KRAKEN STUDIES

Novel “digital fossil-mining” approach uncovers hidden fossils, revealing squids’ ancient origins

Summary author: Walter Beckwith

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

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Using an innovative “digital fossil-mining” approach, researchers have uncovered hundreds of previously hidden fossil squid beaks, revealing a record that squids originated and became ecologically dominant roughly 100 million years ago – well before the end-Cretaceous extinction. Squids are the most diverse and globally distributed group of marine cephalopods in the modern ocean, where they play a vital role in ocean ecosystems as both predators and prey. Their evolutionary success is widely considered to be related to the loss of a rigid external shell, which was a key trait of their cephalopod ancestors. However, their evolutionary origins remain obscure due to the rarity of fossils from soft-bodied organisms. The fossil record of squids begins only around 45 million years ago, with most specimens consisting of just fossilized statoliths – tiny calcium carbonite structures involved in balance. The lack of early fossils has led to speculation that squids diversified after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction 66 million years ago. While molecular analyses of living species have offered estimates of squid divergence times, the absence of earlier fossils has made these estimates highly uncertain.

 

Here, Shin Ikegami and colleagues address these gaps using a novel approach – “digital fossil-mining” – which uses high-resolution grinding tomography and advanced image processing to digitally scan entire rocks as stacked cross-sectional images to reveal hidden fossils as detailed 3D models. Ikegami et al. applied this technique to Cretaceous-age carbonate rocks from Japan, uncovering 263 fossilized squid beaks, with specimens spanning 40 species across 23 genera and five families. The findings show that squids originated roughly 100 million years ago, near the boundary between the Early and Late Cretaceous, and rapidly diversified thereafter. According to the authors, the previously hidden fossil record greatly extends the known origins of both major squid groups – Oegopsida by ~15 million years and Myopsida by ~55 million years. Early Oegopsids displayed distinct anatomical traits that disappeared in later species, suggesting swift morphological evolution, while Myopsids already resembled modern forms. What’s more, the study suggests that Late Cretaceous squids were more abundant and often larger than coexisting ammonites and bony fishes, an ecological dominance that predates the radiation of bony fishes and marine mammals by over 30 million years, making them among the first intelligent, fast swimmers to shape modern ocean ecosystems.

 

For reporters interested in research integrity issues co-author Yasuhiro Iba notes, “accessibility and reproducibility in fossil-based studies have been strongly restricted by the fixation on studying physical specimens. In contrast, we performed all processes from fossil hunting to analysis in cyberspace and digitally released all specimens to the public. I believe that this breakthrough is critical to ensuring research integrity and will facilitate groundbreaking discoveries worldwide.”

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adu6248 

Article Title

Origin and radiation of squids revealed by digital fossil-mining

Article Publication Date

26-Jun-2025

Ancient squids dominated the ocean 100 million years ago

A new fossil discovery technique reveals that squids originated and rapidly became abundant, diverse, and dominant in the oceans 100 million years ago, reshaping our understanding of ancient marine ecosystems.

Hokkaido University

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An example of  grinding tomography images

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Credit: Ikegami et al., Science, June 26, 2025

Squids first appeared about 100 million years ago and quickly rose to become dominant predators in the ancient oceans, according to a new study published in the journal Science. A team of researchers from Hokkaido University developed an advanced fossil discovery technique that completely digitizes rocks with all embedded fossils in complete 3D form. It allowed them to identify one thousand fossilized cephalopod beaks hidden inside Late Cretaceous rocks from Japan. Among these small and fragile beaks were 263 squid specimens including about 40 different species that had never been seen before.

Squids are rarely preserved as fossils because they don’t have hard shells. Their origin and early evolution are the biggest questions in the 500 million-year history of cephalopods, which have been model animals for long-term evolution. Squid beaks, hard mouthparts that have a high fossilization potential, are therefore important clues for studying how squids evolved.

One of the study’s most striking discoveries was how common squids were in ancient oceans. The team found that squid fossils far outnumbered those of ammonites and bony fishes. Ammonites are extinct shelled relatives of squids and have been considered among the most successful swimmers of the Mesozoic era.

“In both number and size, these ancient squids clearly prevailed the seas,” said Dr. Shin Ikegami of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Hokkaido University, the study’s first author. “Their body sizes were as large as fish and even bigger than the ammonites we found alongside them. This shows us that squids were thriving as the most abundant swimmers in the ancient ocean.”

