Slow traffic, fast food: Study links road delays with unhealthy eating

University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences

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University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign economist Becca Taylor collaborated on a study showing unexpected traffic delays lead to more fast-food visits, adding up to a modest but meaningful potential impact on health.  

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Credit: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

URBANA, Ill. — Ever notice how much more tempting it is to pick up fast food for dinner after being stuck in traffic? It’s not just you. New University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign research shows that traffic delays significantly increase visits to fast food restaurants, leading to unhealthier eating for millions each year. 

“In our analysis focusing on Los Angeles County, unexpected traffic delays beyond the usual congestion led to a 1% increase in fast food visits. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s equivalent to 1.2 million more fast food visits per year in LA County alone. We describe our results as being modest but meaningful in terms of potential for changing unhealthy food choices,” said study author Becca Taylor, assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at Illinois.

Taylor and her co-authors had access to daily highway traffic patterns over more than two years in Los Angeles, along with data showing how many cell phone users entered fast-food restaurants in the same time period. With these data, the team created a computational model showing a causal link between unexpected traffic slow-downs and fast food visits.

This pattern held at various time scales, including 24-hour cycles and by the hour throughout a given day. When analyzed by the day, traffic delays of just 30 seconds per mile were enough to spike fast-food visits by 1%.

“It might not be intuitive to imagine what a 30-second delay per mile feels like,” Taylor said. “I think of it as the difference between 10 a.m. traffic and 5 p.m. traffic.”

When the researchers broke the day into hour-long segments, they found a significantly greater number of fast food visits when traffic delays hit during the evening rush hour. At the same time, grocery store visits declined slightly.

“If there's traffic between 5 and 7 p.m., which happens to be right around the evening meal time, we see an increase in fast food visits,” Taylor said. “Drivers have to make a decision about whether to go home and cook something, stop at the grocery store first, or just get fast food.”

Considering every major city has both traffic and fast food restaurants lining highway feeder roads, it’s not a stretch to extrapolate the pattern beyond Los Angeles. Taylor and her co-authors say the link between traffic and unhealthy food choices is just one more reason policymakers around the country and the globe should prioritize infrastructure reforms to ease congestion. 

“Our results contribute to the literature suggesting time constraints are really important to the food choices people make. Any policies aimed at loosening time constraints — and traffic is essentially lost time — could help battle unhealthy eating,” Taylor said. “That could mean improvements in infrastructure to mitigate traffic congestion, expanding public transport availability, and potentially increasing work from home opportunities.”

The study, “Slow traffic, fast food: The effects of time lost on food store choice,” is published in the Journal of Urban Economics [DOI: 10.1016/j.jue.2025.103737]. Authors include Panka Bencsik of Vanderbilt University, Lester Lusher of the University of Pittsburgh and IZA, and Becca Taylor.

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Journal

Journal of Urban Economics

DOI

10.1016/j.jue.2025.103737 

AMERIKAN POLY-KRISIS

UC San Diego physician-scientist to lead new Lancet commission on U.S. societal resilience in a global pandemic age

International panel will address ways to strengthen communities against pandemics, climate change and other global threats

University of California - San Diego

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Lancet Commission chair Eliah Aronoff-Spencer (front) of UC San Diego attends the UN Science Summit in the fall of 2024 with Lancet Commission co-chairs Richard Carpiano (center back) of UC Riverside and global public health consultant Lara Vojnov (back second right) and colleagues Wendy MacNaughton (left, panelist and New York Times bestselling illustrator and graphic journalist) and Julie Makani (Wellcome Trust research fellow and associate professor in the Department of Haematology and Blood Transfusion at the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences).

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Credit: Photo courtesy of Eliah Aronoff-Spencer, UC San Diego

The prestigious medical journal The Lancet has convened a new commission charged with recommending how to build more resilient communities in the face of pandemics, climate change and other interconnected global challenges. Titled “The Lancet Commission on U.S. Societal Resilience in a Global Pandemic Age: Lessons for the Present from the Future,” the commission is chaired by Eliah Aronoff-Spencer, M.D., Ph.D., of UC San Diego and will operate over the next four years.

