The conventional way of making MXenes reads like a chain of laboratory chores. It begins with a precursor called a MAX phase, a layered ceramic powder that must itself be synthesized. That powder is then combined with a liquid etchant, most commonly hydrofluoric acid, agitated repeatedly, washed, and spun in a centrifuge multiple times to strip away the reaction byproducts. What emerges is MXene material in a form that still demands further processing into an ink, a coating, or a film before it can be put to work. Each of these stages adds cost and time, and the wet chemical etching generates toxic waste while potentially leaving flaws on the surfaces of the delicate flakes. Although the process has been tuned to yield a wide range of chemical compositions and scaled to kilograms per day, its dependence on a separately synthesized precursor has remained a fundamental constraint.

Yury Gogotsi, distinguished university and Bach chair professor in Drexel’s Nick Howley College of Engineering and Computing and one of the discoverers of MXenes, led the new study, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Being able to combine a solid metal source with abundant and inexpensive gaseous reactants to form MXenes directly, he explained, opens a fundamentally different manufacturing pathway. The approach builds on a vapor-phase deposition process pioneered by researchers at the University of Chicago, who reported the first chemical vapor deposition synthesis of MXene, but it introduces markedly cheaper starting materials: titanium tetrachloride, an industrial commodity already produced in enormous quantities to make titania, the white pigment found in paint and sunblock, and methane, the principal component of natural gas.

The experimental recipe is disarmingly simple compared with its wet-chemical rival. The researchers placed titanium powder in a quartz carrier tube, introduced methane, and heated the mixture in a conventional tube furnace to trigger the reaction. As the hot gaseous mixture cooled, a layer of crystalline MXene, specifically the compound Ti2CCl2, formed on the quartz substrate. No MAX phase synthesis preceded the reaction, and no acid etching followed it. Hyunho Kim, a research professor at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea and first author of the paper, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral assistant in Gogotsi’s laboratory, emphasized that growing crystalline MXene directly from abundant precursors, without first making and etching extra precursor materials, represents a significant development. MXene inks made by selective etching, he noted, remain valuable for coatings and printed devices, while vapor-phase synthesis offers a complementary route to crystals with extremely low defect density for future electronics, optics, and quantum technologies.

Beyond simplifying the supply chain, the team discovered that they could exert meaningful control over the material by manipulating the geometry of the reaction itself. By increasing the exposed surface area of the titanium and confining the reaction within a narrow carrier tube, they found that MXene formed on the quartz substrate without ever making direct contact with the solid titanium source. Under these confined conditions, the material self-organized into rounded structures known as spherulites, which together formed a porous nanocrystal network. The confined space, the researchers concluded, drives saturation of titanium chloride vapor to the level required for two-dimensional crystal growth, a key chemical mechanism that explains why the process works and how it might be tuned.

Time proved to be another powerful dial. As the synthesis proceeded for longer periods, the researchers observed continuous lateral growth into larger flakes. Individual spherulites expanded outward and merged with their neighbors, producing swirl-like crystalline domains containing individual flakes tens of micrometers across. This behavior demonstrates that crystalline two-dimensional MXene can be synthesized directly through a gas-to-solid growth process, and the sustained lateral expansion hints at something even more ambitious: the feasibility of producing large-area, and eventually wafer-scale, MXene crystals using equipment and principles familiar to the semiconductor industry.

The industrial logic of the process may prove to be its most compelling feature. Gogotsi pointed out that the new method shares important similarities with the chloride route used for industrial titania production. Both rely on titanium tetrachloride as a high-temperature vapor precursor; conceptually, methane supplies the carbon in the MXene process just as oxygen is used to form titania. Because titanium chloride is already handled at a very large industrial scale to produce millions of tons of titania each year, the same engineering principles could ultimately be adapted to produce inexpensive MXene powder in ton-scale quantities. For a material whose commercial adoption has been throttled by manufacturing complexity, that parallel to one of chemistry’s largest commodity processes is a striking endorsement of scalability.

Cost reduction extended to the metal source as well. Whereas the original University of Chicago study used high-purity titanium foil as its starting material, the Drexel-led group sourced its precursor from titanium sponge, an abundant industrial product that is substantially less expensive than high-purity titanium. Combined with the elimination of the MAX phase synthesis and the acid-etching steps, along with their associated toxic waste streams, the economics of MXene production begin to look radically different. Fewer steps mean fewer opportunities for contamination and defects, and gaseous precursors lend themselves to the kind of continuous, controlled manufacturing that has made electronic-grade materials affordable at scale.

The implications reach well beyond cheaper powders. According to the researchers, continued control over nucleation and lateral growth could eventually enable large-area, low-defect MXene crystals and even wafer-scale conducting films suitable for electronics, optical communication, and quantum computing. Crystalline films grown directly from the vapor phase, with their extremely low defect densities, are precisely the form factor demanded by next-generation devices, where flake boundaries and surface imperfections degrade performance. A route that grows such crystals directly on a substrate, from commodity chemicals, in a conventional tube furnace, positions MXenes to compete with established two-dimensional materials on the manufacturing terms that matter most.

Challenges remain before MXenes move from the quartz tube to the factory floor. The next phase of the research will focus on refining the process to ensure structural uniformity, increasing flake size, and achieving precise control over the surface chemistry of the resulting materials, which governs how MXenes conduct charge and interact with their environment. The team also intends to adapt the process to produce MXenes with other chemical compositions, broadening the palette of properties available to device designers. Still, the demonstration that a material born in an acid flask can now be grown as a crystalline film from natural gas and a paint pigment precursor marks a turning point. The discovery of a key chemical mechanism for scalable vapor-phase growth suggests that the barriers that have kept MXenes in the laboratory for a decade and a half may finally be dissolving, one wafer at a time.

Subject of Research: Vapor-phase chemical synthesis of two-dimensional Ti2CCl2 MXene crystals for scalable industrial production

Article Title: New process for making MXenes via vapor-phase synthesis could expand technological applications

Article References: New process for making MXenes via vapor-phase synthesis could expand technological applications. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: MXenes, two-dimensional materials, chemical vapor deposition, titanium tetrachloride, nanomaterials, Drexel University, energy storage, quantum computing, materials science, Ti2CCl2, thin films, industrial manufacturing

The study, published in the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine, was led by co-senior authors David Thompson, MD, an associate professor of clinical emergency medicine and director of quality improvement and patient safety in the UC College of Medicine’s Department of Emergency Medicine, and Anita Goel, MD, also an associate professor of clinical emergency medicine. Over a 23-month campaign spanning the emergency departments of University of Cincinnati Medical Center and West Chester Hospital, the team tracked what happened when clinicians were given the training, tools and encouragement to apply validated clinical decision rules before ordering head and cervical spine CT scans in low-risk trauma patients. The outcome was striking: an estimated 3,542 CT scans were avoided, roughly $6.2 million in patient healthcare charges were saved, and more than 14,000 hours of cumulative patient waiting time were eliminated, all with no identifiable patient harm.