The research also revealed that the two main groups of modern squids, Myopsida, which live near the shore, and Oegopsida, found in the open sea, were already present around 100 million years ago. Until now, scientists believed that squids only began to flourish after the mass extinction event that ended the age of dinosaurs about 65 million years ago. The new study shows that squids had already originated and explosively diversified long before then.

“These findings change everything we thought we knew about marine ecosystems in the past,” said Associate Professor Yasuhiro Iba of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Hokkaido University, who led the study. “Squids were probably the pioneers of fast and intelligent swimmers that dominate the modern ocean.”

 

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adu6248 

Method of Research

Imaging analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Origin and radiation of squids revealed by digital fossil-mining

Article Publication Date

26-Jun-2025

Examples of fossil lower beaks of squids from the Late Cretaceous discovered in this study. Scalebar: 1mm.




The digital fossil-mining method utilizes grinding tomography to create digitized rocks and reveal hidden fossils within them.

Credit

Ikegami et al., Science, June 26, 2025

Digital fossil-mining of squid beaks [VIDEO] | 

Digital fossil-mining of squid beaks
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29336441

The grinding tomography [VIDEO] 

Comparison between X-ray CT (left) and grinding tomography (right).
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29336525

Credit

Shin Ikegami, et al.

UC Irvine-led team uncovers cell structures that squids use to change their appearance

Inspired by new knowledge, researchers develop tunable, multispectral composite material

University of California - Irvine

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Digital camera images of the entire body (top left) and dorsal mantle (top right) of a squid show the splotches’ blue, green, yellow, orange and red iridescent (angle-dependent) colors. An individual splotch (bottom, from left) transitions from transparent to red to orange to green at 0, 60, 90 and 120 seconds, respectively, when subjected to chemical and neurophysiological stimuli.

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Credit: Alon Gorodetsky Lab, UC Irvine

Irvine, Calif., June 26, 2025 – By examining squid skin cells three-dimensionally, a University of California, Irvine-led team has unveiled the structures responsible for the creatures’ ability to dynamically change their appearance from transparent to arbitrarily colored states.

The group of scientists, which included collaborators from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, found that in vibrantly colored squid mantle tissues, light-manipulating cells called iridophores or iridocytes contain stacked and winding columns of platelets from a protein called reflectin, with the columns functioning as Bragg reflectors that selectively transmit and reflect light at specific wavelengths.

In a paper published today in Science, the researchers discussed how they took inspiration from the cells and their internal columnar structures to develop a multispectral composite material with adjustable visible and infrared properties.

“In nature, many animals use Bragg reflectors for structural coloration,” said co-author Alon Gorodetsky, UC Irvine associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. “A squid’s ability to rapidly and reversibly transition from transparent to colored is remarkable, and we found that cells containing specialized subcellular columnar structures with sinusoidal refractive index distributions enable the squid to achieve such feats.”  

Co-author Roger Hanlon, a senior scientist with the Marine Biological Laboratory, provided Gorodetsky’s UC Irvine team with access to squids, and his laboratory helped unravel the coloration and anatomy of the iridophore-containing tissues.

“These are longfin inshore squids – Doryteuthis pealeii – that are native to the Atlantic Ocean,” said Gorodetsky. “Marine Biological Laboratory has been famous for studying this squid and other cephalopods for more than a century, so we were fortunate to be able to leverage their world-class expertise with properly collecting, handling and studying these biological specimens.”

The team used holotomography, a microscopy technique that combines low-intensity light with quantitative phase imaging to create 3D images of clustered and individual cells. The instrument directly measures subtle shifts in light as it passes through the tissue and constructs a refractive index map of the sample, revealing structural and biochemical features.

“Holotomography used the high refractive index of reflectin proteins to reveal the presence of sinusoidal refractive index distributions within squid iridophore cells,” said co-lead author Georgii Bogdanov, a UC Irvine postdoctoral researcher in chemical and biomolecular engineering. “Platelets composed of the protein reflectin form winding platelet columns that fill the interiors of the iridophores. This complex system drives cephalopod mantle optics, with the cells and their internal structures regulating light transmission and reflection.”