“We need to refocus on strengthening our society by understanding what makes communities resilient—from transformational technologies like AI and synthetic biology to local governance and stewardship,” said Aronoff-Spencer, professor of medicine and design in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at UC San Diego School of Medicine, director of the Center for Health Design at the UC San Diego Design Lab, and UC San Diego Qualcomm Institute affiliate. “We also must go beyond technical solutions and find better ways of engaging and connecting people, harnessing community-powered innovation, ensuring that solutions are locally viable, and truly serve people’s needs while protecting our nation’s health security.”

The commission’s leadership includes Richard Carpiano, Ph.D., M.P.H., professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside, and Lara Vojnov, Ph.D., a global public health consultant, who serve as co-chairs. 

“The idea is to go upstream and address fundamental societal and ecological issues—the major challenges confronting us in 2025,” said Carpiano. “Imagine standing by a raging river, seeing people swept away. We can keep pulling them out one by one, or we can go upstream to address what’s putting them at risk in the first place. That’s exactly what we aim to do.”

More than 20 commissioners from fields including medicine, environmental science, economics, policy, media and technology will contribute their expertise. The commission’s work will unfold in three major phases: Planning and community building, which will lay the foundation for the commission’s research, establishing objectives and forming collaborative teams. Fact-finding and landscape analysis, in which the team will examine case studies in the U.S. and internationally, engaging with stakeholders at every level—from local communities to global organizations such as the United Nations. Collaborative simulation and speculative design, in which the team will consider diverse threats and opportunities to produce a future-oriented report, followed by the creation of living strategic roadmaps with policy recommendations to guide communities toward resilience.

In addition, the commission and associated Resilient Collective (resilient.ucsd.edu)  are collaborating with the United Nations Science Summit on developing a resilient community dimension framework for the post-sustainable development goal era. This partnership underscores the commission’s mission to shape practical strategies that foster health security, economic stability and social well-being worldwide.

With Aronoff-Spencer, Carpiano and Vojnov, the commission includes:

·      Berit Anderson of Strategic News Service

·      Reed Berkowitz of Curiouser LLC

·      Rick Bright of Bright Global Health

·      Renee DiResta of Stanford Internet Observatory

·      Patricia Garcia of School of Public Health, Cayetano Heredia University (UPCH)

·      Tina George Karippacheril of the World Bank Group

·      M. Chris Gibbons of the Greystone Group, Inc.

·      Richard Gold of McGill University Faculty of Law

·      Shannon Hader of American University School of International Service

·      Mark S. Handcock of UCLA Department of Statistics and Data Science

·      Linda A. Hill of Harvard Business School

·  Sean Hillier of York University School of Health Policy & Management

·      Ilesh Jani of Mozambique Ministry of Health

·  Paula Lantz of University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy

·      Bill Lober of University of Washington Department of Global Health

·      Mohsen Malekinejad of UC San Francisco School of Medicine

·      Jonna Mazet of UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine

·      Camille Nebeker of UC San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science

·      Anita Raj of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine

·      Stuart “Stu” Sandin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego

·      Robert “Chip” Schooley of UC San Diego School of Medicine

·      Davey Smith of UC San Diego School of Medicine

·      Steffanie Strathdee of UC San Diego School of Medicine

·      Steve Wanyee of IntelliSOFT

The Lancet article announcing the commission is available online at “Announcing the Lancet Commission on US Societal Resilience in a Global Pandemic Age: Lessons for the Present from the Future.”

 

Do women talk more than men? It might depend on their age

University of Arizona

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The stereotype that women are much more talkative than men is pervasive across many cultures, but a widely reported study by University of Arizona researchers in 2007 refuted the claim, finding that men and women speak roughly the same number of words per day – around 16,000. 