The technical foundation of the campaign rested on clinical decision rules that have become core components of emergency medicine training and standards of care nationwide. These rules, which guide clinicians in determining which head or neck trauma patients genuinely need cross-sectional imaging, incorporate carefully weighted risk indicators. Patients who fall from height, are ejected from motor vehicles, experience limb weakness or numbness, present with blood in the ear, vomit after the injury or show signs of confusion are considered high risk and proceed to imaging. Patients without such red flags, including many with concussions, are classified as low risk, and in those cases the rules support withholding the CT scan and monitoring the patient instead. The rationale is grounded in both radiation biology and health economics: each head or cervical spine CT delivers a meaningful ionizing radiation dose to tissues that are inherently radiosensitive, and the diagnostic yield in truly low-risk populations is exceptionally low.

The numbers quantify just how much low-value imaging was being avoided. At an estimated cost of approximately $1,750 per scan, the 3,542 avoided CT examinations translated into $6.2 million in patient charges that were never incurred. At an average of about four hours of waiting per scan, the campaign spared patients a cumulative 14,168 hours of time spent in the emergency department. Perhaps most striking from a radiation safety perspective, the avoided scans eliminated an estimated 6,021.4 millisieverts of collective radiation dose, a figure the researchers note corresponds to roughly 2,000 years of typical natural background radiation exposure for a single person. In an era when medical imaging accounts for a substantial fraction of the population’s cumulative exposure to ionizing radiation, reductions of this magnitude carry genuine public health significance.

Crucially, the campaign’s safety review found no downside. When the team examined their data at the conclusion of the intervention period, they identified zero missed injuries, meaning every avoided scan had indeed been medically unnecessary and no patient had been sent home with an undetected serious head or spinal injury. This finding addresses the central concern that has historically slowed the adoption of imaging-reduction programs: the fear that trimming CT utilization will inevitably let dangerous pathology slip through. Thompson emphasized that the guidelines, when followed, reliably protect against missed serious injuries, and the campaign’s own outcome data provided direct, institution-level confirmation of that claim across two busy emergency departments.

The intervention itself was deliberately multifaceted, reflecting modern implementation science rather than a single blunt policy. Continuing education sessions were delivered to emergency medicine providers, reinforcing the decision rules and the research evidence behind them so that clinicians understood not just what to do but why. Simultaneously, the CT decision rules were embedded directly into the electronic health record used to order patient testing, so that the point of ordering became a structured prompt for appropriate test selection. This combination of provider education and clinical decision support embedded in the workflow is widely regarded as the most durable way to change ordering behavior, because it reduces reliance on individual memory or judgment at moments of time pressure and standardizes the application of evidence across the entire provider pool.

The campaign also extended its educational efforts to patients, recognizing that a significant fraction of unnecessary imaging is driven not by clinician uncertainty but by patient expectation. Some injured patients arrive convinced that a CT scan is required, even after a physician has determined that their risk profile does not warrant one. To address this, the team created informational handouts designed to reassure patients that declining a scan in their situation reflects careful, evidence-based medicine rather than corner-cutting. As Thompson explained, not everyone with a head or neck injury needs a CT scan; some do and some do not, and the department’s goal is to provide the right care for every patient using the tools available to make those distinctions accurately.

The setting in which these results were achieved amplifies their importance. University of Cincinnati Medical Center is the Greater Cincinnati region’s only academic medical center and its only Level I adult trauma center, functioning as a major tertiary referral hub with an 81-bed emergency department that Thompson described as almost always at capacity. West Chester Hospital adds further patient volume to the health system’s emergency care footprint. Demonstrating that imaging reduction can be achieved in such a demanding, high-acuity environment undercuts a common objection, namely that evidence-based imaging restraint works only in smaller or calmer settings. The UC experience suggests the opposite: precisely because high-volume departments face the greatest pressures of throughput, cost and radiation burden, they may have the most to gain from rigorously applied decision support.

By the end of the 23-month period, all measured outcome indicators showed reductions in the rate of head and cervical spine CT scanning at both participating hospitals, and the absence of any identified missed injuries confirmed that the avoided imaging was truly discretionary. The research team, which included co-first authors Jude C. Luke, an emergency medicine resident physician, and Rebecca N. Kubick, a medical student, alongside biostatistician Heidi J. Sucharew, Natalie E. Kreitzer, and performance improvement specialists Kayla Winkler and Mary L. Giles, framed the project as a win for both physicians and patients. Doctors retain the reassurance that validated rules protect against missed injuries, while patients receive faster care, smaller bills and less radiation. If replicated at scale, the model offers a template for how emergency departments everywhere can convert well-established clinical decision rules from guidelines on paper into measurable reductions in low-value care.

Subject of Research: A quality improvement campaign reducing head and cervical spine CT imaging in low-risk trauma patients

Article Title: University of Cincinnati emergency medicine physicians safely eliminate thousands of unnecessary CT scans

Article References: University of Cincinnati emergency medicine physicians safely eliminate thousands of unnecessary CT scans. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: emergency medicine, CT scans, quality improvement, clinical decision rules, trauma, radiation exposure, healthcare costs, University of Cincinnati, patient safety, low-value care, electronic health records, concussion

The report emerges from the REAL post-growth research project, funded by a European Research Council Synergy Grant and led by Giorgos Kallis and Jason Hickel of ICTA-UAB together with Julia Steinberger of the University of Lausanne. In this research tradition, economic growth is treated not as an unqualified good but as something closer to an addiction: a pursuit that no longer reliably improves people’s lives while progressively compromising the resources and environmental stability on which future well-being depends. Post-growth scholarship therefore seeks ways to raise quality of life without depending on continued expansion of production and consumption, which is increasingly doubtful in viability and incompatible with the limits of a finite planet. The Catalan study translates that abstract ambition into a concrete inventory of interventions, each calibrated to the region’s actual socio-environmental conditions.

The report’s principal investigator, Salvador Pueyo, acknowledges that there are reasons for pessimism given the scale of global and everyday problems, but he insists that the game is not over, and that defining solidly grounded policies is an immediate necessity for emerging from the current crisis. Giorgos Kallis, principal investigator of REAL, describes the work as a fundamental study, the first to calculate how a region can transition toward a post-growth future, demonstrating that such a transition is feasible. A central methodological contribution of the report is its quantification of the resources demanded by current modes of living and production, compared against the potential capacity of Catalonia and of the planet as a whole. Pueyo emphasizes that the analysis does not focus on individual responsibility but on the potential for collective change, while conceding that a collective shift of this magnitude will inevitably also involve changes in consumption habits.

Nowhere is the quantitative rigor more evident than in the energy chapter. The report presents data showing that moving away from fossil fuels is urgent and, crucially, is not currently happening. Meeting Catalonia’s entire present energy consumption exclusively through renewable sources, the authors calculate, would require occupying the equivalent of 4.9 percent of the region’s territory, a burden with consequences that would be difficult to bear; increasing consumption further would make the problem even worse. To avoid this, the plan calls for a sharp reduction in energy use combined with the sequential deployment of renewables, beginning in locations with lower environmental impact and moving later to higher-impact sites, preserving future opportunities to mitigate damage. Notably, the report finds that the bulk of current electricity consumption could be covered using rooftops and degraded land, provided the Catalan government, the Generalitat, plays a proactive role: covering 60 percent of available rooftop areas is estimated to require an investment equivalent to 4.5 percent of the Generalitat’s non-financial budget over five years, an outlay the authors consider recoverable.

