serves as the outpost’s liaison into what the Sasquatch Outpost’s booking website describes as “the realm of the Forest People.” Here, visitors might experience numerous encounters with Bigfoot in the form of vocalizations, footprints, knocking on trees and airborne rocks thrown in the direction of the group.

Folklorist Jack Daly, an instructor in the �� Boulder Program for Writing and Rhetoric, explores the supernatural, unexplainable and unnerving in his book Eerie Colorado: Mountain Folklore, Monsters and Tales of the Supernatural.

On that particular hike, deep in the forest, Daly and the group were startled—not by flying rocks or breaking branches, but by what he describes as “a giant silver orb just flying overhead, and we all saw it. We stopped, and it disappeared. There’s no flashing lights. It was not in, like, full orbit.”

This UFO encounter was notably different from the one he experienced in high school, when he and a friend witnessed a glowing blue orb hovering above a meadow, moving from one place to another at random intervals, for several minutes.

Daly shares this experience and more in his recently published book, Eerie Colorado: Mountain Folklore, Monsters and Tales of the Supernatural. Thursday evening, Daly will host an event at the Boulder Bookstore, where attendees will have the opportunity to learn more about Colorado’s supernatural folklore through the eyes of an expert.

Eerie Colorado

Jack Daly will speak about and sign his new book, Eerie Colorado: Mountain Folklore, Monsters and Tales of the Supernatural.

Where: Boulder Bookstore, 1107 Pearl St.

When: 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 5.

Learn more

In his book, Daly, a lecturer in the University of Colorado Boulder Program for Writing and Rhetoric, explores all things supernatural, unexplainable and unnerving in the Centennial State. Beyond simply organizing these legends in one volume, Daly grapples with the role supernatural folklore plays in the historical and contemporary culture of Colorado. Enmeshing his own personal testimony and the testimonies of the individuals he interviewed on his own with existing scholarly research, he divides his findings into two categories: the corporeal, which he describes in his book as creatures of “‘flesh-and-blood,’” and the incorporeal, referring to the entities that lack physical bodies.

Daly used ethnographic methods in his research, conducting interviews and documenting participant observation, a qualitative research method in which scholars immerse themselves in a setting and attempt to observe as many individuals as possible to draw conclusions about a specific culture. He uses the term “memorate” to classify the personal experience narratives throughout the book, including some of his own, as well as the experiences of his family members. Jim Myers of the Sasquatch Outpost shared a personal Bigfoot encounter for the book—a sighting that Myers dubbed as a Class A experience, which is an encounter at close range, where the viewer can confidently rule out all natural explanations.

Monsters, legends and the supernatural

Beyond the memorates, Daly’s fieldwork has taken him to as many of the sites featured in the book as possible for his research.

As a folklorist, Daly’s research focuses on monsters, legends and the supernatural. In 2023, he received the American Folklore Society’s Warren E. Roberts Prize in Folk Art and Material Culture for his piece “Devil in the Skies, Stars on the Barns: The Snallygaster, Hex Signs, and Barn Stars.” He earned a master’s degree in folklore and is currently pursuing a PhD in American studies at Pennsylvania State University, where he was a recipient of the 2022-23 University Graduate Fellowship.

In his book Eerie Colorado, author Jack Daly grapples with the role supernatural folklore plays in the historical and contemporary culture of Colorado.

Daly explains that his research champions scholarship while validating personal experience, noting that “people’s experiences with the supernatural are much more common than we give them credit for.” As a folklorist and scholar of belief, he says, he takes an “ethnographic, folkloristic [and] anthropological approach,” striving to avoid approaching all things eerie and inconceivable from “a position of disbelief in regards to the supernatural,” which he refers to in Eerie Colorado as a believer-skeptic binary.

In the book’s introduction, Daly makes clear that he is unconcerned with the reality of monsters, unexplainable phenomena and supernatural beings. He approaches his research from a place of neither belief nor disbelief, but with the aim of analyzing how these stories, which trend across time and place, function on a cultural and personal level.

Daly’s UFO encounter in the hills outside Bailey, which occurred only a couple of months ago, reinforces why his research approach for Eerie Colorado is helpful. Quite often, accounts of strange phenomena come from individuals who are skeptical themselves. Daly and the group simultaneously saw a silver orb enter their field of vision before it disappeared altogether; they couldn’t explain or verify it, but they all had the same experience.

Across the folklore field, Daly says, many scholars have begun to approach the supernatural through a similar, experience-based approach championed by David Hufford, a folklorist and ethnologist whose theories Daly draws from in Eerie Colorado. When Daly approaches legends, he says he strives to address them “more literally. As they literally happened,” adding that this approach “was heavily, heavily stigmatized for, you know, over 100 years when the processes of rationalism and empiricism and enlightenment [were] the overriding paradigms in academia and within intellectual culture more broadly.”

Yet the study of folklore appears to be changing, and Daly isn’t the only scholar in the field of belief studies who is interested in how legends function in a larger cultural context. He notes a newfound “openness that scholars are engaging with, in terms of thinking: This person literally did see a UFO. This person literally did see Bigfoot. This person literally did see a ghost, which is, I think, an interesting new movement that I want to keep on pursuing.”

Ready for a legend trip of your own?

