New research shows excessive oleic acid, found in olive oil, drives fat cell growth

University of Oklahoma

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Michael Rudolph, Ph.D., is assistant professor of biochemistry and physiology at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine.

view more 

Credit: University of Oklahoma

OKLAHOMA CITY – Eating a high-fat diet containing a large amount of oleic acid – a type of fatty acid commonly found in olive oil – could drive obesity more than other types of dietary fats, according to a study published in the journal Cell Reports.

The study found that oleic acid, a monounsaturated fat associated with obesity, causes the body to make more fat cells. By boosting a signaling protein called AKT2 and reducing the activity of a regulating protein called LXR, high levels of oleic acid resulted in faster growth of the precursor cells that form new fat cells.

“We know that the types of fat that people eat have changed during the obesity epidemic. We wanted to know whether simply overeating a diet rich in fat causes obesity, or whether the composition of these fatty acids that make up the oils in the diet is important. Do specific fat molecules trigger responses in the cells?” said Michael Rudolph, Ph.D., assistant professor of biochemistry and physiology at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine and member of OU Health Harold Hamm Diabetes Center.

Rudolph and his team, including Matthew Rodeheffer, Ph.D., of Yale University School of Medicine and other collaborators at Yale and New York University School of Medicine, fed mice a variety of specialized diets enriched in specific individual fatty acids, including those found in coconut oil, peanut oil, milk, lard and soybean oil. Oleic acid was the only one that caused the precursor cells that give rise to fat cells to proliferate more than other fatty acids.

“You can think of the fat cells as an army,” Rudolph said. “When you give oleic acid, it initially increases the number of ‘fat cell soldiers’ in the army, which creates a larger capacity to store excess dietary nutrients. Over time, if the excess nutrients overtake the number of fat cells, obesity can occur, which can then lead to cardiovascular disease or diabetes if not controlled.”

Unfortunately, it’s not quite so easy to isolate different fatty acids in a human diet. People generally consume a complex mixture if they have cream in their coffee, a salad for lunch and meat and pasta for dinner. However, Rudolph said, there are increasing levels of oleic acid in the food supply, particularly when access to food variety is limited and fast food is an affordable option.

“I think the take-home message is moderation and to consume fats from a variety of different sources,” he said. “Relatively balanced levels of oleic acid seem to be beneficial, but higher and prolonged levels may be detrimental. If someone is at risk for heart disease, high levels of oleic acid may not be a good idea.”

###

About the project

The publication, “Dietary oleic acid drives obesogenic adipogenesis via modulation of LXRa signaling,” can be found at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2025.115527.

About the University of Oklahoma

Founded in 1890, the University of Oklahoma is a public research university with campuses in Norman, Oklahoma City and Tulsa. As the state’s flagship university, OU serves the educational, cultural, economic and health care needs of the state, region and nation. In Oklahoma City, OU Health Sciences is one of the nation’s few academic health centers with seven health profession colleges located on the same campus. OU Health Sciences serves approximately 4,000 students in more than 70 undergraduate and graduate degree programs spanning Oklahoma City and Tulsa and is the leading research institution in Oklahoma. For more information about OU Health Sciences, visit www.ouhsc.edu.

---

Journal

Cell Reports

DOI

10.1016/j.celrep.2025.115527 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Dietary oleic acid drives obesogenic adipogenesis via modulation of LXRa signaling

 

Airborne disease detection made easier with new, low-cost device

University of Notre Dame

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Jingcheng Ma, assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame.

view more 

Credit: (Wes Evard/University of Notre Dame)

Airborne hazardous chemicals can be dilute, mobile and hard to trap. Yet, accurately measuring these chemicals is critical in protecting human health and the environment.

Now, a new, small, low-cost device, nicknamed ABLE, could make the collection and detection of airborne hazards much more efficient. The device, just four by eight inches across, was devised by Jingcheng Ma, assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Notre Dame, and researchers at the University of Chicago. The results of their work were published in Nature Chemical Engineering.

ABLE has immediate applications in hospitals, where viruses, bacteria and nanoplastics can be detected directly from the air — offering less invasive alternatives to blood draws, particularly for vulnerable infants in neonatal units.

“Many important biomarkers — molecules your body produces when it’s dealing with pathogens — are very dilute in the air. They could be at the parts per billion level. Trying to find them is like locating six to seven people in the global population — very difficult,” said Ma, the study’s first author, who conducted the research as a postdoc at the University of Chicago.

