A recent study looked at the relationship between meth and opioid use with non-fatal drug overdoses in rural areas across 10 states, including Wisconsin. We speak with an author of the paper on who uses multiple drugs and how they can best receive treatment, Dr. Randall Brown.
The findings “challenge our ideas about what sleep is,” says Benjamin Baird, a researcher who studies dreams at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was not involved in this study. Sleep has classically been defined as unresponsiveness to external environmental stimuli—and that feature is still typically part of the definition today, Baird explains. “This work pushes us to think carefully—rethink, maybe—about some of those fundamental definitions about the nature of sleep itself and what’s possible in sleep.“
Quoted: UW-Madison education professor Nick Hillman leads a research lab that’s dedicated to understanding how student loan debt impacts borrowers after they leave college.
“1 in 5 are clear of debt in 5 years, 1 in 5 struggling and in default within 5 years, so that means you have 3 in 5 who are kind of in this muddy middle,” he said.
Hillman’s research shows nearly 50 percent of Wisconsinites between the ages of 18 and 34 have student loans, but that steadily decreases among older age groups.
While the Ivy League universities move down Forbes’ list, several large public universities are rising in our ranks. Public colleges filled five of our top 25 spots this year, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Michigan State University, the University of Kansas, and Texas Tech University each rose at least ten spots on our list. Mississippi State University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology made remarkable leaps on our list, moving up 132 and 114 spots, respectively.
UW Varsity Band Concert 2022, 8 p.m. Monday, Sept. 26
Third-year director Corey Pompey leads the UW Varsity Band through a mix of new material and familiar favorites, including a tribute to the music of Queen and a salute to members of our nation’s armed forces.
UW-Madison is looking for an artist — or artists — to commission an outdoor art installation for the new School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences (CDIS) building.Wisconsin artists are encourage to apply, though the search is open nationally.
Quoted: As someone who’s a registered dietitian who also works in the dairy field, it’s ironic that Andrea Miller deals with lactose intolerance herself. She’s a registered dietitian and outreach program manager for the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“For most people, cultured products as a whole will digest and absorb well because of what they contain (natural enzymes) and the fact that lactose has been eaten up in the process of culturing,” she says.
Quoted: “We have an opportunity, actually, to sort of prevent this from becoming a long-term issue,” Dr. Dan Shirley, medical director for infection prevention at UW Health, said.
While the Badgers opened their Week 1 prep days with bad news of Chase Wolf’s extensive knee injury, the team is still in high spirits ahead of Saturday’s opener vs. Illinois State.
Quoted: In such cases, people have a hard time gauging what the majority believes because often the minority tends to be very visible and loud, said Dominique Brossard, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies public perception on controversial science, who was not involved in the study.
“We actually use cues around us to make sense of what’s going on,” said Brossard, so if someone lives in a neighborhood that is fairly conservative, they will tend to think more people are conservative than they are.
Yet the political environment is slightly different in Wisconsin, another 2022 and 2024 battleground state to which Biden is expected to travel next week, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center Director Barry Burden.
While most Americans are now living free of face masks, one group — the roughly 7 million who are immunocompromised — are still mid-pandemic, the Guardian reported Tuesday. Dr. Jeannina Smith, medical director of the infectious disease program at University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics, describes the trauma suffered by organ transplant patients who lose their transplant when the test positive for COVID in a hospital setting. One such patient, “was sobbing because she said, ‘It’s so hard for me to see that people care so little about my life that wearing a mask is too much for them.’”
Noted: “We don’t like to speak about mortality, but it’s a fact of life,” said Henning, who has worked in language preservation for his tribe since graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in linguistics. “We’re going to get to a situation where I’m going to be saying, … ‘I wish I would have asked when they were here.’ “