Jack Daly uses the term “legend trip” in his book Eerie Colorado, which he describes as a visit to a site associated with a supernatural legend, where individuals often try to interact with a legend through rituals or “tests.” For those who want to get up close and personal with some of the local legends featured in Eerie Colorado, Daly has both visited and recommends these sites:

The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. For Daly, the Stanley is a prime example of “the transformative effect that the supernatural can have in reality.” Before The Shining, he notes, the site was “in disrepair. It was falling apart. People weren’t really going to Estes Park. Stephen King goes there, he has a supernatural encounter ostensibly. It causes him to write the book… the book turns into a movie… And then that literally transforms the culture surrounding both Estes Park and the Stanley Hotel. It was repaired. It is now a destination. It’s super, super nice.”

The Vampire Grave in Lafayette, where, according to legend, a tree grew from a stake used to kill a vampire. Check out Daly’s viral TikTok at the Vampire Grave at @thefolklord

The Molly Brown House in Denver, which is rumored to be haunted by both Molly and her husband.

The Denver Botanic Gardens October Ghost Tours

Cheeseman Park in Denver, which some consider one of the most haunted sites in Denver as it was built over the Mount Prospect Cemetery, where thousands are still buried.

For those interested in legends they can explore from the comfort of their homes, Daly recommends the Digital Folklore podcast, hosted by Perry Carpenter and Mason Amadeus. Described on their website as a “fusion of audio drama and narrative documentary,” the pair dive into internet legends, monsters and conspiracy theories “through the lens of academic folklore.” Like Daly, they strive to use these legends to draw broader cultural connections, rather than simply collecting and platforming them.

‘I know what I saw’

In the process of writing Eerie Colorado, Daly notes his attempts to balance academic scholarship and theory with folklore in an approachable way. Tapping into existing scholarship and attempting to draw conclusions about the role of the legend in Colorado culture, Eerie Colorado takes on a new perspective—one supported by research.

After reading some of the existing books about Colorado folklore, Daly noticed a trend: “They don’t cite their sources. They are clearly unfamiliar with the broader scholarship that would give them a much deeper level [of understanding].” In Eerie Colorado, Daly describes how many previous publications on Colorado folklore will present a story and let it speak for itself, without attempting to interpret the function these stories might serve to the local people. Daly sought to remedy this gap in the literature with his book, attempting to make meaning out of popular Colorado legends by situating them within a broader cultural context and tracing their developments across time and place.

“There’s one thing you notice with legends: They migrate,” says Daly. He argues that legends, even those that appear specific to Colorado, can often be situated in “a broader legend complex [tied] into other variants that we see across not just the United States, but the entire world.”

For example, the Phantom Jogger of Riverdale Road in Thornton, which Daly covers in Eerie Colorado, closely mimics the more commonly known story of the Vanishing Hitchhiker, which has been well documented by folklorists since the 1940s, Daly notes in his book. According to Thornton legend, a jogger was killed in a hit and run on Riverdale Road and left to haunt the site of the crash.

Daly sets the scene: “You’ll be driving along the road, and you’ll see this jogger, and sometimes they’ll ask you for a ride. They’ll get in the car, and then they’ll disappear. And so that’s a variant of the Vanishing Hitchhiker, but it’s a Colorado version because it’s athletic. It’s a jogger.”

In both cases, the disappearing hitchhikers and Thornton’s jogger often leave behind a mark of their presence. According to the local legends Daly documents in Eerie Colorado, those who are eager to drive down Riverdale Road and are brave enough to pull over may hear footsteps approaching them or fists banging against the sides of their car, or they may find handprints left on the outside of their vehicle.

Daly’s UFO sightings can also be linked back to popular legends of the past. When he was in high school, Daly and a friend “saw a giant blue orb flying over a field.” He details in Eerie Colorado that similar visual experiences are not uncommon and have been well documented across history, often known by a host of different names. “They’ve been connected with fairies,” Daly shares. “They’ve been connected with Bigfoot as well. They’re a common thing that people have described seeing.”

Throughout history and the contemporary era, countless individuals have witnessed strange phenomena in the skies that they cannot explain. Regardless of whether they interpret these sightings as flying saucers, massive fireballs or ships of fairies on the way to Magonia, Daly’s book guides readers through trends in firsthand accounts of the supernatural while tracking them across history. Popular creatures and entities that have taken on legendary status may be known by various names, but like the Vanishing Hitchhiker and the Phantom Jogger, the original legend and its local offspring often retain the same key attributes.

As for where he falls on the spectrum of belief in the supernatural, Daly says, “I do believe, honestly. And part of it has come from my own personal experience.” Recalling the silver orb in the skies near Bailey, he reflects, “I don’t know what it was, but I had that encounter. Like, I know that I know what I saw, and that’s what people say: I know what I saw. My experience was my experience, and that’s what I found in doing my fieldwork as well.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about writing and rhetoric? Show your support.

In new book, �� Boulder folklorist Jack Daly bridges the gap between academic research and Colorado legend.

Traditional

White

Top image: the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, with illustrative glow (Photo: Carol Highsmith/Wikimedia Commons)

Research sheds light on unintended consequences of money laundering regulations

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 15:37:54 +0000

Research sheds light on unintended consequences of money laundering regulations Rachel Sauer Wed, 01/28/2026 - 08:37

Bradley Worrell

�� Boulder economist Alessandro Peri finds that when authorities cracked down on offshore money laundering, criminals redirected that money into domestic businesses and properties

Economists traditionally focus on economic indicators such as growth, inflation and trade—not on organized crime. Yet a recent paper co-authored by Alessandro Peri, an economist and associate professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Economics, dives deep into the economics of money laundering, exploring how international regulations meant to tamp down the practice in one part of the world can inadvertently cause it to take hold in different areas and in different ways.