Mobility receives equally specific treatment. To cut energy consumption and environmental impacts, the report proposes curtailing private motorized traffic while strengthening public transit, and redirecting subsidies for electric cars toward leasing services, vehicle-sharing systems and community fleets. Air transport is singled out as a sector in need of rapid contraction, addressed through targeted fiscal tools. The report demonstrates that sharply reducing air traffic would save resources, reduce impacts and lower vulnerabilities while simultaneously generating public revenue and tempering housing prices, a combination of benefits that makes it one of the more politically attractive proposals in the plan. The document also draws attention to the emerging challenge posed by data centers, whose swelling energy appetite threatens to undermine any conservation gains achieved elsewhere in the economy.

The agrifood chapter offers perhaps the study’s starkest accounting. Catalonia, the authors find, lacks the agricultural capacity to feed both its human population and its livestock industry simultaneously, even if meat exports were halted completely, while sustainable extensive farming could cover only a small fraction of current consumption levels. The report therefore deems a drastic reduction in the consumption of animal-based products indispensable, and prescribes a transition toward an agroecological model centered on small-scale farmers rather than large corporations, prioritizing food security over exports. Agroecological intensification, the report argues, would maintain high productivity while delivering far greater benefits for sustainability, rural livelihoods and public health. Beyond Catalonia’s borders, the authors identify a coordinated international reduction in animal-source consumption as perhaps the last remaining hope for the climate, because even the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, more necessary than ever, is no longer sufficient on its own to respect the 1.5 °C limit. On the emissions side, to avoid exhausting the carbon budget compatible with that limit by 2028, the report proposes a 7 percent annual reduction in fossil emissions in Catalonia beginning in 2026, alongside the food-system shift.

The economic pillar of the plan is inseparable from these physical transformations. As Pueyo puts it, a post-growth transition requires a profound transformation of economic, fiscal, labor and social policies, because economic tools must drive sustainability even at the expense of growth, and when growth ceases to be a priority or is simply no longer viable, redistribution becomes key to meeting basic needs. The report proposes an adaptive eco-voucher scheme (EVA) that combines an environmental consumption tax with a complementary currency distributed to citizens, penalizing higher polluters while compensating those with a lower environmental footprint. A progressive land value tax would curb speculation and lower housing costs, with revenue earmarked to expand public rental housing, support housing cooperatives and fund social spending. These instruments, the authors argue, allow fiscal policy to reward low-impact behavior rather than simply punishing consumption, a design intended to protect low- and middle-income households through the transition.

On labor and social rights, the plan proposes a cushion income (renda coixía), a tailored welfare benefit protecting low- and middle-income households, and, as an alternative or complement, a job guarantee focused at least on those facing the greatest difficulty finding work, estimated to cost 2.4 percent of the Generalitat’s budget. Recommendations include shortening the workweek to improve quality of life and share caregiving duties, and guaranteeing public or cooperative employment for workers displaced by the eco-social transition. The governance layer of the plan is equally ambitious: a commitment to ethical banking, the cooperative model and public-community partnerships, binding citizens’ assemblies for strategic decisions, and mechanisms to ensure that leadership positions are held by individuals motivated by the common good. The method underlying the whole report is data and statistical analysis, grounding each policy in measured resource flows rather than rhetoric.

Perhaps the most politically consequential finding concerns unilateral action. Globally, the authors argue, there is no alternative path to improving everyone’s quality of life; yet implementing post-growth policies unilaterally is far more difficult for a specific territory, especially one inside the eurozone. Research under the REAL project has advanced post-growth economic policy for the eurozone as a whole, but a major challenge remained: determining what Catalonia can do while the rest of the currency union has yet to act. Pueyo admits that at the outset the team feared Catalonia’s margin for unilateral maneuver would be minimal, but they are now more optimistic, having compiled existing policies and developed new ones that can, in principle, be applied without waiting for external coordination. The researchers hope these policies will serve as a benchmark for other countries, and that even if unilateral implementation is insufficient on its own, Catalonia’s example could supply the leadership needed to drive the international coordination that major global challenges demand. The report frames the present global landscape as the failure of the globalized economic model, and its central challenge as articulating a new form of cooperation focused on people and the planet, drawing on historical precedents that demonstrate the viability of such collective action.

Subject of Research: A quantitative post-growth policy study modeling how Catalonia can maintain resilience and well-being while decoupling from economic growth.

Article Title: Can Catalonia survive without economic growth? A new study says it can

Article References: Can Catalonia survive without economic growth? A new study says it can. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: post-growth, Catalonia, ICTA-UAB, climate emergency, energy transition, agroecology, renewable energy, land value tax, job guarantee, eurozone, 1.5 °C limit, degrowth policy

The graduate at the center of the milestone is Matthew Grundy, a 27-year-old marketing professional who completed the degree ahead of the standard three-year timeframe by taking on additional units and studying through holiday periods. His route through the program offers a case study in how the degree operates in practice. Rather than moving through a fixed sequence of disciplinary prerequisites, Grundy navigated a curriculum built around tackling real-world projects, working alongside people from different backgrounds and exploring emerging technologies and business models. The structure deliberately mirrors the conditions of contemporary professional life, where problems rarely arrive neatly labeled by discipline and where teams are assembled from varied expertise to respond to challenges that shift as quickly as the markets they emerge from.

In remarks following the ceremony, Grundy reflected on what drew him to the program in the first place, describing the degree as different from conventional offerings because it encouraged students to think across industries rather than focusing on a single field of study. He emphasized that the curriculum rewarded creative problem solving and adaptability, and he argued that these capabilities are becoming increasingly important as industries evolve and organizations seek people who can think critically, identify opportunities and navigate uncertainty. His assessment speaks to a wider debate within higher education about whether the traditional degree structure, which has historically organized knowledge into bounded departments and majors, still serves students entering a labor market characterized by fluid career paths, technological disruption and the erosion of clearly defined job descriptions.

Curtin Vice-Chancellor Professor Harlene Hayne framed the graduation in precisely those terms, saying that Grundy’s success exemplified the curiosity, adaptability and entrepreneurial thinking the university aims to foster in every student. According to Hayne, graduates who can work across disciplines, think creatively and respond confidently to uncertainty will be essential to the future workforce as industries continue to evolve. The statement reflects a strategic bet being made by institutions around the world: that the next generation of value creation, whether in established corporations or startup ecosystems, will depend less on deep specialization in a single domain and more on the ability to synthesize insights from multiple fields, communicate across professional boundaries and translate abstract ideas into practical solutions that generate measurable outcomes.

Grundy’s own experience of the degree suggests that its lessons extended well beyond formal coursework. Balancing full-time work in marketing with a demanding study load, he said the program sparked a strong interest in growth, innovation and business development, and he now plans to continue building a career spanning strategy, marketing, innovation, organizational development and business growth. Notably, he described being the first graduate of the degree as a source of considerable pride, and he offered a perspective on innovation that pushes back against common assumptions. Innovation is frequently equated with technology, he observed, but one of the biggest lessons he took from the degree was that innovation is fundamentally about people, about solving problems and about creating value. Those skills, he argued, will remain important regardless of how industries change in the future.