A new, larger follow-up to that study paints a more nuanced picture, suggesting that women may be the chattier gender, but only during a certain period of life. 

"There is a strong cross-cultural assumption that women talk a lot more than men," said co-lead study author Colin Tidwell, a clinical psychology doctoral candidate at the U of A. "We wanted to see  whether or not this assumption holds when empirically tested."

Researchers found that women between the ages of 25 and 65 – the life stages of early and middle adulthood – spoke on average about 3,000 more words per day than their male counterparts. Significant gender differences did not appear in the study's other age groups: adolescence (ages 10 to 17), emerging adulthood (ages 18 to 24) and older adulthood (65 and up). 

The researchers also discovered that people in general might be becoming less talkative, a finding they suspect is linked to an increasing reliance on digital communication. Their findings are published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Revisiting an enduring question

In 2007, U of A psychologist Matthias Mehl tested the common assumption that women are much more talkative than men by analyzing data collected from 500 male and female study participants who wore a portable recording device dubbed the EAR – Electronically Activated Recorder – that turns on at random intervals to capture snippets of daily conversations. 

Using those audio files, Mehl developed estimates for the number of words spoken by a person per day. When his analysis revealed no significant gender difference, the provocative finding – published in the journal Science – made national headlines. But the study also invited criticism due to its limitations: Its participants were almost entirely college-aged, and most lived in the same city – Austin, Texas.

Eighteen years later, Mehl and his collaborators – including Tidwell; Valeria Pfeifer, a U of A psychology postdoctoral researcher; and Alexander Danvers, a former postdoctoral researcher at the U of A – sought to replicate the original findings with a larger and more diverse sample. They analyzed 630,000 EAR recordings from 22 separate studies conducted in four countries, with participants ranging in age from 10 to 94. The study included 2,197 individuals – four times as many as many as the original study.

A significant gender difference only emerged for one age group: those 25-64, an age range that had been missing in the original study of college students. While women in the early to middle adulthood age group spoke 21,845 words a day on average, men spoke 18,570.

The researchers don't know for sure why women are the more talkative gender during the near-40-year stretch between 25 and 64, but they say one possibility is that those tend to be the child rearing years, and women, who often assume the role of primary caregiver, might be speaking more than men to their children during that time. 

"Gender-linked differences in child rearing and family care are one possibility that could account for this difference," said Mehl, senior author of the study and a professor in the U of A Department of Psychology. "If biological factors like hormones were to be the main cause, a sizeable gender difference should have also been present among emerging adults. If societal generational changes were to be the driving force, there should have been a gradually increasing gender difference with older participants. Neither, though, was the case." 

Men and women are both talking less 

While women may be more talkative than men at some points in life, Mehl said it's important to note that there is significant variation among individuals in both genders. The study's least talkative person – a man – spoke an estimated 100 words a day, while the most verbose participant – also male – spoke more than 120,000. 

"We humans are so much more different individually than the two genders systematically," Mehl said.

When looking across the full range of study participants, irrespective of gender or age, the researchers also found that the average number of words spoken per day appears to have decreased over the years. The data analyzed for the study was collected between 2005 and 2018, over which time the average number of words spoken per day fell from about 16,000 to about 13,000.

"We did a full analysis looking at what year the data were collected and found that, indeed, 300 spoken words on average per year go missing," said study co-lead author Pfeifer. 

Additional research is needed to determine the reason for the drop, but a rise in digital communication tools, including texting and social media, are likely part of the equation, Mehl said.

Mehl also said more work is needed to better understand what role a person's level of talkativeness and socializing might play in human health and well-being. To that end, he is co-developing a "SocialBit," similar in concept to a Fitbit, that would measure people's minutes of daily conversation without recording the content, using an algorithm that classifies ambient audio into whether or not it contains conversations. 