Gorodetsky said the process of exploring and discovering the mechanisms underpinning the squids’ color-manipulation abilities inspired his team to develop flexible and stretchable visible appearance-changing composite materials from nanocolumnar sinusoidal Bragg reflectors and to then further augment these materials with infrared appearance-modifying capabilities by incorporating nanostructured metal films.

Using a suite of microscopy and spectroscopy instruments, the team verified that the modular and multifunctional composites could perform a variety of multispectral functions, including as camouflage, signaling, and sensing.

“These bioinspired materials go beyond simple static color control, as they can dynamically adjust both their appearances in the visible and infrared wavelengths in response to environmental or mechanical stimuli,” said co-lead author Aleksandra Strzelecka, Ph.D. candidate in chemical and biomolecular engineering. “Part of what makes this technology truly exciting is its inherent scalability. We have demonstrated large-area and arrayed composites that mimic and even go beyond the squid’s natural optical capabilities, opening the door to many applications ranging from adaptive camouflage to responsive fabrics to multispectral displays to advanced sensors.”

Gorodetsky said that the underlying fundamental insights gained from studying squid skin can be potentially broadly leveraged for improving a wide range of other optical technologies, such as lasers, fiber optics, photovoltaics, and sensors.

“This study is an exciting demonstration of the power of coupling basic and applied research,” he said. “We have likely just started to scratch the surface of what is possible for cephalopod-inspired tunable optical materials in our laboratory.”

Other team members were Sanghoon Lee, a UC Irvine postdoctoral scholar in chemical and biomolecular engineering; Nikhil Kaimal, a UC Irvine Ph.D. candidate in chemical and biomolecular engineering; and Stephen Senft, a research associate at the Marine Biological Laboratory.

The research was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UC Irvine is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced five Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UC Irvine has more than 36,000 students and offers 224 degree programs. It’s located in one of the world’s safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County’s second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UC Irvine, visit www.uci.edu.

Media access: Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus studio with a Comrex IP audio codec to interview UC Irvine faculty and experts, subject to availability and university approval. For more UC Irvine news, visit news.uci.edu. Additional resources for journalists may be found at https://news.uci.edu/media-resources.

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adn1570 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Cells

Article Title

Gradient refractive indices enable squid structural color and inspire multispectral materials

Article Publication Date

26-Jun-2025

 

New research explores how US food insecurity affects stress and mental health

Study finds that hardship with low quality of diet cannot build resilience

Binghamton University

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Food insecurity combined with hardship does not lead to resilience, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

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Credit: "groceries in transit" by qmnonic is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 13.5% of American households experienced food insecurity at some time during 2023. That means 18 million families didn’t have enough to meet their needs and often didn’t know where the next meal would come from.

In her past research, Binghamton University, State University of New York Associate Professor Lina Begdache, PhD ’08, has explored how our diets affect our mental health and overall moods. But how does a lack of nutrition change our resilience, stress mindset and level of mental distress, particularly across age and gender?

In a recent paper published in Health Science Reports, Begdache, Assistant Professor Melissa Zeynep Ertem and their team investigated these relationships using survey data from 1,099 people, with 70% of participants under 30 years old.

As part of her overall research, Begdache — a faculty member in health and wellness studies at Binghamton’s Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences — likes to compare how diet affects young adults compared to older adults, since the human brain is not done maturing until the mid- to late 20s. She admitted that some of the findings from this paper surprised her.

“Resilience builds off hardship, but it looks like hardship with low quality of diet cannot build resilience. We are probably the first to report that,” she said. “We also didn’t find that food insecurity affects the stress mindset. People could still be happy or have a positive thinking even though they have food insecurity, so it’s more related to their personality traits rather than the quality of their diet.”

The questionnaires also asked about participants’ activity levels and factored those responses into their overall health scores.

“Exercise is known to modulate brain chemistry, and in this research, we found that exercise was associated with improvements in neurobehaviors, including your stress mindset,” Begdache said. “If you have negative thinking, you can exercise regularly and improve the way you think about stress. It improved resilience, too — specifically, resilience was highly associated with exercising.”

Ertem, a faculty member at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s School of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering, contributed her skills in data analysis to the research. She believes it is important to assess the effects of American food policies after the pandemic.

