Skip to main content

Author: gbump

Abby Roque is first Native American to play U.S. women’s hockey team

Posted on
The Washington Post

The players skated around Tuesday afternoon at Wukesong Sports Center without their helmets and — briefly, mercifully — without their masks, stopping and smiling for the camera that would capture the official team portrait of the 2022 U.S. Olympic women’s hockey team, not to mention their own camera phones that were tucked under pads on their hips or their shoulders. After the large group photo came the subsets: first-time Olympians in one shot, the goalies in another; University of Minnesota players followed by those from the University of Wisconsin — rivals in everyday life, teammates here.

Experts question unusual plan to clear Covid vaccine for kids under 5

Posted on
STAT News

Malia Jones, an epidemiologist who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and who specializes in vaccine hesitancy, said it has been clear for a while that getting children vaccinated against Covid is going to be an uphill battle. She worries that the low level of confidence in Covid vaccines for children will erode parental support for other vaccines. “This is the thing that keeps me up at night,” she said.

MGE looks to buy share in gas plant, says fuel switch will speed carbon reduction

Posted on
Wisconsin State Journal

Greg Nemet, a UW-Madison professor who specializes in energy policy, said utilities need to begin shutting down gas plants, and acquisitions like this cast doubt on ambitious decarbonization goals. “We want to see less demand for gas-fired electricity, not new purchases of it,” Nemet said. “If we are trying to reduce emissions by 80% in the next eight years, we should be investing rapidly and heavily in clean energy and energy efficiency.”

‘I built too many prisons’: Tommy Thompson, UW System want more inmates to get degrees

Posted on
Wisconsin State Journal

The details are fuzzy, but Tommy Thompson’s idea to “turn a prison into a university” is starting to take shape. The Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. late last year awarded the University of Wisconsin System and the Department of Corrections a $5.7 million grant to expand college pathways for inmates. The grant provides a much-needed boost for the project, which Republicans declined to fund in the state budget passed last summer.

What Is a Bomb Cyclone? A Winter Storm Explained

Posted on
WSJ

If traveling by vehicle, pack a winter survival kit, and in the event of getting stranded in the snow, stay with the vehicle. Laura Albert, an industrial engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies emergency response and preparedness, recommends packing such a kit with jumper cables, a small shovel, a flashlight, warm clothes, blankets, bottled water and nonperishable snacks, and a bag of sand or cat litter to regain traction on snow or ice.

New Reports Shine a Light on Rural Colleges

Posted on
Inside Higher Ed

What is a rural college? And where can such institutions be found? The questions seem simple, but in higher education, the answers are surprisingly complex. Now two new reports aim to clarify them.

The first, released in December, comes from the University of Wisconsin and is titled “Mapping Rural Colleges and Their Communities.” Nicholas Hillman, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin who spearheaded the report, says the research was born out of the question “Where are rural colleges located?”

What Does Endemicity Mean for COVID?

Posted on
The Atlantic

Pretty much all we can say for sure about the flu is that—as Malia Jones, a population-health expert at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told us—it is “a huge pain in the butt, but also not a global pandemic, most of the time. Unfortunately, there is not a single word for that.”

UW study: Antiviral COVID-19 pill works well against Omicron variant

Posted on
WISC-TV 3

A new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows current anti-COVID-19 pills work well against the Omicron variant, but antibody drugs are less effective. Researchers at the UW School of Veterinary Medicine found the Omicron variant has so many different mutations in spike proteins that antibody treatments can’t keep up.

COVID-19 pandemic worsened blood supply crisis

Posted on
NBC-15

The lack of labor to carry out the blood drives also curtailed the ability to collect blood. Additionally, there is a shortage of workers to transport the blood across the country. There has been a 10% decline in blood donations since March 2020, including a 62% drop in college and high school blood drives. This group made up about 25% of all donors in 2019, according to the American Red Cross’s website. This scenario has forced hospitals to closely monitor blood use in the event blood supplies drop off, according to UW Health Surgeon Dr. Ann O’ Rourke.

Krewson, Grace

Posted on
Wisconsin State Journal

Grace’s college studies were interrupted by marriage, but her service to the University was not; she held many jobs there over five decades, from technical typist at the Army Math Research Building to office manager for the botany and zoology programs at Birge Hall. However, it was as student advisor to the English department that she found her calling.

No end in sight in dispute over UW Hospital nurses’ union

Posted on
Wisconsin State Journal

Unlike other public employees affected by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10, which banned collective bargaining except for cost-of-living pay increases, UW Hospital workers are not state or municipal employees. When the hospital became a public authority separate from the university in 1996, it acquired its own special status. How Act 10 and other laws apply to that status accounts for most of the legal arguments over whether UW Health, one of the largest employers in Dane County, can recognize the union for collective bargaining.