Peri says his interest in money laundering was sparked in 2018 after attending a presentation on the topic. He also notes that his interest in the phenomenon of riciclaggio di denaro—Italian for money laundering—was partly shaped by his father, who worked for Guarda di Finanza, the Italian tax enforcement agency tasked with fighting financial crimes.

“I have always been fascinated by the phenomenon,” says Peri, whose research focuses on the macroeconomic implications of economic policy and legislative changes. “Specifically, on the process through which illicit profits—from drugs, counterfeit goods or other illegal activities—find their way into legitimate businesses and the real economy.”

�� Boulder economist Alessandro Peri and his research colleagues find that international regulations meant to tamp down money laundering in one part of the world can inadvertently cause it to take hold in different areas and in different ways.

To understand money laundering, Peri says it’s important to grasp its purpose. Criminal enterprises—from drug cartels to counterfeit goods networks—generate mountains of “dirty” cash that needs to find its way into the legitimate economy. Traditionally, banks were the preferred channel to make “dirty” money look “clean.”

In their research, Peri and his co-authors take a step further and explore the question: What happens when governments make it harder for criminals to hide illegal money in offshore banks? The answer, they discovered, is that criminals don’t stop laundering money. They often just switch to other methods and re-channel dirty funds from offshore financial account to domestic activities (such as local businesses) in the United States, a process they call “money laundering leakage.”

“If you target only one channel, the money leaks into others,” Peri explains. “It’s like squeezing a balloon.”

Tightening regulations

To address this question, the authors focused on a tightening in anti-money-laundering regulations that in 2009 involved Caribbean nations, historically considered havens for both tax evasion and money laundering. Peri says both of those activities exploit weak oversight, but their economic impacts differ, as stricter tax enforcement may reduce domestic investment, given that firms can no longer save on taxes, whereas tighter laundering controls can cause criminals to look for new domestic channels to “clean” their illicit gains.

Facing international pressure, Peri says Caribbean countries formed the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force, and from 2008 to 2015 underwent a mutual evaluation process aimed at curbing money laundering activities by strengthening oversight of financial institutions and enforcing compliance across jurisdictions.

“Passing laws is not enough. Enforcement of the law is just as important, and over time these countries did a really good job of that,” Peri says. As a result, laundering operations via financial havens became more difficult and expensive.

At the same time, Peri and his co-authors document how that action resulted in unintended consequences, by providing indirect evidence of a re-channeling of these offshore laundering operations into the United States.

Measuring the impact

How do you study an activity designed to be invisible?

Peri’s team employed some creative methods, including using information uncovered by investigative journalists in the Panama Papers—which documented financial linkages between U.S. localities and Caribbean jurisdictions—to determine which counties had stronger exposure to the regulatory changes happening in the Caribbean jurisdictions.

The researchers then used county-level data from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics from 2004 to 2015 to look at patterns in business activities. In U.S. counties with stronger financial connections to Caribbean jurisdictions, Peri and his co-authors were able to determine that there was a measurable uptick in business establishments—particularly small, cash-intensive firms. Peri says such businesses often exhibit telltale signs of “front companies”: few employees, unusual revenue patterns and operations in cash-intensive businesses such as liquor stores, laundromats, florists, restaurants and car dealerships.

Additionally, Peri says he and his colleagues found that cash-based real estate purchases increased—another common way criminals use to clean illegal money. “Someone seeking to clean criminal proceeds may purchase a home and quickly resell,” he says.

“If a crook were to launder money, they wouldn’t buy a multi-million-dollar company (like Apple), as they would get detected. They’d buy a car wash, which makes it much less likely to get audited,” says �� Boulder researcher Alessandro Peri about money laundering. (Photo: Jason Leung/Unsplash)

“This started as a theory paper, but in the end, we were able to provide some indirect evidence of how offshore AML (anti-money laundering) efforts impacted money laundering (in the U.S.) and its impact on local economies,” he says.

Notably, the evidence suggests a more pronounced increase in the use of front companies in high-intensity drug-trafficking areas, suggesting a link between local illicit economies and laundering demand, Peri says.

Ultimately, laundering decisions hinge on a cost-benefit analysis, Peri says, as criminals weigh the risk of detection against the need to legitimize funds.

“If a crook were to launder money, they wouldn’t buy a multi-million-dollar company (like Apple), as they would get detected,” he says. “They’d buy a car wash, which makes it much less likely to get audited.”

He says the smartest operations focus on diversification—buying a handful of businesses across sectors and locations rather than concentrating their operations in one sector.

“Hypothetically, if they went out and bought every restaurant in Boulder, they would probably get detected and audited,” Peri explains. “But if they buy just a few restaurants, as well as some florists and auto dealerships to diversify their operations, it likely reduces their risk of getting caught. That’s what we believe is at the heart of this process of diversification.”

The scale of the challenge

In pop culture, money laundering is portrayed as a shadowy process involving suitcases full of cash and offshore accounts. From Scarface to Breaking Bad, the trope is familiar: illicit profits transformed into legitimate wealth through clever schemes.

Peri says those cinematic dramas don’t do justice to how sophisticated modern money laundering schemes have become or the scope of such operations today. The United Nations Oﬃce on Drugs and Crime estimates that money laundering is a trillion-dollar problem, accounting for nearly 5% of global gross domestic product (GDP) annually. That’s roughly equivalent to the entire economic output of Germany, he notes.

What’s more, Peri says money laundering isn’t just a criminal issue—it’s an economic one. He says that by injecting illicit funds into legitimate markets, money laundering can distort local markets, misallocate resources and crowd out legitimate firms. For example, when illicit funds flood into real estate, housing prices can soar, pricing out ordinary families.