“During COVID, there were some extra incentives where government provided food items for vulnerable populations,” Ertem said. “After 2023, most of the extra benefits like Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer and extra SNAP benefits have concluded. One of the big question we want to answer was how food insecurity might affect young adults, especially after those incentives are gone.

Begdache thinks the new research is important for understanding how food insecurity affects psychological resilience, mental well-being and stress-related perceptions, but it also has broader implications.

“If we take these findings and translate them into the current American diet, we’re not consuming the best quality, which means that this may be affecting our resilience level,” she said. “The literature has shown that the Mediterranean diet, which has a spectrum of wholesome food, is associated with resilience. If we improve our quality of diet, we may be able to develop resilience and improve our mental health as well.” 

Also contributing to the research were Ertem’s students Amera Al-Amery, PhD ’23 (now an assistant professor at the Princess Sumaya University for Technology in Jordan), Katerina K. Nagorny ’24, Ushima Chowdhury ’25 and Lexis R. Rosenberg ’23.

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Journal

Health Science Reports

DOI

10.1002/hsr2.70787 

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

The Interplay of Food Insecurity, Resilience, Stress Mindset, and Mental Distress: Insights From a Cross-Sectional Study

Study finds link between brain injury and criminal behavior

Study shows criminality is associated with damage to a key brain pathway involved in emotional control and judgment

University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

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A new study led by researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School has found that damage to a specific region of the brain may contribute to criminal or violent behavior.

The study, titled “White matter disconnection in acquired criminality”, was published recently in Molecular Psychiatry.

The investigation analyzed brain scans from individuals who began committing crimes after sustaining brain injuries from strokes, tumors or traumatic brain injury. The study compared these 17 cases to brain scans from 706 individuals with other neurological symptoms such as memory loss or depression. The investigators found that injury to the region of the right uncinate fasciculus was the most commonly affected area in the brains of those people who developed criminal behavior. The same pattern held true among individuals who committed violent crimes.

“This part of the brain, the uncinate fasciculus, is a white matter pathway that serves as a cable connecting regions that govern emotion and decision-making,” said Christopher M. Filley, MD, professor emeritus of neurology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and one of the study’s co-authors. “When that connection is disrupted on the right side, a person’s ability to regulate emotions and make moral choices may be severely impaired.”

“While it is widely accepted that brain injury can lead to problems with memory or motor function, the role of the brain in guiding social behaviors like criminality is more controversial,” said Isaiah Kletenik, MD, assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the study. “It raises complex questions about culpability and free will.”

Kletenik said during his time in behavioral neurology training at the University of Colorado School of Medicine he had the unique opportunity to evaluate patients who began committing acts of violence with the onset of brain tumors or degenerative diseases.

“These clinical cases prompted my curiosity into the brain basis of moral decision-making and led me to learn new network-based neuroimaging techniques at the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School,” said Kletenik.

To strengthen the findings, the researchers conducted a full connectome analysis, employing a detailed map of how brain regions are interconnected. They confirmed that the right uncinate fasciculus was the neural pathway with the most consistent link to criminal behavior.

“It wasn’t just any brain damage, it was damage in the location of this pathway,” said Filley. “Our finding suggests that this specific connection may play a unique role in regulating behavior.”

The uncinate fasciculus links brain regions involved in reward-based decision-making with those that process emotions. When that link is damaged, particularly on the right side, people may have difficulty controlling impulses, anticipating consequences or feeling empathy, all of which can contribute to harmful or criminal actions.

While not everyone with this type of brain injury becomes violent the study suggests that  damage to this tract may play a role in new onset criminal behavior after injury.

“This work could have real-world implications for both medicine and the law,” said Filley. “Doctors may be able to better identify at-risk patients and offer effective early interventions. And courts might need to consider brain damage when evaluating criminal responsibility.”

Kletenik said that the findings raise important ethical questions.

“Should brain injury factor into how we judge criminal behavior? Causality in science is not defined in the same way as culpability in the eyes of the law. Still, our findings provide useful data that can help inform this discussion and contributes to our growing knowledge about how social behavior is mediated by the brain.” said Kletenik.

Experts from Vanderbilt University, University of California San Diego and Salk Institute, also collaborated on the study.

