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One of the major, if not the major impediment to large scale increases of human insect consumption, is the strong rejection of insects as food by most of the world’s population. In an effort to understand this aversion, we surveyed online samples of adults living in the USA and India to participate in a study on ‘attitudes toward food’. A substantial proportion of both Americans (72%) and Indians (74%) were at least willing to consider eating some form of insect food. Men were more willing to try eating insects than were women, especially in the USA. Disgust seems to be the most common reaction of both groups at the prospect of eating insects. The most common perceived benefits of eating insects were related to nutrition and environmental sustainability, and the most common risks related to risk of disease and illness. Both groups find ants the most palatable of a set of seven possible insects, and cockroaches the most unpalatable. In both samples, participants were most amenable to eating low levels of insect flour in a favourite food, and most averse to consuming whole insects. The best predictors of insect acceptance were disgust at the thought of eating insects, beliefs about the benefits of eating insects, sensation seeking, and the enjoyment of telling others about consumption of unusual foods.

Interpersonal relationships are essential to well-being, and gifts are often given to cultivate these relationships. To inform gift givers of what to give and to gain insight into the connecting function of gifts, this research investigates what type of gift is better at strengthening relationships according to gift recipients—material gifts (objects for recipients to keep) or experiential gifts (events for recipients to live through). Experiments examining actual gift exchanges in real-life relationships reveal that experiential gifts produce greater improvements in relationship strength than material gifts, regardless of whether the gift giver and recipient consume the gift together. The relationship improvements that recipients derive from experiential gifts stem from the intensity of emotion that is evoked when they consume the gifts, rather than when the gifts are received. Giving experiential gifts is thus identified as a highly effective form of prosocial spending.

An increasingly prevalent form of social influence occurs online where consumers read reviews written by other consumers. Do people rely on consumer reviews differently when making experiential purchases (events to live through) versus when making material purchases (objects to keep)? Though people often use consumer reviews both when making experiential and material purchases, an analysis of more than six million reviews on Amazon.com and four laboratory experiments reveal that people are less likely to rely on consumer reviews for experiential purchases than for material purchases. This effect is driven by beliefs that reviews are less reflective of the purchase’s objective quality for experiences than for material goods. These findings not only indicate how different types of purchases are influenced by word of mouth, but also illuminate the psychological processes underlying shoppers’ reliance on consumer reviews. Furthermore, as one of the first investigations into how people choose among various experiential and material purchase options, these findings suggest that people are less receptive to being told what to do than what to have.

Vaccine design strategies against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) are focused on the Spike protein or its subunits as the main antigen target of neutralizing antibodies. In this work, we propose rapid production methods of an extended segment of the Spike Receptor Binding Domain (RBD) in HEK293SF cells cultured in suspension, in serum-free media, as a major component of a COVID-19 subunit vaccine under development. The expression of RBD, engineered with a sortase-recognition motif for protein-based carrier coupling, was achieved at high yields by plasmid transient transfection or human type-5-adenoviral infection of the cells, in a period of only two and three weeks, respectively. Both production methods were evaluated in 3L-controlled bioreactors with upstream and downstream bioprocess improvements, resulting in a product recovery with over 95% purity. Adenoviral infection led to over 100 µg/mL of RBD in culture supernatants, which was around 7-fold higher than levels obtained in transfected cultures. The monosaccharide and sialic acid content was similar in the RBD protein from the two production approaches. It also exhibited a proper conformational structure as recognized by monoclonal antibodies directed against key native Spike epitopes. Efficient direct binding to ACE2 was also demonstrated at similar levels in RBD obtained from both methods and from different production lots. Overall, we provide bioprocess-related data for the rapid, scalable manufacturing of low cost RBD based vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, with the added value of making a functional antigen available to support further research on uncovering mechanisms of virus binding and entry as well as screening for potential COVID-19 therapeutics.