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December 30, 2019

Top Stories

Research

Researchers Develop Video Game ‘Tenacity’ To Improve Mindfulness In Middle Schoolers

International Business Times

It is estimated that a staggering 97 percent of adolescents play video games during their spare time. While many often see video games as mere time-killers, a team of researchers from the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, Irvine see them as an opportunity to develop mindfulness in the youth.

Good News for Dogs with Cancer

Scientific American

New treatment techniques and diagnostic tools have likewise been created. Technology for targeted radiation that avoids damaging tissue near a tumor was developed on pet dogs with sinus tumors at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Higher Education/System

Athletics

Business/Technology

UW Experts in the News

Heavy road salt use a growing problem, scientists say

USA Today

Quoted: Given the amount of salt used on roads, that’s a real problem, according to Hilary Dugan, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A 2017 study by her team found that nearly half of the 284 freshwater lakes in their sample in the Northeast and Midwest had undergone “long-term salinization.” One in 10 of them reached a threshold where scientists worry about impacts on aquatic life.

Lightning can help predict rapidly intensifying storms

Tampa Bay Tribune

Noted: “We’ve been amazed by the lightning mapper,” said Derrick Herndon, a hurricane satellite specialist at the University of Wisconsin Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies in a May interview. “We’ve had lightning systems before but they didn’t have the resolution this mapper has and this is doing a much better job of tracking how lightning changes in the storms.”

11 trends that changed the way we read this decade

The Washington Post

Noted: In 2014, the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s School of Education found that less than 3 percent of newly published children’s books were about black people. For a group of minority authors and publishing insiders, it was high time to confront the unbearable whiteness of being.

Obituaries

Holt, Ronald W.

Wisconsin State Journal

Ron worked at the University of Wisconsin Medical School as Director of Medical Education from the beginning of his career until he retired in 2001.

Allee Willis, who co-wrote Earth, Wind & Fire’s good-time hit ‘September,’ dies at 72

Washington Post

Allee Willis, a Grammy Award-winning songwriter who helped compose the catchy theme song for the TV sitcom “Friends,” as well as hits for the Pointer Sisters and Earth, Wind & Fire, and who was described in a Washington Post headline as “the most interesting woman you’ve never heard of,” died Dec. 24 at a Los Angeles hospital. She was 72.