About the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus is a world-class medical destination at the forefront of transformative science, medicine, education and patient care. The campus encompasses the University of Colorado health professional schools, more than 60 centers and institutes and two nationally ranked independent hospitals - UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital and Children's Hospital Colorado – which see more than two million adult and pediatric patient visits yearly. Innovative, interconnected and highly collaborative, the CU Anschutz Medical Campus delivers life-changing treatments, patient care and
professional training and conducts world-renowned research fueled by $910 million in annual research funding, including $757 million in sponsored awards and $153 million in philanthropic gifts.
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Journal

Molecular Psychiatry

 

Attention scan: How our minds shift focus in dynamic settings 

Yale University

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A person’s capacity for attention has a profound impact on what they see, dictating which details they glean from the world around them. As they walk down a busy street, the focus of their attention may shift to a compelling new billboard advertisement, or a shiny Lamborghini parked on the curb. 

 

Attention, however, can be fleeting. When that person reaches a busy intersection, for instance, details of the billboard or sportscar disappear. The person’s attention instead becomes focused on approaching or stationary traffic, the flashing walk sign, and other pedestrians they’ll need to avoid in the crosswalk.

 

Most research on attention has concentrated on what happens when we notice the new billboard or shiny car. But in a new study, Yale psychologists instead focus on what happens when our attention shifts to a specific goal, such as navigating the busy intersection.

 

Writing in the journal Psychological Review, the researchers unveil a human attention model that explains how the mind evaluates what is task-relevant in complex, dynamic scenarios — and apportions computational capacity in response. 

 

“We have a limited number of resources with which we can see the world,” said Ilker Yildirim,      assistant professor of psychology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and senior author of the study. “We think of these resources as elementary computational processes; each perception we experience, such as the position of an object or how fast it’s moving, is a result of exerting some number of these elementary perceptual computations.” 

 

For the study, the researchers developed a system which they call “adaptive computation,” which is essentially a software program that rations these elementary computations in order to more deeply process goal-relevant objects. For example, when a person crosses a busy street, adaptive computation would prioritize the pedestrian walk sign over the shiny car.

 

“Our model reveals a mechanism by which human attention identifies what things in a dynamic scene are relevant to the goal at hand, and then rations perceptual computations accordingly,” said Mario Belledonne, a graduate student in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and co-author of the study. 

 

In one experiment, they presented volunteer participants with eight identically colored circles on a computer screen. The researchers then highlighted a group of four circles and asked the participants to track the highlighted circles as all eight circles moved randomly across the screen. Such tracking of multiple objects at the same time elicits a complex, dynamic ebb and flow of attention among the participants. 

 

Researchers measured these shifts of attention, at sub-second thresholds, by asking subjects to hit the space bar whenever they noticed a flashing dot appear very briefly on a specific object.  The frequency with which these flashing dots were noticed indicates where and when people are attending, and the adaptive computation model successfully predicted these momentary, fine-grained patterns of attentional deployment. 

          

In another experiment, participants again were asked to track four objects, but in this case the researchers varied how many identically colored “distractor” objects were on the screen and how fast the objects were moving. When the objects stopped moving, researchers asked participants to rate how difficult it was to track them. The researchers showed that the adaptive computation model also explains these subjective difficulty ratings: The more computational resources the model exerted for tracking, the more difficult it was rated by participants. In this way, the researchers’ model provided a computational signature of the feeling of exertion that occurs when a person focuses attention on the same task for a prolonged period, Yildirim said. 

 

“We want to work out the computational logic of the human mind, by creating new      algorithms of perception and attention, and comparing the performance of these algorithms to that of humans,” he said.

 

The model also helps make sense of what’s sometimes considered a “human quirk”: the ability to make perceptions of non-task-oriented objects — such as the billboard or the sports car — disappear while crossing the busy street.

 

“We think this line of work can lead to systems that are a bit different from today’s AI, something more human-like,” Yildirim said. “This would be an AI system that when tasked with a goal might miss things, even shiny things, so as to flexibly and safely interact with the world.”

 

The research team also included Brian Scholl, a professor of psychology at FAS, and Eivinas Butkus, of Columbia University, a former member of Yildirim’s lab.

 

The research was supported by a grant from U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.      