"I'm fascinated by the idea that we know how much we need to sleep, we know how much we need to exercise, and people are wearing Fitbits all the time, but we have no idea how much we're supposed to socialize," he said. "The evidence is very strong that socializing is linked to health, at least to the same extent as physical activity and sleep are. It's just another health behavior."

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Journal

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

DOI

10.1037/pspp0000534 

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Are women really (not) more talkative than men? A registered report of binary gender similarities/differences in daily word use.

 

Texas A&M researcher awarded NASA grant to study Martian dunes

Texas A&M University doctoral student Lauren Berger is using a prestigious NASA grant to study Mars' dune formations and uncover secrets about the planet’s environment and wind patterns

Grant and Award Announcement

Texas A&M University

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Lauren Berger stands next to a glacier in Iceland during the 2021 SAND-E Mission (Semi-Autonomous Navigation for Detrital Environments), which explored Mars-like terrain to examine how sediments change upriver versus downriver and to test rover science operations and navigation in those environments. 

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Credit: Lauren Berger

Sand dunes on Mars might hold the key to understanding the planet’s mysterious environment, and Texas A&M Geology & Geophysics Ph.D. student Lauren Berger is ready to unlock their secrets. Recently awarded a prestigious grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Berger is diving into a project that could reveal new insights into the Red Planet’s wind patterns, atmospheric conditions and more. The FINESST (Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology) grant supports innovative research in earth and planetary sciences. 

Berger’s project, Insights into the Martian Environment Through Pattern Analysis of Compound Dunes, focuses on studying dune formations on Mars using high-resolution images captured by NASA's orbiting cameras. These “compound dunes”—dunes with smaller dunes layered on top—are well-documented on Earth but remain unexplored on Mars.

“The shape and pattern of these aeolian bedforms—geologic features shaped by wind—can tell us so much about the environment,” Berger explained. “By comparing compound dunes on Mars to those on Earth, we can uncover similarities and differences that could help us better understand the Martian surface and atmosphere.”

This groundbreaking research is supported by the FINESST program, which awarded funding to only 156 projects out of 1,120 submissions. With such a competitive selection process, winning this grant is both rare and significant. 

“Lauren is a passionate and dedicated student,” said Dr. Julia Reece, Berger’s adviser and an assistant professor in the Department of Geology & Geophysics. “The FINESST grant is a great accomplishment for which she can be proud. It will allow her to focus on her research, strengthen her relationship with NASA, and grow as a leader in earth and planetary sciences.” 

Berger, originally from New York, developed her passion for geology and wind-shaped landscapes during her undergraduate years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where she earned a degree in geology. As part of her studies, she interned at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, mapping sand ripples on Mars. Her experiences with the National Park Service and NASA fueled her curiosity about aeolian bedforms, leading her to Texas A&M, where she found a program that matched her passion for studying planets and began working with Dr. Ryan Ewing, who now works at NASA’S Johnson Space Center. 

As part of her research at Texas A&M with the FINESST grant, Berger’s first step is to identify all the compound dunes on Mars. Using high-resolution images from NASA's Context Camera and High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, she will study their shapes and compare them to similar dunes on Earth to better understand how they form and what they reveal about the Martian environment.

“After years of looking at sand ripples as hazards for the Perseverance Rover, which is a NASA robot exploring Mars and searching for signs of past life, I wanted to dive deeper into the science behind them,” Berger said. 

Dr. Marion Nachon, the principal investigator for the research project and an associate research scientist in the department, has been a key mentor for Berger throughout her work. Nachon emphasizes how rare and valuable the FINESST grant is for young researchers, offering a unique opportunity to advance their careers. 

“With this highly competitive FINESST grant award, Lauren is getting an exceptional opportunity to pursue her growth as a motivated and promising scientist,” Nachon said. “She’s reaching for the stars and planets!”

By Texas A&M University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing & Communications

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Lauren Berger collects grain-size samples of sand outside the Algodones Dune Field in California.

