Be thankful for the teachers who allow our children to go to school, the clerks who stock the shelves, and everyone else who makes or delivers what we need. Be thankful for the science that helps protect us, including abundant vaccines, a promising new pill to treat COVID and ongoing research at UW-Madison and elsewhere.
The holiday weekend hasn’t started yet, but one UW-Madison researcher says he can already see more movement among Americans in 2021 than he did in 2020. Assistant Geography Prof. Song Gao says visits to transportation hubs like airports, train stations and bus stops have significantly increased since last year, according to anonymous cell phone motion tracking data.
To assess how missed screenings might affect cancer mortality rates, the National Cancer Institute turned to Oguzhan Alagoz, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose research involves modeling both cancer epidemiology and infectious diseases.
“The question is really interesting because it’s a combination of the two areas I work in,” Alagoz says. His first estimates, unveiled in a widely read editorial published in Science in June by NCI director Normal E. Sharpless, showed that missed screenings might result in 5,000 additional deaths in breast cancer alone over the next decade. A separate group, looking at missed colon cancer screenings, predicted another 5,000 deaths.
When Alagoz produced his breast cancer estimates early in the pandemic, he thought the numbers might not be truly representative. So he worked to refine them, using better data with three powerful cancer models that incorporated numerous factors related to breast cancer—such as delayed screening, treatment effectiveness and long-term survival rates—and the nuanced ways they intersect to affect mortality over time. “Everyone can tell you what will happen immediately, but it’s hard to say what’s going to happen in five or 10 years,” Alagoz says. “If there’s a huge increase in smoking, you’re not going to see more lung cancer right away. You’re going to see that 10 or 15 years down the road.”
Noted: “College campuses are just ideal habitat,” said David Drake, a professor and extension wildlife specialist at the University of Wisconsin, where a sizable flock likes to hang out near apartments for graduate students. “You’ve got that intermixing of forested patches with open grassy areas and things like that. Nobody’s hunting.”
Coexisting with collegiate poultry is not always easy. At California Polytechnic State University, the campus Police Department is occasionally called about turkeys chasing people. At the University of Michigan, a state wildlife officer killed a well-known turkey two years ago that was said to be harassing bikers and joggers. And at Wisconsin, Dr. Drake said at least a couple of aggressive toms were culled after repeatedly frightening students.
Even for fans of the turkeys, getting chased can be fearsome.
“There’s an element of humor, because, oh, it’s a turkey,” said Audrey Evans, a doctoral student at Wisconsin who runs @turkeys_of_uw_madison on Instagram. “But your fight-or-flight instinct kicks in.”
Quoted: Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the people Gableman is meeting with “are all election skeptics who have bought into the big lie.”
Gableman, who last year without evidence claimed the election was stolen, has insisted he has no preconceived ideas about his review and hopes to find that the election was run properly.
“It’s hard to see how he could ever reach such a conclusion given this set of oddballs who he’s working with,” Burden said.
“Having that meat thermometer is going to be really important for turkey, because it’s not going to cook as fast as chicken. And if you forgot to thaw it all the way and you pop it in the oven, there’s that possibility that some parts aren’t going to be done,” said UW Extension educator Heather Quackenboss.
Doctors at UW Health say the pandemic is now largely one of the unvaccinated. To help protect people and stop new variants from developing and spreading, getting a booster dose is a powerful tool in the fight against the pandemic, according to Dr. Jim Conway, pediatric infectious disease specialist, UW Health, and professor of pediatrics, UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
More than two decades after she was critically injured in a shooting, a local woman got the chance to reunite with a nurse who helped save her life.
Johnson was celebrated as an American hockey icon when he died 30 years ago Friday, less than three months after being diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor at age 60. He opened doors for more U.S. players and coaches in the NHL ahead of the wave of hockey growth that took the league south and west in the country.
The hustle and bustle of the holiday shopping season is here, or is it? “The production rate is down and even when they do get finished, you encounter the shipping problem,” says Nancy Wong, professor of consumer science at UW-Madison.