“Are these firms creating jobs? Yes,” he notes. “But at what cost to the local economies? The answer is unclear and requires further research.”

The scope of the challenge is daunting, Peri says, and the field of money laundering is evolving. In addition to traditional channels for cleaning currency, he says he believes criminal organizations engaged in money laundering are now purchasing cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and engaging in complex trading schemes that can add layers of opacity to their operations.

“Partial measures create leakage. To be effective, enforcement must be coordinated across financial and non-financial channels, and across borders.”

“We just scratched the surface,” he says of what his research uncovered. “There are always new methods.”

A call for vigilance

What should governments do about money laundering?

Peri’s paper stops short of prescribing detailed enforcement strategies, but he says his research does underscore two imperatives. First, domestic agencies including financial regulators, tax authorities and law enforcement must collaborate, and international agencies must harmonize standards. Second, Peri says targeting one channel is insufficient, so efforts must span financial systems, real estate and emerging technologies such as cryptocurrencies.

Peri draws an analogy to climate policy, which is also a research focus of his. Just as carbon emissions shift to countries with lax regulations, he says dirty money flows to jurisdictions—or sectors—where oversight is weakest.

“Partial measures create leakage,” he warns. “To be effective, enforcement must be coordinated across financial and non-financial channels, and across borders.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about economics? Show your support.

�� Boulder economist Alessandro Peri finds that when authorities cracked down on offshore money laundering, criminals redirected that money into domestic businesses and properties.

Traditional

White

Top image: iStock

Welcome to the Camping Games (now please show up)

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 15:06:01 +0000

Welcome to the Camping Games (now please show up) Rachel Sauer Tue, 01/20/2026 - 08:06

Rachel Sauer

The world of campsite reservations is increasingly cutthroat, so why are so many campers not showing up? �� Boulder economist Jon Hughes applies numerical modeling to understand campground no-shows

Throughout the United States, and especially here in the West, snagging a preferred public-land campsite has become a take-no-prisoners battle royale with little room for weakness or sleep or mercy.

If your friends seem especially haunted and jittery these days, it’s possibly because they’ve been up for hours, hitting refresh every 30 seconds on every computer, tablet and smartphone in the house, trying to reserve a summer campsite the millisecond it becomes available online—six months to the day in advance and at midnight for Colorado state parks and 8 a.m. MST for federal lands.

With so much summer enjoyment on the line, then, and reservations more precious than gold, it’s a central mystery of outdoor recreation why park managers and users report high summer campground vacancy rates due to no-shows.

Jon Hughes, a �� Boulder associate professor of economics and Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute fellow, found through numerical modeling that that increasing fees, either overnight fees or no-show fees, decreases campsite no-shows.

“I think we’ve all probably had this experience,” says Jon Hughes, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of economics and Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute fellow. “You show up and the campground is half empty, and you think, ‘How is this possible? It was so hard to get this reservation.’

“I think part of it is it’s hard to know what our schedule’s going to look like in six months, so we make these reservations and optimistically tell ourselves we’ll be able to go camping—even up to the last minute.”

Based on his experiences as an outdoor recreator seeing no-shows firsthand and as an economics researcher who has long studied transportation and climate issues, Hughes wondered: How do park pricing policies contribute to no-shows—and the associated inefficiencies—and can policy changes correct these inefficiencies while meeting park managers’ goals of adequate revenue and improved access?

In research recently published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Hughes aimed to answer these questions via numerical modeling, simulating pricing policies at a hypothetical but representative national park. He found, among other results, that increasing fees, either overnight fees or no-show fees, decreases no-shows, which on one hand is a positive outcome but doesn’t address the perennial issue of equitable access to public lands.

“One of the things park managers are always really worried about is equity,” Hughes says. “This is all of our land—this isn’t only for rich people. If you want to design a system where every site is used and sites go to people who most want to camp, you could just auction (reservations) off. In economic terms, that would be very efficient, but if you think your desire to camp is maybe positively correlated with income or wealth, it might create a system where certain folks are able to camp and others aren’t.”

The economics of no-shows

In part because of his own experiences trying to get a summertime campground reservation, and based on his previous research studying access to and use of public lands, Hughes began considering how to understand the economic impact of campground no-shows: “We have finite capacity (on these lands), so how we best use these resources I think is a really interesting question.”

He consulted with Montana State University Professor Will Rice, a former park ranger, whose research on management of public lands inspired Hughes to call him—a conversation that highlighted the growing problem of no-shows.

“I got off the phone with him and wrote down a simple, intermediate microeconomics model for how consumers would think about this decision (to cancel or no-show),” Hughes says. “There’s some desire to go camping, some understood utility you’d get from having a campground reservation and you pay some monetary fee to take that reservation, but then there’s some uncertainty.

“If you don’t go, you might have to pay a fee or you might have to pay with your time if you decide to cancel. If you can’t go, you think about, ‘How do I minimize the cost?’ That lends itself to a really simple economic model that generates some interesting predictions: If you make it more costly to cancel, people aren’t going to cancel and you’ll have more no-shows. If you charge a fee when people don’t show up, they’re less likely to no-show. The theory model predicts that raising (reservation) fees will discourage no-shows, but it actually leads to another effect where if you increase fees, that just makes it more expensive for everyone, whether they camp or no-show.”