That people-centered framing of innovation deserves attention, because it aligns with a growing body of thought in management and organizational research. Studies of successful innovation consistently find that technological capability alone rarely determines outcomes; instead, the decisive factors tend to be organizational culture, the willingness to experiment, the capacity to learn from failure and the ability to assemble teams whose members bring complementary perspectives. A degree that explicitly trains students to collaborate across backgrounds and to treat problem solving as a human-centered activity is, in effect, institutionalizing those findings into a curriculum. The implication is that innovation can be taught not as a body of technical knowledge but as a set of habits and dispositions, including tolerance for ambiguity, comfort with iteration and the discipline to test ideas against real constraints before scaling them.

Dr Mike Burbridge, the Bachelor of Innovation course lead at Curtin Business School, described the degree as a direct response to a job market in which career paths are changing faster than ever before. His characterization of the program’s purpose is deliberately practical: the degree, he said, gives students the skills and knowledge to tackle complex problems and the confidence to implement their solutions, whatever direction their careers ultimately take. That last clause is significant. Unlike professional degrees that prepare graduates for a defined occupation, the Bachelor of Innovation is explicitly designed to be destination-agnostic, equipping students with transferable capabilities that remain relevant as their individual paths diverge. In a labor market where analysts estimate that many of today’s school-age students will work in roles that do not yet exist, that design choice represents a conscious departure from the credentialing logic that has dominated universities for generations.

The accelerated completion of the degree also highlights questions about how flexible academic structures can be when students are motivated and institutions allow it. By taking extra units and studying through holiday periods, Grundy compressed a three-year program into a shorter span while simultaneously maintaining full-time employment. For universities, this raises the possibility that innovation-focused curricula, freed from rigid prerequisite chains, may naturally lend themselves to accelerated and part-time pathways alike, broadening access for working professionals who cannot step away from employment to study. It also suggests a model in which the boundary between study and work becomes more porous, with students applying classroom insights to professional challenges in real time and bringing workplace problems back into academic projects, creating a continuous feedback loop between theory and practice.

The graduation arrives amid broader evidence that employers increasingly prize exactly the competencies the program targets. Global surveys of hiring managers routinely place creative thinking, adaptability, complex problem solving and collaboration near the top of desired skills, often ahead of specific technical proficiencies that become obsolete within a few years. Automation and artificial intelligence are expected to absorb many routine analytical tasks, leaving human workers to concentrate on the ambiguous, judgment-heavy and interpersonal dimensions of work that resist codification. A curriculum that treats uncertainty as a subject of study rather than an inconvenience therefore positions its graduates to occupy the segments of the labor market that are likely to expand rather than contract, and the first completed cycle of the degree offers an early indication that students can emerge from such a program with a coherent professional identity rather than a diffuse set of interests.

For Curtin University, the weekend ceremony closes the loop on a bold curricular experiment and opens a new chapter in which the degree must demonstrate sustained value through the career trajectories of its graduates. Grundy’s stated ambition to build a career across strategy, marketing, innovation and business growth will be watched with interest, not as a single data point but as the first entry in what both the university and its faculty clearly hope will become a growing roster of alumni demonstrating that thinking differently can be formally taught, rigorously assessed and practically rewarded. As Professor Hayne’s remarks made clear, the university’s wager is that curiosity, adaptability and entrepreneurial thinking are not fixed traits that students either possess or lack, but capacities that can be deliberately cultivated. The first graduate of the Bachelor of Innovation now stands as living evidence that the experiment can work, and his journey from enrolment to graduation, compressed ahead of schedule and balanced against full-time work, may well become the template that future cohorts of cross-disciplinary problem solvers follow into a workforce that increasingly rewards those who can adapt faster than the world around them changes.

Subject of Research: The first graduate of Curtin University's cross-disciplinary Bachelor of Innovation degree and the design of innovation-focused higher education curricula.

Article Title: Curtin's first Innovation graduate proves the value of thinking differently

Article References: Curtin's first Innovation graduate proves the value of thinking differently. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Curtin University, Bachelor of Innovation, Matthew Grundy, Harlene Hayne, Mike Burbridge, Curtin Business School, innovation education, cross-disciplinary learning, graduate employment, creative problem solving, future workforce, higher education

Timothy Werner, professor of business, government, and society and Wade T. and Bettye C. Nowlin Centennial Professor of Business Administration at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, has given this playbook a name: organizational repression. The term is borrowed deliberately from political science, where researchers have long studied how governments anticipate, disrupt, and escalate against political dissent. Werner’s contribution, developed with Natalie Holzaepfel and Olga Hawn of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is to argue that companies deploy an analogous set of strategies against stakeholder activism, and that these strategies are far more alike, and far more widespread, than previous scholarship has recognized.

Stakeholders, in this framework, are non-shareholder groups with an interest in a company’s conduct: employees seeking better conditions, activists demanding environmental accountability, communities affected by operations. Past research has generally assumed that firms treat such groups with a kind of grudging respect. Companies might resist stakeholder pressure, the literature suggested, but they might also collaborate with it or simply ignore it. What Werner and his colleagues wanted to show was something more unsettling: that firms can act to undermine the very ability of stakeholders to organize in the first place, before any negotiation, boycott, or campaign even begins.

The theoretical architecture of the paper, published in the Academy of Management Review, maps corporate tactics onto the three phases that social movements typically pass through. The first is emergence, the stage at which individuals privately notice a grievance but have not yet connected with others who share it. The second is coalescence, when people begin to organize, communicate, and identify as a group. The third is formalization, when the movement acquires structure, formal membership, and alliances with outside organizations. For each phase, the researchers identify matching corporate strategies designed to prevent or discourage the movement from advancing to the next one.

At the emergence stage, the goal is to stop collective action before it starts by convincing people there is nothing worth mobilizing over. The paper points to Exxon Mobil, which began funding research downplaying climate change as early as the 1970s, years before the company became a target of activist campaigns. By shaping the information environment and the perceived legitimacy of a grievance, a firm can prevent the grievance from ever crystallizing into a shared cause. A second strategy at this stage is reputational: cultivating a public image of being unreceptive to activism, so that potential organizers conclude that mobilization would be pointless before they ever attempt it.

Once a movement begins to coalesce, the corporate calculus shifts toward making participation costly. Here companies target the individuals most likely to join. When Delta Air Lines faced a unionization push among flight attendants in 2024, it offered a carrot: a 5 percent pay raise, but only for nonunion workers. The message was that loyalty to the company, not to a collective, would be rewarded. Other firms have reached for sticks instead, including demotions, schedule changes engineered to conflict with organizing meetings, and implicit threats to fire known organizers. The Amazon case in Virginia illustrates the same logic, combining surveillance with messaging designed to make association itself feel risky.

If a movement nonetheless achieves full formalization, recruiting members and forming alliances with outside groups, the most effective corporate response changes again, toward fracturing the coalition itself. The pipeline company Energy Transfer, facing protests over its Dakota Access Pipeline, allegedly hired private security firms to disrupt activist networks. It also pursued litigation against protest groups, ultimately winning a judgment of more than $600 million from Greenpeace. Lawsuits of this kind, often described by critics as strategic suits against public participation, can drain resources and attention from a movement even when the underlying dispute remains unresolved.