 

 

 

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Journal

Psychological Review

DOI

10.1037/rev0000572 

Article Title

Adaptive computation as a new mechanism of dynamic human attention

MYOB

Do you have a nosy coworker? BU research finds snooping colleagues send our stress levels rising

Organizational psychologist Richard A. Currie studies the difference between prying and friendly curiosity—and nosiness’ impact on employee performance

Boston University

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They’re a common office menace: the nosy coworker. They read over shoulders, loiter as friends chitchat, ask uncomfortable personal questions. It can be tempting to duck for cover whenever you see them heading your way.

But separating the prying and obtrusive from the merely curious and concerned can be challenging. What one person considers nosy, another might think is friendly; some people are open books, others like to keep their personal lives private.

Those blurry lines aren’t just issues for the 9-to-5 crowd to navigate, they’ve been a thorny problem for researchers studying intrusive behavior and employees’ privacy boundaries. Until now, says Boston University organizational psychologist Richard A. Currie, there’s been no reliable way to measure, or even define, workplace nosiness, making it hard to track its potentially negative effects. His research aims to change that, and his latest project started with surveys of 350 young adults about nosiness—asking them what it means to be nosy at work, how nosy colleagues act, how often nosiness occurs.

In a series of four studies, Currie has come up with a set of common nosiness characteristics, developed a way to measure workplace intrusiveness, and tested whether nosiness levels are predictors of an employee’s performance and satisfaction. The research was conducted with Mark G. Ehrhart of the University of Central Florida and published in the Journal of Business and Psychology. They found one-third of people reported seeing someone being nosy at work at least weekly; a similar proportion said they spotted it every month.

I think we all have been in situations where others felt entitled to our feelings, ourselves in some way,” says Currie, a BU School of Hospitality Administration assistant professor of organizational psychology. “What really sparked my interest in workplace privacy is this modern push for authenticity—it sounds healthy to bring your whole self to work, but it seems like it’s almost eroding boundaries between professional and personal lives. That creates pressure, discomfort, perhaps burnout and stress—I wanted to explore that tension a little bit.”

How Do You Measure Nosiness?

Over the course of two studies—and with further input from expert reviewers and surveys with working adults—the researchers isolated themes from the answers given by the 350 subjects, such as chronic questioning and gossip/drama, to create a nosiness scale (see “How Nosy Are Your Colleagues?”). The scale, which allows survey respondents to quantify a colleague’s intrusiveness, has measures of professional and personal nosiness—seeking information about what happens while on the clock versus trying to weasel out details about life outside of work.

“If you think of nosiness not as a behavior necessarily,” says Currie, “but as a perception or an appraisal of someone else’s information-seeking behaviors, there’s a lot of individual variables—personality, hostile biases—that could determine why someone is more or less likely to perceive someone else as being nosy.”

In their paper, the researchers define workplace nosiness as “employees’ intrusive attempts to obtain private information from others at work.”

Defining nosiness is a really big step forward,” says Currie. “We came to a firm definition of how it’s different from other related constructs—like social curiosity—that in and of themselves don’t necessarily have overly negative implications; nosiness does, so it truly is a distinct phenomenon.”

In the third and fourth studies, the researchers aimed to test how that negativity might impact employee well-being and performance. They found employees react to nosiness by pulling down the shutters—“tightening their privacy boundaries through hiding knowledge from their nosy coworkers,” according to the journal article. In companies rife with prying colleagues, stress levels were higher, while task performance and knowledge-sharing with colleagues were lower. The researchers also separately concluded that workplaces perceived to have a competitive psychological climate—with everyone vying for an advantage over their coworkers—correlated with higher levels of nosiness.

“Interestingly, we found that younger workers reported engaging in nosy behaviors more than older workers did,” says Currie. “I find that to be a fascinating finding. I do wonder if that translates to generational differences—not only in your likelihood of engaging in nosiness or being appraised by others as being nosy, but also how you appraise and respond to others.”

Authentic Supervisors Encourage Sharing

Currie has already tested his nosiness scale in a hospitality scenario, publishing a paper in the International Journal of Hospitality Management on how supervisor inquisitiveness about personal lives impacts frontline restaurant staff. Exploring nosiness’ effects is something he’d like to do more of.

“We found workers’ shared supervisor nosiness perceptions negatively impacted employee perceptions of interpersonal justice, which ultimately reduced their likelihood of engaging in knowledge-sharing behavior,” says Currie. “We also found that when supervisors were more authentic and trusted more, that weakened the negative relationship between nosiness and interpersonal justice, leading to more knowledge-sharing.”

