Clipsheet

Interviewed: William Brangham talks to USA Today’s Christine Brennan and former Olympian Madeleine Pape, who once raced against Semenya and is now earning a sociology PhD in gender at UW-Madison.

Noted: “The more we lose, the greater the impact will be,” states meteorologist Jordan Gerth, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the current issue of Nature. “This is a global problem.”

Noted: Dr. Erik Tarula, a neurosurgery professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says there are two kinds of strokes – one with similarities to the pipes in a house that get clogged, and another where they spring a leak.

Noted: Plants’ ability to capture and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is a crucial piece of our continued survival. The fastest, cheapest, most efficient way to bring down greenhouse gases and mitigate some of the effects of climate change is to grow more trees around the world and preserve the ones we have, said Donald Waller, a botany and environmental studies professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “We could essentially be absorbing more carbon than generated by all the cars and trucks on our highways.”

Noted: But many scientists are concerned about a growing “national attention deficit.” “Our attention is being captured by devices rather than being voluntarily regulated,” Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin Madison, told Vox late last year. “We are like a sailor without a rudder on the ocean — pushed and pulled by the digital stimuli to which we are exposed rather than by the intentional direction of our own mind.”