Werner is careful to emphasize what the theory does and does not claim. The researchers pass no ethical judgment on organizational repression, and they take no stance on whether repression is good or bad. Their claim is analytical rather than moral: that these tactics constitute a systematic, coherent, and underexplored set of behaviors that deserve rigorous empirical study in their own right, rather than being treated as scattered anecdotes about particular companies or industries. Framing union-busting, greenwashing, surveillance, and litigation as instances of a single strategic umbrella, they argue, allows scholars to see patterns that case-by-case analysis obscures.

The theory also carries an important caveat: organizational repression is not guaranteed to work. A company that moves too aggressively may trigger a backlash that strengthens the very movement it was trying to suppress, drawing public sympathy, media scrutiny, or regulatory attention to the grievance. The effectiveness of any given tactic therefore depends on context, on how visible the repression is, and on how stakeholders and observers respond. This contingency is precisely why the authors argue that systematic measurement is needed, rather than assumptions in either direction about how firms behave or how stakeholders fare.

The researchers’ next step is to test the framework empirically, drawing on data sources such as whistleblower reports, lawsuits, and leaked corporate documents to assess how often, and how effectively, companies actually deploy these tactics in practice. If the theory holds, it could reshape how scholars and policymakers think about the balance of power between corporations and the people they affect, moving the conversation from isolated scandals toward a structural understanding of how dissent is managed before it can gain momentum.

Subject of Research: How companies systematically repress collective action by stakeholders such as employees, activists, and communities

Article Title: How companies quietly undercut dissent

Article References: How companies quietly undercut dissent. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: organizational repression, stakeholder activism, corporate strategy, union-busting, social movements, labor relations, greenwashing, Academy of Management Review, corporate surveillance, strategic litigation, collective action, business ethics

The study, published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, used an elegant experimental design to probe moral intuitions about distributive justice. Participants were asked to decide how bonuses should be allocated to real workers on an online labor market platform, choosing between allocation based on measured performance and allocation through a random lottery. This approach allowed the researchers to observe whether people reward merit or tolerate chance when real money is at stake for actual workers, rather than merely recording abstract opinions. The same participants were then asked about their support for redistribution through policy measures, including higher taxes on the wealthy, giving the team a direct window into the connection between private fairness judgments and public economic preferences.

The headline result is that, on average, the global population is substantially more willing to accept an unequal distribution of wealth when it is based on work rather than on pure chance. Earnings that flow from effort, skill and achievement are widely regarded as deserved, while windfalls produced by the roll of a dice are viewed with far more suspicion and are far more likely to trigger support for redistribution. In other words, inequality is not a single moral category. Two societies with identical levels of income dispersion may judge that dispersion in profoundly different ways depending on whether the rich earned their position or simply got lucky.

Yet this merit-based view of fairness is not universal, and here the study delivers its most provocative findings. The belief that prosperity achieved without personal effort is undeserved is strongest in countries with democratic political systems that are richer, more equal and more individualistic. Switzerland emerges as a paradigmatic case: the Swiss population places exceptional value on achievement through personal effort and is comparatively tolerant of income gaps produced by hard work and performance. At the same time, the Swiss remain open to a degree of redistribution, particularly in cases where inequality is clearly grounded in luck rather than merit. The moral logic seems to be that society should cushion the unlucky but need not penalize the successful.

In sharp contrast, the researchers documented a high level of acceptance of luck in several non-Western countries, with China and India standing out as prominent examples. In these societies, majorities were not only more accepting of prosperity gained by chance; they were also opposed to redistributing wealth that had been acquired through luck. This finding upends the assumption, common in Western economics and political philosophy, that chance-based inequality is morally illegitimate everywhere and that luck should be neutralized through taxation and transfer programs. Almås suggests that cultural and other factors underpin these divergent attitudes, and she indicates that future work will examine to what extent differences in redistributive preferences are associated with different religious beliefs, which may shape whether fortune is seen as a private blessing or a collective concern.

The study also tested an alternative explanation for why people might tolerate inequality even when they find it unfair. Redistribution, after all, is not costless. High earners may be believed to work less when redistributive taxes are in place, shrinking the economic pie and reducing incentives. If such efficiency concerns drive tolerance of inequality, then attitudes should correlate with beliefs about the economic costs of taxation rather than with moral judgments about the source of income. The analysis, however, found that this factor plays a much smaller role in the global acceptance of inequality than the origin of that inequality itself. Luck versus merit, it turns out, is the decisive axis along which people around the world evaluate whether a distribution deserves their approval.

These results carry important methodological lessons for the social sciences. Much of what economists and psychologists claim about human fairness norms has been built on studies of so-called WEIRD populations, that is, Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies. The findings reveal a significant contrast between Western and non-Western societies, demonstrating that conclusions drawn from Western samples cannot simply be generalized to humanity at large. A person in Zurich and a person in Delhi may look at the same distribution of income and reach opposite moral verdicts, not because one is mistaken about the facts, but because they are drawing on fundamentally different frameworks for justifying economic outcomes.

The practical implications extend well beyond the academy. Debates over progressive taxation, welfare programs and executive compensation are often framed as battles between egalitarians and defenders of the free market, with the underlying assumption that people respond to inequality itself. This research suggests that framing is incomplete. Public support for redistribution is likely to depend on the narrative attached to inequality, whether citizens believe the wealthy earned their position through effort or stumbled into it through inheritance, connections or chance. Policymakers who ignore the moral source of economic disparities may misread public opinion, and campaigns for or against redistribution may succeed or fail based on which account of merit dominates the public conversation.

For Almås and her colleagues, the dataset represents a foundation for a new generation of research on the moral justification of inequality. By covering eighty percent of the world’s population with a consistent experimental protocol, the study offers an unprecedented map of how fairness norms vary across cultures, political systems and levels of economic development. Understanding how societies morally justify inequality, and how those justifications in turn shape attitudes toward redistribution, is essential for anyone seeking to explain why some democracies embrace high taxes and generous welfare states while others resist them. The study does not settle whether luck or merit should matter, but it makes unmistakably clear that, in the court of global public opinion, not all inequality is judged equally, and the verdict differs dramatically depending on where you ask the question.

Subject of Research: Cross-national study of fairness preferences and attitudes toward income inequality and redistribution

Article Title: Luck or merit? Not all inequality is equally acceptable.

Article References: Luck or merit? Not all inequality is equally acceptable.. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: inequality, fairness, redistribution, merit, luck, economic preferences, University of Zurich, cross-cultural study, taxation, behavioral economics, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Ingvild Almås

The relationship between the urban environment and public health is one of the most robustly established findings in modern epidemiology. The quality of housing, the design of transport infrastructure, the availability of green space and the walkability of neighbourhoods all measurably influence the risk that residents will develop life-threatening conditions. Poorly connected communities with limited access to parks and active travel options show elevated rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness and several cancers. Yet despite decades of evidence, improving urban environments as a preventative public health measure remains extraordinarily complex, because it demands coordinated action from multiple actors with different mandates, budgets and priorities. Planning authorities, housing developers, transport agencies and health services each hold only part of the levers required to create healthier places, and no single organisation bears the full cost of the diseases that bad design can produce.