Ma, whose graduate training was in thermal science and energy systems — a field in which the transfer of water from liquid to steam is central — wondered how airborne biomarkers might behave if condensed into liquid. Could these molecules be captured in water droplets? Would their concentration in liquid be the same as their concentration in air? Would different molecules condense differently?

If airborne biomarkers are tested in gas form, large, expensive machines — such as mass spectrometers — are usually necessary. However, if the researchers could convert the air into a liquid, an array of low-cost, accurate measuring tools became available — paper-based test strips, electro-chemical sensors, enzyme assays and optical sensors.

“We discovered that many molecules can effectively enter water droplets even when their concentration is very low,” Ma said. “We didn’t need to develop any advanced chemical systems to capture these biomarkers in water. It’s a very natural process.”

The ABLE device, which can be made for under $200, sucks in air, adds water vapor and cools it. The air sample condenses into water droplets on a surface of microscopic silicon spikes — a process through which even tiny amounts of contaminant become highly concentrated. These droplets then slide into a reservoir where they are tested for biomarkers.

Ma’s research group, the Interfacial Thermofluids Lab (ITL), is exploring ways to miniaturize ABLE, enabling it to fit into portable sensing systems or robotic platforms for environmental and healthcare monitoring. The group is also working with community partners to monitor the health of vulnerable infants in neonatal care.

“I like to do what I call ‘budget research,’ that is, use simple and low-cost components, but do something important that no one has achieved before. I like research that delivers something everyone can buy from the store,” Ma said.

---

Journal

Nature Chemical Engineering

DOI

10.1038/s44286-025-00223-9 

Article Title

Airborne biomarker localization engine for open-air point-of-care detection

GREEN CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

California’s solar market faces seven forms of corruption—including “sex for solar”

Boston University

Facebook

XLinkedIn
MessageWhatsAppEmail

Solar power is growing by leaps and bounds in the United States, propelled by climate mitigation policies and carbon-free energy goals — and California is leading the way as the nation’s top producer of solar electricity. A new study in Energy Strategy Reviews has revealed a dark side to the state’s breakneck pace for solar investment, deployment, and adoption, taking a first-time look at patterns of public and private sector corruption in the California solar market.

Researchers at the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS) have identified seven distinct types of corruption abuses and risks in California solar energy. Among them, favoritism in project approvals, including a high-profile incident at the senior ranks of the U.S. Department of the Interior involving an intimate relationship with a solar company lobbyist. To fully realize a just energy transition, the authors call for major solar reforms in California as the U.S. increasingly relies on solar energy to decarbonize its electricity sector.

“It’s a wake-up call that the solar industry cannot continue on its current trajectory of bad governance and bad behavior.”

“In this groundbreaking study, we find that efforts to accelerate solar infrastructure deployment in California end up contributing to a sobering array of corruption practices and risks. These include shocking abuses of power in the approval and licensing phases as well as the displacement of Indigenous groups, and also nefarious patterns of tax evasion or the falsification of information about solar projects,” says lead author Benjamin Sovacool, who is the director of IGS and a Boston University professor of earth and environment. “It’s a wake-up call that the solar industry cannot continue on its current trajectory of bad governance and bad behavior.”

Drawing on a literature review and original interviews and fieldwork, the study’s authors arrive at a framework that helps explore the wider socio-political realities driving corruption at a time of explosive growth in the California solar market, from 2010 to 2024. During this period, the state’s solar energy production increased exponentially, reaching 79,544 gigawatt hours in 2024, or enough to power approximately 7.4 million U.S. households for a year, according to the State of Renewable Energy dashboard.

The research implicates solar energy in numerous corruption practices and risks that have adversely affected communities, policymaking and regulation, and siting decisions and planning.

“The most eye-opening finding for me is how common corruption is at every level of solar development, from small-scale vendors to high-level government officials, even in a well-regulated, progressive state like California,” says co-author Alexander Dunlap, an IGS research fellow.

Favoritism and other forms of corruption

To understand how corruption undermines the solar market, the researchers focused on numerous utility-scale deployments in Riverside County, the fourth most populous county in California. They set out to document patterns of perceived corruption from a broad range of voices, gaining insights through organized focus groups and observation at different solar sites, as well as conducting interviews door-to-door and in a local supermarket parking lot. Respondents included residents in Blythe and Desert Center, California, impacted by solar energy development, solar construction workers, non-governmental organizations, solar company employees, federal agencies, and state and local governments.