“When I decide to no-show, I’m robbing you of the benefit of camping. My decision negatively impacts you, so how do we ensure that people who want to enjoy public lands are able to?” says �� Boulder economist Jon Hughes. (Photo: Dave Hoefler/Unsplash)

Through numerical modeling, Hughes found that cancellation fees can increase or decrease no-shows when campground capacity constraints are not binding, but they strictly increase no-shows when capacity constraints are binding. Further, he found that increasing trip prices strictly decreases no-shows and that increasing no-show fees strictly decreases no-shows.

Simulating a $40 increase in reservation fees or no-show fees, he found that higher reservation prices could increase park revenue by as much as 56% but reduce consumer surplus. However, a $40 no-show fee might modestly increase park revenue but increase consumer surplus by as much as 12%.

Further, he notes in the paper, a $40 increase in reservation price increases the mean income of reservation holders by $2,900, or 2%, while a $40 increase in no-show fee causes little change in income. This could mean that no-show fees wouldn’t push access to public lands further out of reach for those in less wealthy income brackets.

He also estimated outcomes under an optimal no-show fee of $150—equal to the marginal external cost of a no-show, or the lost consumer surplus of a user denied a reservation—which eliminates no-shows and increases consumer surplus by 14%. But even the more modest $40 fee captures nearly all of the benefit of the optimal fee, Hughes found.

Enjoying public lands

All of this, of course, leads to the question of how to collect no-show fees.

“Your doctor is going to charge you if don’t show up, your car mechanic will charge you if don’t show up, my barber will charge me if I don’t show up,” Hughes says. “Logistically, charging a no-show fee is one of the challenges in managing public lands. The only places where it’s currently possible are staffed campgrounds, because hosts are there seeing who hasn’t shown up, but oftentimes a host doesn’t want to cause problems.

“I think technology can save us here. Recreation.gov has implemented an app with the added benefit of your phone knowing where it is all the time, or there are some areas now where you use geofencing. If you want to do the Wave at Coyote Buttes in Arizona, you can get a permit a day or two before your trip, but you have to be within a certain geographic area to get it. It might be possible to do the same with no-shows: You reserved this site, you go, your phone knows if you were there. This is a problem that’s solvable with technology.”

These findings, which Hughes will present to a group of economists with the U.S. Department of the Interior next month, solve two problems, he says: how to best optimize the limited capacity of America’s public lands, which are increasingly in demand, and how to address a “negative externality.”

“When I decide to no-show, I’m robbing you of the benefit of camping,” Hughes explains. “My decision negatively impacts you, so how do we ensure that people who want to enjoy public lands are able to?”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about economics? Show your support.

Traditional

White

Top photo: Xue Guangjian/Pexels

What are the little red dots deep in space?

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:28:58 +0000

What are the little red dots deep in space? Rachel Sauer Fri, 01/16/2026 - 08:28

Blake Puscher

University of Colorado researchers work with an international team to uncover more about the mysterious objects detected by the James Webb Space Telescope

As the largest telescope in outer space, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been able to view celestial objects that are too dim or distant for its predecessors to detect. As a result, it has helped astronomers look deeper into topics like galaxy formation. However, the JWST can see only so far, and at the edge of its vision some of the most interesting recent astronomical observations have been made, in the form of strange, seemingly impossible objects.

They are small, red-tinted spots of light and were descriptively named little red dots (LRDs). Information on them is limited, though they are known to be extremely dense and to have existed twelve to thirteen billion years ago (for context, the Big Bang was slightly less than fourteen billion years ago). What can be seen of them now are afterimages, because looking so far into space also means looking back in time; even light takes a while to make it between galaxies. There are several theories about what LRDs are, but none of them can completely reconcile the evidence with established astronomical principles.

�� Boulder astrophysicist Erica Nelson and an international team of research colleagues found evidence that the little red dot dubbed Irony is a growing supermassive black hole, which suggests that at least some of the other little red dots are as well.

Erica Nelson, an assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the researchers who first discovered LRDs, recently published a study that focuses on a specific LRD dubbed Irony. The study was co-led by Francesco D’Eugenio at Cambridge University and included �� Boulder PhD student Vanessa Brown as well as an international team of scientists. They found evidence that Irony is a growing supermassive black hole, which suggests that at least some of the other LRDs are as well.

Little red dots

According to Nelson, there are two main interpretations of what little red dots are. “Either they are really massive galaxies, or they are growing supermassive black holes,” she says. The two can be difficult to distinguish because both are very luminous. Massive galaxies are luminous because they typically have more stars, but “contrary to what most people expect, supermassive black holes are incredibly luminous” too, Nelson continues, “especially when they’re growing.”

Either of these possibilities would have implications for our understanding of the history of the universe. If LRDs are massive galaxies, “it could mean that early galaxies grow much more rapidly than we think they should be able to,” Nelson explains. That could be because their stars formed in a different way than how scientists have observed stars to form previously.

If they are supermassive black holes, they could be a phase in the development of black holes long hypothesized by �� Boulder professor Mitch Begelman, though never observed. “For a long time, we have tried to understand how supermassive black holes can grow so fast,” Nelson says. If LRDs represent an early phase of supermassive black hole growth, it could help narrow down the possibilities for how they form, “which has been a mystery for a really, really long time.”

Regardless of what the answer is, if it falls into one of these interpretations, it will provide insight into a broader question: whether galaxies or supermassive black holes formed first. That matters because most large galaxies, including the Milky Way, seem to have supermassive black holes at their centers. So, even if LRDs are black holes, that fact will have implications for galaxy formation.