Since starting this work, Currie says he’s been more aware of his own inquisitiveness—when it’s appropriate, when to dial it back. “Being the nosiness researcher, you can’t be nosy,” he says. It’s also shaped his leadership classes to future hospitality managers, helping him speak to students about their biases and motivations when they’re interacting with others, “exposing my students to this understanding that people are really complex.”

As for what to do when confronted with the office’s nosy neighbor, Currie says that’s a subject for a future study. But he does offer one final insight.

“People are interesting and, naturally, all of us want to know more about the people we encounter regularly,” he says. “Sometimes, I find myself being overly curious about what others in my workplace and outside of work are doing, so I do keep in check my nosiness behaviors. But I’d also like to believe that I’m not policing others’ information-seeking.”

 

*This research was supported in part by a graduate student award from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

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Journal

Journal of Business and Psychology

DOI

10.1007/s10869-025-10018-7 

Method of Research

Survey

Article Title

Mind Your Own Business: Developing and Validating the Workplace Nosiness Scale

 

Research explores human factors in general aviation plane crashes

University of Arkansas

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Mechanical engineer Neelakshi Majumdar studies aviation safety.

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Credit: Whit Pruitt

On average, four planes crash each day in the United States with almost all of aircraft involved being single-engine plans. One in five of those crashes were caused by inflight loss of control, defined by the Federal Aviation Administration as “unintended departure of an aircraft from controlled flight.” Nearly half of accidents caused by inflight loss of control are fatal.

New research from a University of Arkansas mechanical engineering assistant professor, Neelakshi Majumdar, investigates why inflight loss of control occurs in general aviation, which includes all civil flights except for commercial transports of people or cargo, and how pilots can prevent and recover from it. The work could improve pilot training and save lives.

The paper, published in the latest issue of the Journal of Air Transportation, is the first rigorous survey to ask surviving pilots why they experienced inflight loss of control and document the human factors that led to the incidents. Nearly 200 pilots completed the survey.

Karen Marais, professor of Purdue University’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, was the second author of the paper. The research received funding from the Federal Aviation Administration.

OUT OF CONTROL HIGH IN THE SKY

Pilots cannot always avoid inflight loss of control, as it may result from mechanical failure or unexpected severe weather. In Majumdar’s survey of pilots who experienced inflight loss of control, however, she found errors caused by either a lack of skills or a poor decision often contributed to the incident.

Errors include low air speed, trying to take off with an overweight plane, incorrect use of autopilot, overlooking a checklist item, and not recognizing that the aircraft is in a spin. While pilots cannot control the weather, often they fail to check the weather or overestimate their ability to handle bad conditions.

Past research on inflight loss of control has relied on data from the National Transportation Safety Board. Researchers use NTSB data because it is the official record collected after an accident. But the quality of that data varies widely.

“For some accidents, they would have a detailed narrative about what happened,” Majumdar said. “For others, it would be vague, generic and broad.”

Majumdar found that many pilots did not want to talk about loss of control incidents.

“Pilots are too scared to lose their license,” she said.

The pilots who participated in the study skewed older. The professional pilots were more likely to be retired. Majumdar speculates these older pilots saw less risk in discussing loss of control incidents.

The most common causes of inflight loss of control, Majumdar found, were poor planning that led to flying in severe weather and pilots recognizing too late that they were in a dangerous situation, which delayed or prevented corrective actions.

THE NEED FOR TRAINING 

“What stood out for me was that around one quarter of the pilots talked about inadequate training for preventing loss of control scenarios,” Majumdar said.

Several of the pilots in the survey said they were never taught how to recover from out-of-control situations like spins and spirals. Even pilots who are taught how to recover from a spin may not have the skills to execute the recovery.

“When it comes to actually doing it, how many people can actually do it within five seconds?” Majumdar said.

Majumdar, herself a licensed private pilot, believes that technology like flight simulators could be used to better train pilots how to avoid and recover from inflight loss of control incidents. Flight simulators could also reduce the cost of training.

“General aviation is really unsafe compared to commercial aviation. Pilot training and education is something that needs to be done better,” she said.

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Journal

Journal of Air Transportation

DOI

10.2514/1.D0432 

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Human Factors in General Aviation Loss of Control: Survey of Pilot Experiences

Article Publication Date

27-Jul-2025