While the study’s authors acknowledge the difficulty of confirming individual claims of corruption, their mixed-methods research approach combines these personal assertions with analysis of news stories, court testimony, and other official sources to support their findings.

They point to a blend of public, private, social, and political patterns of corruption in the California solar energy market.

1. Clientelism and favoritism: Hiring friends or family over others for solar projects and unfairly allocating government contracts or permits to project developers, which in one instance led to an investigative report questioning the influence of a sexual relationship.
2. Rent-seeking and land grabbing: Redirecting public funds or lands to benefit private developers and taking communal or public land from Indigenous peoples or other groups for energy infrastructure siting.
3. Service diversion: Withholding local benefits, such as lower electricity bills, or distributing locally generated power only to higher-paying parts of the state.
4. Theft: Forceful removal of flora or cultural artifacts, or disturbing animal habitat, to build solar project sites.
5. Greenwashing: Misleading the public about a solar project’s environmental benefits; using flawed environmental or cultural impact assessments to evaluate project impacts, such as pollution of nearby waterways; and overriding environmental protections to fast-track solar infrastructure expansion.
6. Tax evasion and avoidance: Not paying or underpaying taxes, or governmental authorities strategically failing to adequately allocate project funds to communities impacted by solar project development.
7. Non-transparency: Hiding, manipulating, or failing to disclose relevant or important information surrounding solar projects, such as the local economic benefits and environmental impacts.

A sunnier future?

Outside of a few headline-making scandals, corruption in California’s renewable energy sector has gone largely unexamined, allowing the underlying dynamics at play to erode the potential of a just energy transition. To remedy this, the study’s authors recommend corruption risk mapping to document problematic practices and entities, subsidy registers and sunset clauses to deter rent-seeking and tax evasion, transparency initiatives aimed at environmental changes and data production (for Environmental Impact Assessment), strong enforcement of anti-corruption laws, and shared ownership models for solar to improve accountability.

This newly published study, “Sex for Solar? Examining Patterns of Public and Private Sector Corruption within the Booming California Solar Energy Market,” is part of a larger IGS research project looking at injustices in U.S. solar and wind energy supply chains.

---

Journal

Energy Strategy Reviews

Article Title

Sex for Solar? Examining Patterns of Public and Private Sector Corruption within the Booming California Solar Energy Market

 

The Holberg Prize conferred upon Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

(Bergen, Norway) – Today, the Holberg Prize was conferred upon Indian Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, by HRH Crown Prince Haakon of Norway

Expressing her deepest gratitude as well as her surprise on receiving the award, Spivak accepted the Holberg Prize “in the name of peace, in Palestine, in Ukraine, for the Rohingyas, for our battered world.”

The University of Bergen

Facebook

XLinkedInWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak received the Holberg Prize today. 

view more 

Credit: Alice Attie

At a prestigious award ceremony today in the University Aula in Bergen, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak received the international research award from HRH Crown Prince Haakon of Norway. Spivak is University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.

The Holberg Prize is worth NOK 6 million (approx. USD 600,000) and is awarded annually for outstanding contributions to research in the humanities, social sciences, law or theology.

Expressing her deepest gratitude as well as her surprise on receiving the award, Spivak accepted the Holberg Prize “in the name of peace, in Palestine, in Ukraine, for the Rohingyas, for our battered world.”

Spivak also stressed how it is her responsibility to mention the “prizes of another kind” she has received through decades of grassroots educational work in rural Bengal. For over forty years, she has supported the creation of elementary schools in marginalized communities, often beginning with makeshift shelters built by locals. Spivak recounted how landless illiterate sharecroppers donated a bit of land between their adobe huts for building a small school. “Never in history has a so-called Untouchable donated land to a caste-Hindu and a white man and never since then”, Spivak said. “This is a prize that I cherish in another way from a grand prize such as the Holberg.”

Spivak is considered one of the most influential global intellectuals of our time. She receives the prize for her groundbreaking interdisciplinary research in comparative literature, translation, postcolonial studies, political philosophy, and feminist theory. Her main research focus has been on post-Hegelian philosophy, and the position of the subaltern, i.e. small social groups on the margins of history who cannot exercise their rights and whose perspectives cannot be included in generalizations about the nation state.