The Irony is…

Irony is the name of the LRD with the deepest medium-resolution JWST spectroscopy to date. Spectroscopy is a way of determining what elements objects are made of, along with other characteristics like density and heat, based on the light coming from them. Irony is an incredibly bright object, giving off more light than other LRDs, so the researchers were able to get more details about it using spectroscopy. Upon examination, these details reveal several oddities.

Images of little red dots captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. (Photo: NASA)

“One is that it was the first time we have detected forbidden iron lines in any distant object,” Nelson says. Spectroscopy uses lines in a spectrum to represent the types of light coming from an object, and this pattern of lines corresponds to iron. The reason they are considered forbidden is technical and not immediately relevant; their detection is significant because scientists do not expect to find iron in something as old as an LRD. “The universe began with just hydrogen and helium,” Nelson explains. “There was no carbon, no oxygen and no iron.”

Heavier elements like iron were produced in the cores of stars over several generations through nuclear fusion. When older generations of stars went supernova, they launched heavier elements than what they formed out of into space, to be picked up by newer generations of stars and fused into even heavier elements. “So, seeing a lot of iron at very early cosmic times means that there had to have been a lot of generations of star formation very rapidly,” Nelson says. Iron in particular is the heaviest element that a star can create during normal hydrogen fusion (the others are only made during supernovae), so it is strange to find iron in older objects.

Another oddity is the strength of Irony’s Balmer breaks, which are breaks in the spectrum of light coming from an object. “The thing we have started to find in some of these little red dots, and especially in Irony, is that the breaks are too strong and too smooth to be produced by stars,” Nelson explains. “No model we can generate produces a break like that, so we think, instead of the atmospheres of a bunch of old stars, it is actually this single atmosphere around a growing supermassive black hole.”

These features suggest that Irony is a supermassive black hole rather than a massive galaxy. Other LRDs may not be the same as Irony, but making this determination about Irony strengthens the argument that some LRDs are supermassive black holes.

Black hole sun

All of this raises a question: What does it mean for Irony and potentially other LRDs to be black holes if LRDs do not fit cleanly into the category of either galaxies or black holes? “The kind of supermassive black holes that these things might be, and that a subset of them likely are, is nothing like any supermassive black holes we’ve seen before,” Nelson answers. They could be a new class of object, called black hole stars or quasi-stars that have been hypothesized by �� Boulder professors Mitch Begelman and Jason Dexter, that in some ways look like incredibly large stars but function differently.

“Instead of being powered by nuclear fusion like our sun and all other stars are, they’re being powered by the energy that is radiated when matter falls into the supermassive black hole,” Nelson explains. This energy comes from the gravitational potential of the objects. Similar to how charging a battery allows it to release energy later, moving an object into a place like the edge of a cliff “charges” it with energy that will be released when it falls. This gravitational potential would be especially strong because of how much gravity black holes of this size exert.

“It’s been a really cool time in extragalactic astrophysics because a big segment of our field is pitching in and collaborating to try to figure out a true mystery that the universe has shown us."

Another telling detail is the mention of an atmosphere around the supermassive black hole, which is not part of the common image of a black hole. “Normally,” Nelson says, “you have the supermassive black hole, and then an accretion disk around it.” The accretion disk is the glowing ring and halo that has appeared in many depictions of black holes in popular culture. “The new theory of these black hole stars is that there is almost spherical accretion.” However, this is a more theoretical aspect of the research, and there are different opinions about the structure that this type of black hole would have.

More research is planned to help resolve these ambiguities, and several JWST proposals for next year are designed to help. Two major points that Nelson identifies are collecting data on more LRDs to understand the variations that exist between them and collecting new data to see if previously observed LRDs have changed since they were first documented.

“Maybe some of them are massive galaxies, maybe some of them are black hole stars, maybe some of them are something else entirely,” she says. “It also helps to have information at different times because things as compact as black holes should show variation on very short timescales, so that will tell us a lot about the nature of the object.

“It’s been a really cool time in extragalactic astrophysics,” Nelson continues, “because a big segment of our field is pitching in and collaborating to try to figure out a true mystery that the universe has shown us. It’s also a strange time, because a lot of funding has been cut from astrophysics in particular. But with support, it could be a golden era in astrophysics. A lot of new discoveries will be made with James Webb. We really are just at the beginning of the data that we’re getting.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about astrophysical and planetary sciences? Show your support.

University of Colorado researchers work with an international team to uncover more about the mysterious objects detected by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Traditional

White

Inferring the evolutionary tree of antelope ground squirrels

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:25:19 +0000

Inferring the evolutionary tree of antelope ground squirrels Rachel Sauer Fri, 01/16/2026 - 08:25

Jeff Mitton

Desert dwellers offer evidence that genes carried by an individual store information that literally reaches back millions of years

Sitting in my campsite at Goblin Valley State Park, I saw an antelope ground squirrel standing erect on its back feet, which I found amusing. I soon found that this was a common posture evoked by vigilance. Antelope ground squirrels are in the genus Ammospermophilus, which has five species, all in North America. I was watching white-tailed antelope ground squirrels, A. leucurus, the only antelope ground squirrel in Colorado and Utah.

Antelope ground squirrels (AGS) occur primarily in deserts, including Great Basin, San Joaquin, Mojave, Peninsular, Sonoran and Chihuahuan. They also occur in dryland environments like sagebrush communities and some grasslands. Most species of ground squirrels hibernate, but living in relatively warm and dry environments allows AGS to be active year round.

AGS have several adaptations that allow them to live in the deserts of the western United States and Mexico. Later that day, in the heat of the afternoon, AGS were walking with their white tails coiled above their backs to shed their own portable shade. They would also linger in the shade of a piñon pine, dumping heat by stretching out their legs and pressing their bellies onto the soil. This posture is used frequently in their burrows, between bouts of foraging on the surface. Their body temperatures can rise to 108 to 110 degrees F without damage, much higher than most mammals.

