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February 16, 2021

Research

Nature Makes Wood. Could a Lab Make It Better?

Posted on
WIRED

In addition to the tantalizing possibilities of growing whole furniture, the plant-based materials could enhance fuels and chemicals production, says Xuejun Pan, a professor in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who wasn’t involved in the study. “You don’t have to necessarily grow a strong piece of wood. If you can produce a biomass, for example, as a future feedstock for bioindustry—competitively and productively—that could be attractive,” he says

Campus life

UW Madison gives out more emergency funds for students

Posted on
NBC-15

University of Wisconsin- Madison students who have been financially impacted by the pandemic started to receive a second round of emergency grant funding on Monday. The university is giving out grants by pulling from $9.89 million of the federal Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund II, according to a news release.

Health

New global health major at UW-Madison introduced in the midst of global pandemic

Posted on
NBC-15

Dehdashti is one of many students who were immediately interested in the global health major when it was first offered this past fall. According to Susan Paskewitz, director of undergraduate global health programs in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the foundational class for the major immediately filled up, meeting its 150 student capacity.

UW Experts in the News

Panpsychism: The Trippy Theory That Everything From Bananas to Bicycles Are Conscious

Posted on
Discover Magazine

Of course, panpsychism is likely not falsifiable. There’s no experiment that can determine whether or not your mailbox has a mental life, much less a quark. Yet that doesn’t mean science isn’t working on the problem. Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has developed something called the integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT). IIT holds that consciousness is actually a kind of information and can be measured mathematically, though doing so is not very straightforward and has caused some to discount the theory.

What Presidents Mean When They Talk About ‘Equity’

Posted on
Bloomberg

While Obama also used equity in the more modern, social-justice sense of the word, he did so less often than Biden already has — a possible sign of his reluctance to center race as a national issue as the country’s first Black president, said Dietram A. Scheufele, a social scientist who studies political communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Obituaries

Jerry Rose

Posted on
Wisconsin State Journal

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jerry was principal investigator for studies on the effectiveness of trauma and heart emergency care, and the cost-effectiveness of helicopter transport of heart, trauma and emergency care. He taught, mentored and became close friends with dozens of graduate students who went on to executive leadership at hospitals around the globe.

UW-Madison Related

UNH professor allegedly behind offensive Twitter account resigns

Posted on
CNN

Later that month, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison resigned from a teaching position after admitting on social media that they falsely claimed to be a person of color. CV Vitolo-Haddad apologized in posts on Medium.com and said they let incorrect guesses about their ancestry, which is southern Italian, “become answers I wanted but couldn’t prove.”