In her acceptance speech, Spivak emphasized the importance of the humanities in helping us recognize and respond to the unpredictable and accidental elements that exist outside of rigid systems—how the humanities foster the imagination and critical thinking needed to challenge orders that seek to control or explain everything. “Without this moment,” she said, “available to the imaginative activism of the humanities, we see totalitarianisms committed to preserving the system at all costs, all over the world—regardless of left and right.“

Spivak also highlighted how the humanities teach the practice of learning, not just the accumulation of knowledge. This is a practice that mirrors the ideals of democracy and ethical living, where understanding others is essential. Thus, a just society depends on changing how we think, not just what we know. “No hope of a just society if every generation is not persistently weaned from the basic human affects of greed, fear, and violence; disregarding race-class-gender apartheid”, said the Laureate. “Unless there is persistent, sustained, and worldwide epistemic change, democracy and ethics cannot be desired and knowledge is managed for greed, fear, and violence.”

About the Holberg Laureate
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has held the post of University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University
since 2007, where she is also a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She was educated first at the University of Calcutta and then at Cornell University, where she completed her Ph.D. degree in 1967. She has since taught at more than 20 universities, including University of Ghana, Princeton University, University of California at Irvine, New School for Social Research, University of Pittsburgh, Brown University, University of Iowa, Northwestern University, and Cornell University.

Spivak is a Corresponding Fellow at the British Academy, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as of the American Philosophical Society. She has received more than 50 faculty awards, and her many honours include the Kyoto Prize in Art and Philosophy (2012), the Padma Bhushan (2013), and the Modern Language Association Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award (2018). She holds fifteen honorary doctorates from around the world.
 
About the Holberg Prize
Established by the Norwegian Parliament in 2003, the Holberg Prize is one of the largest annual international research prizes awarded to scholars who have made outstanding contributions to research in the humanities, social science, law or theology. The Prize is funded by the Norwegian Government through a direct allocation from the Ministry of Education and Research to the University of Bergen. Previous Laureates include Julia Kristeva, Jürgen Habermas, Manuel Castells, Onora O’Neill, Cass Sunstein, Paul Gilroy, Griselda Pollock, Martha Nussbaum, and Sheila Jasanoff.
To learn more about the Holberg Prize and the call for nominations, visit: https://holbergprize.org/en. 

Nau.edujan.ucc.nau.edu/~sj6/Spivak CanTheSubalternSpeak.pdf

Can the Subaltern Speak?

GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK policies, institutions, and culture; in the nationalist and neo-nationalist writings - to Indian elite personalities ...

Wordpress.comacademictrap.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/gayatri-chakravorty-spivak-an-aesthetic-education-in-the-era-of-globalization.pdf

AN AESTHETIC EDUCATION IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION

... Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. An aesthetic education in the era of globalization I Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and ...

Nau.edujan.ucc.nau.edu/~sj6/Spivak CanTheSubalternSpeak.pdf

Can the Subaltern Speak?

GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK policies, institutions, and culture; in the nationalist and neo-nationalist writings - to Indian elite personalities ...

Wordpress.comacademictrap.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/gayatri-chakravorty-spivak-an-aesthetic-education-in-the-era-of-globalization.pdf

AN AESTHETIC EDUCATION IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION

... Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. An aesthetic education in the era of globalization I Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and ...

Utoronto.cacomplit.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/COL1000H_Esonwanne_Gayatri_Spivak.pdf

“Crossing Borders,” Death of a Discipline

GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS. NEW YORK. Page 2. CHAPTER 1. CROSSIng borDERS. Since 1992, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall ...

Upenn.eduweb.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Spivak_Righting_Wrongs.pdf

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Righting Wrongs

... pdf/103/2-3/523/469376/S. A. Q. 103-0203-15S. pivakF pp.pdf by UNIV. O. F. P. E. NNS. Y. LV. A. NIA user on 09 November 2023. Page 2. 524 Gayatri Chakravorty ...

Elte.huseas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/GardosBalint/gayatri_spivak_three_womens_texts_and_a_critique_of_imperialism.pdf

Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism

Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985) ? 1985 by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. All rights reserved. Permission to reprint may be obtained only from the author. 243 ...

Archive.orgarchive.org/details/the-politics-of-translation-by-gayatri-chakravorty-spivak

The Politics Of Translation By Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Mar 28, 2024 ... Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's 1992 essay constitutes a feminist intervention into postcolonial translation issues as well as a working translator's manifest...

Utoronto.cacomplit.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/COL1000H_SPIVAK_Rethinking-Comparativism.pdf

Rethinking Comparativism - Centre for Comparative Literature

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. What is it that one “compare”-s in Comparative ... Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor in the Humanities at.