It is precisely this fragmentation that the researchers set out to address. To assess how economic evidence could support more integrated decision-making, the team conducted 167 qualitative interviews with key stakeholders drawn from across England’s urban development system, spanning national and local government, private industry and civil society. The interviews explored in depth how the HAUS tool could support collaboration and informed decision-making across sectors that rarely share a common evidence base or a common metric of success. What emerged was a striking consensus: stakeholders recognised the value of HAUS as a new way to support shared decision-making and to create incentives for organisations to work together toward better health outcomes, precisely because it assigns an economic value to impacts that have historically been invisible in development appraisals.

The technical core of HAUS is a valuation model that links specific features of the environment to health outcomes and their associated economic costs. The tool quantifies and monetises changes in disease occurrence and premature mortality linked with different urban development interventions and affecting local populations. In practical terms, a proposal to add walkable streets, expand green infrastructure or improve housing quality can be assessed not only in terms of construction costs and property values, but also in terms of the expected reduction in NHS treatment costs, productivity losses and the broader societal burden of illness. By translating health outcomes into economic terms, the tool helps decision-makers grasp the long-term value of healthier urban environments and supports more informed investment and planning decisions that might otherwise be dismissed on short-term financial grounds.

The tool did not appear from nowhere. It was initially developed during an earlier research pilot and was further refined throughout the project in collaboration with the UK’s Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, giving it an unusually direct route from academic prototype to policy application. That collaboration has now borne institutional fruit: the ministry has adopted HAUS in its appraisal guides for local authorities, embedding health valuation into the standard machinery of English planning assessment. For a field in which public health arguments have long struggled to compete with housing delivery targets and economic growth imperatives, this represents a significant shift in what evidence counts when the future of a city is decided.

Dr Andrew Barnfield, Senior Lecturer in public health at the University of East London and co-author of the study, emphasised that the tool changes what decision-makers are able to see. ‘The HAUS tool enables decision makers to account for health costs that are linked with the urban environment,’ he said. ‘As our work shows, this is vital for making healthier and more equitable places.’ The equity dimension matters because the health burden of poor urban design falls disproportionately on disadvantaged communities, which are more likely to live near major roads, in lower-quality housing and with limited access to green space. By making these costs explicit, HAUS gives advocates for those communities a quantitative argument that resonates in boardrooms and town halls alike.

Professor Sarah Ayres, from the University of Bristol’s School for Policy Studies, framed the development as a genuine methodological milestone. ‘The collaboration between TRUUD and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has created a version of the Health Appraisal of Urban Systems model which is to be used for housing, community and local government interventions,’ she said. ‘For the first time, there are now methods to quantify and value the potential health impacts of urban interventions for specific populations.’ The reference to TRUUD, the research consortium on urban health decarbonisation and decision-making of which the three universities are part, underlines the scale of the effort required to move such tools from theory into the working routines of government.

Dr Geoff Bates, from the University of Bath’s Institute for Policy Research, argued that the economic framing is not a concession to fiscal orthodoxy but a strategic necessity. ‘Making the economic case to pursue preventative policies is one way that can persuade policymakers to act to improve long-term health and wellbeing,’ he said. ‘Improving policymaker access to evidence and tools like HAUS that demonstrate the savings to the public purse from investing in healthier housing and urban environments is a step towards improving public health.’ The logic is familiar from other domains of preventative policy: the costs of disease are diffuse and delayed, while the costs of intervention are immediate and concentrated, and only tools that render future savings visible can rebalance that asymmetry in political decision-making.

The findings arrive at a moment when the pressures on urban systems are intensifying. Rising obesity rates, an ageing population, persistent air pollution and the health impacts of climate change all converge on the built environment, and health services across the developed world are increasingly looking upstream toward prevention. The researchers conclude that HAUS provides valuable evidence to encourage cross-sector collaboration and to embed preventative public health into urban development decisions, shifting the question from whether cities can afford to prioritise health to whether they can afford not to. If the tool’s adoption by national government spreads through local authority practice, the healthier city may cease to be an aspiration and become, at last, an audited line in the appraisal.

Subject of Research: Economic valuation of public health impacts in urban development decision-making

Article Title: Economic tool could help cities prioritize public health in urban development

Article References: Economic tool could help cities prioritize public health in urban development. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: urban development, public health, HAUS tool, economic valuation, planning policy, prevention, health equity, built environment, stakeholder interviews, England, University of East London, ministry adoption

The prize recognizes a landmark 2012 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences under the title Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior. The paper has aged remarkably well, continuing to be cited, debated, and replicated in the years since its publication. For Piff, the recognition is the culmination of nearly two decades of investigation into a deceptively simple question: what does money do to the human mind? As he explained to the Zurich audience, his laboratory has spent roughly twenty years documenting a consistent pattern in which rising wealth and increasing financial resources appear to make people more self-interested, more entitled, and more greedy. The finding is not a moral judgment about individuals but a psychological account of how social environments shape behavior, often in ways that people themselves fail to notice.

The technical core of the research lies in its experimental design. Rather than asking people to report on their own ethics, a method vulnerable to self-presentation bias, Piff and his collaborators observed behavior directly in naturalistic and controlled settings. In one of the study’s most cited experiments, the team stationed observers at a busy four-way intersection in the San Francisco Bay Area and recorded which drivers cut off other vehicles by advancing before their turn. The results were striking. Drivers of expensive, late-model vehicles were significantly more likely to violate right-of-way norms than drivers of modest cars. A companion experiment examined whether drivers would yield to a pedestrian waiting to cross at a crosswalk, a legal obligation in California, and again found that higher vehicle value predicted lower rates of compliance. The car, in effect, served as a visible proxy for social class, allowing researchers to test the class-behavior relationship without a single questionnaire.

Crucially, the intersection studies were only the beginning. The paper assembled a battery of experiments spanning hypothetical dilemmas, real economic games, and observational measures, all designed to probe whether the pattern held across contexts. In laboratory tasks, participants with higher subjective and objective socioeconomic status were more likely to endorse unethical decision-making, to take resources that did not belong to them, and to report a willingness to lie in negotiations for personal gain. In one widely discussed experiment, participants were told they could take candy from a jar that was explicitly identified as being reserved for children participating in another study. The results were as uncomfortable as they were memorable: wealthier individuals took roughly twice as much candy as their less affluent counterparts. Piff recounted the finding to the Zurich audience with characteristic candor, telling them, I kid you not, as laughter rippled through the hall.

The theoretical framework underlying these findings is as important as the data themselves. Piff and his colleagues argue that elevated social class tends to foster a sense of self-sufficiency and independence that can shade into diminished regard for others. Greater resources reduce dependence on social relationships for survival and advancement, and that reduced dependence, the theory holds, weakens the everyday psychological brakes that keep self-interest in check. In his acceptance speech, Piff compressed the idea into a single memorable line: wealth seems to free people from the burdensome shackles of caring about other humans. The phrase drew laughter, but it captures a serious claim in social psychology, one that connects the economics of inequality to the micro-behaviors of daily life, from traffic etiquette to the contents of a candy jar.