AGS are adapted to deserts or drylands and A. leucurus occupies the greatest distribution, including Oregon, Idaho, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and the Baja California Peninsula. Background reading turned up a paper in a scientific journal that nicely demonstrated, with AGS, how biologists can utilize DNA sequences to infer an evolutionary tree of the genus, and to not only estimate the date that the genus first arose but also infer when and where each species arose.

Antelope ground squirrels occur primarily in deserts and also in dryland environments like sagebrush communities and some grasslands. (Photo: Jeff Mitton)

From 10 million years ago to the end of the Miocene, 5.33 million years ago, a single lineage sustained the ancestors of AGS, but approximately 4 million years ago, as deserts were spreading and developing in the Southwest, the lineage split into three clades. That is, from a solitary trunk the tree of AGS sprouted three branches. A. interpres evolved east of the Sea of Cortez, A. leucurus south ranged from the southern tip of Baja to the middle of the peninsula and A. leucurus north ranged from the middle of Baja to Oregon and Idaho.

Fewer than 1 million years ago, another three species evolved. Pioneers from the leucurus south clade colonized two small islands east of Baja in the Sea of Cortez and evolved into A. insularis. The leucurus north form spread into the San Joaquin Desert in California and evolved into A. nelsoni, and subsequently the AGS in Arizona and northern Mexico evolved into A. harrisii. A. leucurus still ranges from the southern tip of Baja to Oregon and Idaho, but within A. leucurus nine subspecies are recognized today.

Dates on the AGS phylogenetic tree were estimated with mutation rates in three genes and with fossil data. A. insularis, A. harrisii and A nelsonii evolved recently, with an average of 0.32 million years ago. On a different continent, modern humans evolved around 0.20 to 0.30 million years ago—approximately the same time.

At first, the differentiation of A. leucurus into northern and southern forms or clades seems curious, but similar vicariances or taxonomic boundaries have been noted in systematic and biogeographic studies of other mammals, birds, fish and insects. The barrier has been attributed to the Vizcaíno Seaway, which is now the Vizcaíno Desert. While systematists agree that there was a barrier to gene flow near the middle of the Baja Peninsula, estimates from different studies yield different estimates, which vary from 1 to 3 million years ago. One description of the modern desert mentions multiple marine terraces, but another states flatly that there is no convincing evidence of an open, freely flowing seaway. Perhaps the marine terraces were formed by recurrent, ephemeral lagoons or marshes that were sufficient to disrupt gene flow.

Studies like this one emphasize the point that the genes carried by an individual store information that literally reaches back millions of years. Historical biogeographers working with genetic data in animals or plants or microbes can peer through the roiling mists of time to infer relationships among species, to detect speciations and extinctions and to map the migrations of species driven by glacial cycles. Similar techniques to those used in this study of AGS were used to map the migration routes that brought humans from southern Africa to every continent, archipelago and island in the world. Furthermore, our genome carries the evidence that humans hybridized with Neanderthals in Europe and the Middle East and Denisovans in Siberia.

Jeff Mitton is a professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder. His column, "Natural Selections," is also printed in the Boulder Daily Camera.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about ecology and evolutionary biology? Show your support.

Desert dwellers offer evidence that genes carried by an individual store information that literally reaches back millions of years.

Traditional

White

Scholar highlights the Venezuela-Cuba connection

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 23:37:58 +0000

Scholar highlights the Venezuela-Cuba connection Rachel Sauer Thu, 01/15/2026 - 16:37

Bradley Worrell

The two countries have developed deep ties over the past two decades, but it’s unclear what impact recent U.S. actions against Venezuela will have on Havana’s government, �� Boulder Latin America researcher Jen Triplett says

The United States military raid that snatched Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from the presidential palace on Jan. 3 likely rattled the Cuban government in Havana as much as it did the Venezuelan regime in Caracas.

That’s because the two Latin American governments have become deeply intertwined during the past 25 years, says Jen Triplett, a University of Colorado Boulder political and cultural sociologist whose research is heavily focused on Cuba in the 10-year period following the Jan. 1, 1959, revolution led by Fidel Castro. She also has studied Venezuelan history from 1999 to 2013, when former President Hugo Chavez ran the country as a socialist.

“I study how leaders leveraged ideological projects to bolster their consolidation of political, military and economic power. Usually, we think of consolidation in terms of politics, economy and military, but ideology—especially when a transitionary government is motivated by it—is another important factor,” Triplett explains.

Jen Triplett, a �� Boulder assistant professor of sociology, notes that the governments of Venezuela and Cuba have become deeply intertwined over the past 25 years.

While many people in the U.S. tend to think about Cuba in connection with the Cold War and its relationship with the Soviet Union, Triplett says Cuban politics in the 1960s and 1970s was equally focused on what was happening in Latin America. Its relationship with Venezuela during those years was largely fraught, she adds.

The Castro-Chavez partnership years

“Cuba didn’t have much to do with Venezuela until Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998,” she says. “Once it became apparent that Chavez had socialist ambitions—nationalizing the oil industry and redistributing wealth—that caught Castro’s eye.”

By the early 2000s, the two men had forged a bond that was both personal and political. That alliance was pragmatic as well as ideological, Triplett says.

Venezuela, rich in oil, could provide Cuba with the energy resources it needs. In return, Cuba could provide Venezuela with something of value it had: human capital.

