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July 3, 2019

Research

Why Do We Sleep? Neuroscientists Reveal “Rebalancing” Effect on Brain

Inverse

The University of Wisconsin-Madison study focused on synapses, the spaces between two connected neurons. To communicate with one another, neurons release neurotransmitters, chemical messengers that nerve cells use to communicate, into synapses. In the mouse experiment at the heart of the study, the authors found that synapses shrink during sleep and expand during wakefulness.

Health

Some Democrats Talk About Cosmetic Surgery Insurance. It Doesn’t Exist.

The New York Times

Quoted: “It’s taking people who are basically normal and would like to look better and feel better about themselves, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” said James Grotting, a plastic surgeon on the clinical faculty at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “But there might be no end of what patients might request if it’s covered by a third party.”

UW Experts in the News

Was the Mexico hailstorm due to climate change? Scientists say it’s not that simple

Mic.com

Quoted: “This is a very unusual event,” says Jonathan Martin, an atmospheric and oceanic scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Indeed, Jalisco Gov. Enrique Alfaro Ramírez said in a video posted to Facebook that the storm was “one we haven’t seen before,” a statement that leads Martin to theorize that that kind of event happens in Guadalajara at most only once every 60 to 100 years.

How Extreme Heat Overwhelms Your Body and Becomes Deadly

Wired

Quoted: The deadly European heat wave of 2003 is a cautionary tale. The first to die were manual laborers, such as roofers, says Richard Keller, a medical historian at the University of Wisconsin Madison who wrote a book on the extreme event called Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003. “It’s always easy to rationalize those deaths away, but they may be a harbinger of things to come,” he says.

UW-Madison Related

Why do rebel groups apologize?

The Conversation

These incidents stretched across different time periods and regions ranging from a 1970 attack by the New Year’s Gang that blew up the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s physics department instead of the Army Math Research Center on the floor above, to a 2014 attack by Boko Haram in Nigeria in which a suicide bomber mistakenly detonated an explosive-laden vehicle next to a fuel depot in Lagos City.