The ceremony itself offered plenty of the absurdist charm for which the Ig Nobels are known. The trophy presented to winners was shaped like a giant mushroom growing atop a human foot, an object that, as observers noted, is also a reasonable metaphor for the sensation of being cut off in traffic by someone in a brand-new BMW. Audience members in banana suits drifted near the stage, and Piff leaned fully into the spirit of the event. At one point he produced a canister of candy belonging to his three-year-old son, Oli, who had collected it himself the previous day at the Museum of Chocolate. Confessing to the crowd that his son did not know the candy had been requisitioned, Piff helped himself to a piece anyway, pronounced it really good, and thereby demonstrated, in miniature, the very behavior his research had documented in the laboratory.

Yet Piff was careful to signal that the humor carried a serious edge. Pausing for effect before the audience, he told attendees that taking candy from children is really the least of our concerns. The remark pointed toward the broader stakes of the research program. If elevated wealth reliably erodes prosocial tendencies, the implications extend well beyond intersections and candy jars, touching on philanthropy, corporate governance, public policy, and the social fabric of societies with widening income gaps. Piff also offered a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment to a group he credited with sustaining his research: the global elite, he joked, for always showing us how reproducible our findings are on a global scale. The line drew one of the biggest laughs of the night, precisely because it reframed replication, the gold standard of science, as an ongoing real-world experiment.

The honor also places Piff in distinguished company within the University of California system. Among this year’s other Ig Nobel recipients is Jaimie Arona Krems of UCLA, who won the Peace Prize for research examining why people sometimes want vicious friends, a finding that observers have noted may or may not explain a few of those four-way intersection incidents. The Ig Nobel tradition of honoring research that is genuinely scientific yet delightfully improbable has, over three decades, celebrated studies on everything from the aerodynamics of wombat feces to the mechanics of wiggling ears. Piff’s prize continues that tradition while underscoring a point that serious researchers have long made: laughter and rigor are not enemies. Some of the most durable insights into human nature arrive disguised as jokes, and some of the most important questions about society can be studied at a stop sign.

For the scientific community, the recognition of the 2012 PNAS paper is also a reminder of the value of behavioral observation over self-report. The intersection experiments remain a textbook example of how a simple, carefully executed field study can illuminate a phenomenon that surveys and interviews routinely miss, because few people are willing to admit, even anonymously, that they cut off strangers in traffic. The full ceremony, including Piff’s complete acceptance speech and the presentation of the mushroom trophy, is available to watch online, offering the public a rare chance to see working scientists celebrate their craft with unguarded joy. As for the millions of drivers who now have peer-reviewed backing for their road rage, the science offers no promise of better traffic. But it does suggest that the next time a luxury sedan barrels through a crosswalk, the behavior says something not only about the driver, but about the psychology of wealth itself.

Subject of Research: The relationship between social class, wealth and unethical behavior, including driving conduct at intersections

Article Title: Psychologist wins Ig Nobel for proving rich drivers are the worst

Article References: Psychologist wins Ig Nobel for proving rich drivers are the worst. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Ig Nobel Prize, Paul Piff, UC Irvine, social class, unethical behavior, wealth psychology, driving behavior, PNAS study, entitlement, behavioral economics, Zurich ceremony, candy experiment

The health stakes of dietary quality are considerable. Poor diets fuel obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and several cancers, and they increase the risk of premature death. In Australia and the United States, roughly one-third of the calories consumed by adults come from what researchers call discretionary foods and drinks: ultra-processed, energy-dense products loaded with sugar, salt and saturated fat, such as chips, burgers and ice-cream. Against that backdrop, the UTS team, which brought together expertise from medical science, psychology and marketing, wanted to understand whether feelings about brands, rather than knowledge about nutrition, might be quietly steering population-level eating patterns. Their conclusion is that aggressive and pervasive marketing of fast-food brands may be helping to drive the increase in chronic diet-related diseases by shaping not just purchases but perceptions.

Senior author Dr Poppy Watson of UTS explained the core mechanism identified by the study. When people develop a psychological loyalty to fast-food brands, she said, it acts as a strong predictor of their saturated fat and sugar intake, regardless of how healthy they perceive those brands to be. This is a subtle but important distinction. Public health campaigns have long assumed that if consumers understand which foods are unhealthy, they will adjust their behaviour accordingly. The new findings suggest the picture is far more complicated, because brand affection appears to operate on a separate track from nutritional knowledge, and on that track it is affection that tends to win.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive result is that people who love fast-food brands actually rate those brands as healthier. Senior author Dr Mike Kendig, a senior lecturer in Medical Science at UTS, noted that nutritional knowledge does play a role in health ratings, but that the strongest predictor of how healthy a brand is perceived to be is simply how much a person likes it. The researchers suggest that repeated exposure to branding builds familiarity and positive feelings, and that these feelings spill over into health perceptions and dietary choices. Familiar logos, jingles and mascots, encountered across retail environments, media, sport and everyday life, may therefore function as a kind of emotional seasoning that makes energy-dense products seem more benign than they are.

The study was conducted in two parts, involving adult participants in both Australia and the United States. Researchers assessed attitudes toward fast-food and beverage brands, measured perceived healthiness of those brands, and administered a comprehensive dietary questionnaire. By combining brand-level affect with detailed dietary recall, the team could test whether liking predicted actual intake of fat and sugar. It did. Participants who expressed stronger liking for fast-food brands not only consumed more fat and sugar overall but also tended to perceive those brands as healthier than less enthusiastic respondents did. The consistency of the pattern across two countries and two separate studies strengthens the case that brand attachment is a meaningful behavioural signal rather than a statistical fluke.

It is tempting, the researchers acknowledge, to assume that the occasional fast-food treat says little about the rest of a person’s diet. The data tell a different story. Liking fast-food brands was associated with poorer overall diet quality, meaning the attachment flagged broader patterns of eating rather than isolated indulgences. This makes brand affinity a potentially useful marker for health professionals and researchers: a simple question about how someone feels toward major fast-food and soft-drink brands may reveal more about their habitual diet than a question about what they believe is healthy. It also suggests that interventions targeting brand attitudes, not just nutritional knowledge, could be a promising avenue for improving population diets.

Dr Watson emphasised just how deliberate and effective the marketing behind these attachments is. Unhealthy food marketing is pervasive in retail, media, sport and other settings, she observed, and companies would not invest so heavily in it if it were not incredibly effective at shaping purchase decisions. It is self-evident that the marketing works, she argued, but consumers are not always cognisant of how it operates on them. The study’s findings give that observation empirical teeth: the emotional bonds forged by advertising are measurable, and they correlate with the fat and sugar people actually put in their bodies. Marketing, in this view, is not merely promoting a choice among foods; it is recalibrating the perceived healthiness of the foods themselves.

The implications for public health policy are significant. Governments and public health organisations invest heavily in nutrition education on the assumption that knowledge helps people make healthier choices. The UTS research suggests this assumption captures only part of the story, because an emotional attachment to a favourite fast-food brand can shape what ends up on a person’s plate despite nutrition warnings. The findings lend support to calls for greater restrictions on junk-food advertising and other government policies aimed at reducing the grip of fast-food giants, such as limits on marketing to children, restrictions on sponsorships of sport, and clearer labelling regimes. Dr Watson argued that individuals need to be aware of how much marketing biases health perceptions and influences eating, but that there is also a broader responsibility to rein in such marketing, because the evidence shows it is shaping diets at a population level.