Credit

Lauren Berger

 

Life-bearing water arrived on Earth later rather than sooner

Insight could aid the understanding of how and when life arose

Rutgers University

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A piece of iron meteorite Campo del Cielo, one of the samples measured in the study.

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Credit: Katherine Bermingham/Rutgers

A team led by a Rutgers-New Brunswick scientist has concluded water did not arrive as early during Earth’s formation as previously thought, an insight that bears directly on the question of when life originated on the planet.

The finding, reported in the science journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, is significant because the data reported by the study support the idea that water arrived towards the final stages of Earth’s development into a planet from dust and gas, what geologists refer to as late accretion.

Scientists seek to learn when the constituent materials necessary for life appeared so that they can understand how and when life began. According to present scientific understanding, at least three necessary ingredients are essential to kick-start life. These are water, energy and a soup of organic chemicals known as CHNOPS – scientific shorthand for carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur.

“When water was delivered to the planet is a major unanswered question in planetary science,” said Katherine Bermingham, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences and lead author of the study. “If we know the answer, we can better constrain when and how life developed.”

Bermingham is a cosmogeochemist, a scientist who studies the chemical composition of matter in the solar system, particularly focusing on the origin and evolution of the solar system and its rocky planets by analyzing Earth rocks and extraterrestrial materials such as meteorites. 

Using thermal ionization mass spectrometry and a new analytical method the team developed, Bermingham and colleagues studied isotopes of the element molybdenum. An isotope is a form of an element with the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons. This allows it to share the same chemical properties while having a different atomic mass.

“The molybdenum isotopic composition of Earth rocks provides us with a special window into events occurring around the time of Earth’s final core formation, when the last 10% to 20% of material was being assembled by the planet. This period is thought to coincide with the Moon’s formation,” Bermingham said.

They extracted molybdenum from meteorite samples obtained from the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution. The scientific community has divided meteorites into two general groups – the first, “CC,” with constituent elements suggesting the meteorites formed in the outer, presumably wetter, Solar System. The second group, “NC,” has characteristics indicating its meteorites formed in the inner, presumably drier, solar system. This study focused on samples that belong to the NC group. 

They compared the molybdenum isotopic composition of these meteorites to Earth rocks from Greenland, South Africa, Canada, the United States and Japan collected by field geologists. The molybdenum in these rocks is generally considered to have been added to Earth during the time the Moon was formed, which is when final core formation occurred. This is precisely when the team wanted to search for the origins of water.  

“Once we gathered the different samples and measured their isotopic compositions, we compared the meteorites signatures with the rock signatures to see if there was a similarity or a difference,” Bermingham said. “And from there, we drew inferences.”

The analyses showed that the Earth rocks they studied were more similar to meteorites sourced from the inner solar system meteorites (NC) rather than meteorites sourced from the outer solar system (CC).  

“We have to figure out from where in our solar system Earth's building blocks – the dust and the gas – came and around when that happened,” Bermingham said. “That’s the information needed to understand when the stage was set for life to begin.”

Since the chemical composition of the Earth rocks they studied matches that of the presumed inner solar system (NC) meteorites, the scientists concluded that the Earth had not received as much water from the Moon-forming event as previously thought. The finding is significant, Bermingham said, because a popular theory of water delivery is that a significant amount of the Earth’s water was added when the Moon was formed.

This research, however, showed that a substantial amount of water likely did not come during this period of growth. Instead, the data support the interpretation that water was delivered to Earth in smaller portions after the Moon was formed, far later during Earth’s formation.

“Our results suggest that the Moon-forming event was not a major supplier of water, unlike what has been thought previously,” Bermingham said. “These findings, however, permit a small amount of water to be added after final core formation, during what is called late accretion.”

Other Rutgers authors of the study include Linda Godfrey, an assistant research professor, and laboratory researcher Hope Tornebene, both of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

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Journal

Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta

DOI

10.1016/j.gca.2024.11.005 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

The non-carbonaceous nature of Earth’s late-stage accretion