“Chavez wanted to focus on giving impoverished Venezuelans what they’d been missing—basic needs and resources—by investing in public education and health infrastructure,” Triplett says. “Cuban doctors allowed him to establish the Barrio Adentro program, bringing health care into urban slums for people who historically lacked access to primary care.”

For Chavez, the relationship was a way to deliver on promises for social justice, while for Castro it was a means to sustain Cuba’s economy and extend its influence in the region, she says. For a time, the two leaders envisioned their relationship could help inspire a wave of socialist-leaning leaders in Latin America that could reshape hemispheric relations and challenge U.S. dominance in the region, she adds.

Maduro’s struggle and Cuba’s deepening role

After Chavez died in March 2013, he was succeeded by his vice president and chosen successor, Maduro. Officially, the Venezuelan-Cuban alliance continued, but the dynamics of the relationship changed, as Maduro lacked Chavez’s charisma and legitimacy, Triplett says.

“Chavez had multiple sources of authority—traditional, rational-legal and charismatic,” she explains. “Maduro is a poor imitation. From day one, people recognized this.”

Lower oil prices and economic mismanagement exacerbated problems, Triplett says. As Venezuela’s economy spiraled downward, reports surfaced that Cuban military and intelligence personnel were actively supporting Maduro—a claim underscored by the recent U.S. raid to capture Maduro, which killed more than 30 Cuban operatives.

“It’s not surprising,” Triplett says. “Cuba’s meager resources include people power. Loyal Cuban military personnel would support efforts to create similar governments elsewhere.”

In 2002, Chavez survived a coup attempt by his own generals. Given Maduro’s precarious position, it’s perhaps not surprising he believed he could trust Cuban military personnel over his own military, Triplett says.

“Maduro’s paranoia likely intensified because he never commanded the same authority as Chavez,” she adds.

For Hugo Chavez, the relationship with Cuba was a way to deliver on promises for social justice, while for Fidel Castro it was a means to sustain Cuba’s economy and extend its influence in the region, says �� Boulder scholar Jen Triplett. (Photo: Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and Nelson Mandela on a billboard in Cuba; Wikimedia Commons)

What comes next for Venezuela?

U.S. intervention in Venezuela—with attacks on reported drug boats departing Venezuela and the capture and extradition of Maduro to the United States—raises questions about the durability of the Cuban-Venezuelan alliance, Triplett says. Still, the removal of Maduro does not necessarily constitute regime change, she adds.

“Replacing him with his vice president, who is steeped in Chavismo, isn’t a real shift,” she says. “Cuba, meanwhile, is on high alert, wondering if they are next. If Venezuela’s new president were to play ball with the U.S., Cuba could lose petrodollars and a valuable lifeline. Whether that happens, I can’t say, but it could be an easy concession by Venezuela.”

Predicting what the future holds for Venezuela and Cuba is hazy at best, Triplett says.

“Both countries share high discontent and outward migration. People are exhausted—too tired to overthrow their governments,” she says. “Cuba’s opposition is even less organized than Venezuela’s. The key difference is foreign intervention. Without it, Maduro would still be in power.”

Prior to Chavez, Venezuela did have a functioning democracy, so Triplett says it’s possible to envision that under the right conditions it could return.

“Neither Venezuelans nor Cubans are monolithic, but Venezuelans largely want democracy—and they remember having it. That’s something that’s been largely absent from U.S. conversations,” she adds, noting America has a long history of military involvement in the affairs of Latin American countries.

Triplett is a member of the Venezuelan studies section of Latin American Studies Association, which recently issued a statement chastising the Maduro government for not honoring the results of the country’s 2024 presidential elections and for cracking down on political dissent. That statement also condemned the U.S. government’s capture of Maduro in a military operation as a violation of international law because it does not appear to be designed to restore democracy to the country but instead seems to be part of efforts to control the country’s resources.

Humanitarian crisis deepens in Cuba

Meanwhile, the conditions in Cuba are disheartening, says Triplett, who has visited the country regularly since 2012, most recently spending four weeks there last summer.

“This last trip was palpably different—an unprecedented struggle for daily survival,” she says. “Blackouts are routine. Outside of Havana, electricity is rarer than outages. Running water is unreliable, forcing residents to pay privately for water trucks, and mosquito-borne illnesses have surged. Meanwhile, Cuba has lost about quarter of its population in four years, mostly working-age people, creating a demographic crisis.”

Triplett soberingly describes Cuba’s near-term outlook as enduring a “polycrisis” that includes economic collapse, political dissent and unmet basic needs, largely because the government has not invested in its infrastructure since the Soviet Union’s collapse.

“People are disillusioned with the government,” she says. “Some had hoped the passing of the Castro brothers would change things, but it hasn’t. Endogenous regime change seems unlikely—too few people, too exhausted and too much repression. Fixing the situation would require massive resources and political will that the government lacks.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about sociology? Show your support.

Traditional

White

Top image: iStock

Research

Art historian walks into the Middle Ages

Scenes from a (very long) walk

Related Articles

Scholar considers language, identity and the fight over shared symbols

Related Articles

One safety step sparks another

Related Articles

Researchers learn new lessons from old butterflies

Related Articles

What’s that knocking in the trees?

Related Articles

Research sheds light on unintended consequences of money laundering regulations

Related Articles

Welcome to the Camping Games (now please show up)

Related Articles

What are the little red dots deep in space?

Related Articles

Inferring the evolutionary tree of antelope ground squirrels

Related Articles

Scholar highlights the Venezuela-Cuba connection

Related Articles