For consumers, the study offers a practical, if uncomfortable, takeaway: the warm feelings a brand inspires are not neutral. They are the product of billions of dollars of exposure engineering, and they can quietly distort judgments about healthiness while correlating with diets higher in saturated fat and sugar. Recognising that affection for a logo may be a better predictor of diet quality than a nutrition quiz could help people interrogate their own preferences more honestly. For researchers, the work opens questions about how brand attachments form, how malleable they are, and whether reducing exposure could weaken the link between brand love and poor diet. For policymakers, it strengthens the evidence base for treating food marketing as a public health issue on par with tobacco and alcohol advertising. What people feel about fast-food brands, this research makes clear, is not just a matter of taste; it is a measurable force in the health of nations.

Subject of Research: The relationship between fast-food brand liking, perceived brand healthiness and overall diet quality in adults.

Article Title: How you feel about fast-food brands can predict overall diet quality

Article References: How you feel about fast-food brands can predict overall diet quality. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: fast food, brand loyalty, diet quality, junk food marketing, sugar-sweetened beverages, nutrition, obesity, public health, health communication, consumer behaviour, chronic disease, University of Technology Sydney

The core financial argument is striking. According to the authors’ estimates, a representative 200-bed community hospital that implements all five interventions could generate approximately $2.5 million to $2.8 million in annual laboratory and clinical savings. Beyond those direct savings, hospitals that improve their baseline performance on quality metrics could reduce penalties under the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Hospital-Acquired Condition program by an estimated $200,000 to $600,000. The interventions may also improve publicly reported healthcare-associated infection metrics and strengthen hospital reputation, benefits that carry real competitive weight in an era when patients and payers increasingly scrutinize quality data.

Diagnostic stewardship, at its heart, is about ensuring the right test is ordered for the right patient at the right time—and that results are interpreted appropriately once they return. It is a discipline aimed at eliminating the cascade of harm that follows unnecessary or poorly targeted testing: false-positive results that trigger unneeded antibiotics, incidental findings that lead to invasive follow-up procedures, prolonged hospital stays, and wasted laboratory resources. Unlike efforts to restrict care, diagnostic stewardship refines decision-making at the moment a test is considered, making it an attractive target for both clinicians and administrators seeking measurable improvement.

The guide examines five common opportunities for improvement that recur across hospital settings. The first is optimizing testing for Clostridioides difficile, the bacterium responsible for severe, sometimes life-threatening diarrheal infections in healthcare settings. Because molecular assays can detect the organism in patients who are merely colonized rather than truly infected, testing unformed stools indiscriminately inflates infection rates and drives unnecessary treatment and isolation. The second and third targets are optimizing urine culture use and de-implementing unnecessary procalcitonin testing. Urine cultures ordered in patients without symptoms frequently reveal asymptomatic bacteriuria, a common finding that is often inappropriately treated with antibiotics, fueling resistance and adverse drug events. Procalcitonin, a biomarker sometimes used to guide antibiotic decisions, is frequently ordered in situations where the result will not change management, consuming resources without benefiting patients.

The remaining two interventions address the explosive growth of multiplex diagnostics. Optimizing respiratory pathogen panel use tackles panels that test for dozens of viruses and bacteria simultaneously in patients whose care would change little based on the full results, encouraging clinicians instead to select narrower panels or targeted tests matched to the clinical question. Optimizing blood culture use rounds out the list, addressing the widespread practice of drawing blood cultures from patients with low pretest probability of bloodstream infection or from indwelling lines where contamination is likely. Each unnecessary culture carries costs in laboratory processing, false-positive contamination that prompts additional testing and antibiotics, and extended lengths of stay when ambiguous results are reflexively treated.

For each of the five interventions, the authors lay out implementation strategies, projected financial impact, and practical examples that hospitals can adapt to their own circumstances. The financial models are designed to translate clinical improvements into the language of hospital administration: avoided laboratory costs, reduced antibiotic expenditures, shortened lengths of stay, and improved quality measure performance. That translation matters, because diagnostic stewardship programs typically require upfront investment in education, electronic health record modifications, and personnel time, and program champions must often justify those costs to budget-conscious executives before any savings are realized.

Senior author Sarah E. Turbett, MD, framed the resource as a bridge between clinical value and operational performance. Healthcare leaders know that every investment must improve both patient care and operational performance, she noted, and this framework helps hospitals evaluate and implement diagnostic stewardship in ways that improve clinical outcomes, strengthen quality metrics, and demonstrate measurable value. The emphasis on measurable value reflects a growing recognition that programs perceived as purely clinical initiatives often struggle to survive budget cycles, while those with robust business cases secure sustained institutional support.

The publication arrives at a moment when diagnostic excellence is receiving increasing national attention. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Core Elements of Hospital Diagnostic Excellence identifies diagnostic stewardship as a key strategy for improving diagnosis while advancing healthcare quality, safety, and value-based care. By aligning its guidance with that national framework, SHEA positions diagnostic stewardship as a central pillar of hospital quality improvement rather than a niche laboratory concern, giving infection preventionists, laboratory directors, and antimicrobial stewardship teams a shared vocabulary for engaging executive leadership.

The guide was developed by SHEA’s Diagnostic Stewardship Special Interest Group, a body convened specifically to advance this field, and it is aimed at a broad professional audience: healthcare executives, laboratory leaders, infection prevention professionals, antimicrobial stewardship teams, and frontline clinicians. Each of these groups plays a distinct role in making diagnostic stewardship succeed. Executives control the resources, laboratory leaders understand the technical nuances of test performance and utilization, infection prevention teams track the downstream effects on healthcare-associated infection metrics, stewardship programs connect testing behavior to antibiotic use, and clinicians ultimately decide which tests to order and how to interpret them.

For hospitals weighing whether to act, the combined figures offer a compelling bottom line. Direct savings of $2.5 million to $2.8 million annually, plus up to $600,000 in avoided CMS penalties, represent the kind of return that few quality initiatives can match—achieved largely by doing fewer, better-targeted tests rather than buying new technology. The authors emphasize that actual results will vary with each hospital’s baseline performance, patient population, and existing stewardship infrastructure, which is precisely why the guide insists on institution-specific business cases rather than one-size-fits-all projections. What the resource makes clear is that diagnostic stewardship has matured from a conceptual ideal into an operational discipline with documented strategies, modeled financial impact, and demonstrated potential to improve patient care, healthcare quality, and hospital finances simultaneously. As pressure mounts to deliver safer, higher-value care, the guide suggests that one of the most powerful tools available to hospitals may be simply ordering the right test, for the right patient, at the right time.

Subject of Research: Building hospital business cases for diagnostic stewardship interventions to improve patient care and reduce costs

Article Title: SHEA publishes resource to help hospitals build the business case for diagnostic stewardship

Article References: SHEA publishes resource to help hospitals build the business case for diagnostic stewardship. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: diagnostic stewardship, SHEA, hospital savings, Clostridioides difficile testing, urine culture, procalcitonin, respiratory pathogen panels, blood culture, antimicrobial stewardship, CMS penalties, healthcare quality, infection prevention