‘It’s about time’: Black women celebrate representation in Biden’s promised SCOTUS nominee

Posted on
WKOW-TV 27

Though Biden’s nominee will make history, UW-Madison political science professor Howard Schweber said the new justice likely won’t have a large impact on case decisions. “Justice Breyer’s retirement and replacement changes nothing on the ideological balance of the court,” Schweber said. “This makes no difference at all in terms of the outcome of any likely cases that we’re paying attention to.”

Will Delta Survive the Omicron Wave?

Posted on
The Atlantic

In a “worst-case scenario,” Gostic said, Delta could transform into something capable of catching up with Omicron, and the two would tag-team. Dual circulation doesn’t just double the number of variants we have to deal with; it “leaves open the possibility for recombination,” a phenomenon in which two coronavirus flavors can swap bits of their genomes to form a nasty hybrid offspring, Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. (Delta’s brutality + Omicron’s stealth = bad-news bears.) Alternatively, a daughter of Delta may totally overtake Omicron, exacting its ancestor’s sweet, sweet revenge. Or maybe the next variant that usurps the global throne will be a bizarro spawn of Alpha … or something else entirely. In the same way that Omicron was not a descendent of Delta, the next variant we tussle with won’t necessarily sprout from Omicron.

Is ‘Fully Vaccinated’ ‘Up-to-Date?’ Experts Are Worried Americans Are Too Confused to Care

Posted on
The Daily Beast

Part of the problem, David O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin, said, is that the CDC may have painted itself into a corner by initially describing those who went through a two-dose mRNA vaccine course as “fully vaccinated,” despite not knowing the long-term efficacy of the vaccines against new variants.

Seditious conspiracy is rarely proven. The Oath Keepers trial is a litmus test | US Capitol attack

Posted on
The Guardian

But because sedition charges so rarely go to trial, there isn’t a great deal of precedent for how such trials proceed, experts say. And US prosecutors have a checkered history in securing sedition convictions. “It’s been used in ways that have been absurd and has been used in ways that were slam dunks,” said Joshua Braver, an assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin.

Health care staff to pitch plan for pandemic help to Dane County Board

Posted on
The Capital Times

Justin Giebel, 25, is a registered nurse in UW Health’s COVID ICU. Recently he’s had to work five night shifts in a row and then stay on for a day shift because the hospital was short-staffed by seven nurses. Many nurses Giebel works with have panic attacks at work, have needed to take leaves of absence or just left nursing altogether, he said.

The health care workers have partnered with the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, a national think-tank housed on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which works to build and support worker-centered partnerships, said director of the center Joel Rogers.

‘We must act,’ says 1619 Project’s Hannah-Jones at UW-Madison

Posted on
The Capital Times

Nikole Hannah-Jones, a historian, professor and award-winning journalist, did not intend for her keynote speech at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to send a hopeful message. “If you came here to get uplifted and inspired: wrong speech,” she told the audience virtually and in person Tuesday for the MLK Symposium at Memorial Union. UW-Madison hosted the event in honor of the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Sculpture of UW-Madison art professor brings message of ‘shared humanity’

Posted on
The Capital Times

When Faisal Abdu’Allah first strolled through a pathway of stone slabs at Quarra Stone, the Madison company that would help create a sculpture of him, he felt like the materials had souls … A year-and-a-half later, the material has been crafted into a 7-foot statue of the University of Wisconsin-Madison art professor for his upcoming DARK MATTER exhibition at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, which opens Sept. 17. Titled “Blu³eprint,” the art will be installed this fall in front of MMoCA, on the corner of Henry and State streets, pending permits from the city.

Wisconsin men’s basketball coach Greg Gard to wear special shoes to honor his mother

Posted on
Wisconsin State Journal

Greg and his wife, Michelle, have raised more than $5 million through their Garding Against Cancer initiative. The Gards, inspired by the loss of Greg’s father, have been dedicated to fighting cancer across Wisconsin. His knowledge of cancer didn’t make anything easier when his mother, Connie, recently was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Fish Oil Is the New Snake Oil

Posted on
Men's Health

“Fish oils, like any nutritional supplement, are not regulated by the FDA the way prescription drugs are, so you can never be quite sure of what you’re getting,” says James Stein, M.D., a professor of cardiovascular research at the University of Wisconsin. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re dangerous; it just means you might not be getting all you’ve paid fo

Column: The reality of your college major

Posted on
Daily Cardinal

I began to define myself as a pre-business student, embedding the major into part of my personality. I was envious of every peer I met who was a direct admit to the business school and I relentlessly picked their brains in order to understand how they got in — and how I could too.

Nikole Hannah-Jones honors the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Posted on
Daily Cardinal

Hannah-Jones prefaced her words at the event with a qualifier: “If you came here to be uplifted, wrong speech.” This is perhaps inherent in work like hers, which forces readers to confront difficult, uncomfortable and, at times, unbelievably cruel parts of the United States’ collective national history.

Column: ‘Are you okay?’

Posted on
Daily Cardinal

Let’s rip the band-aid off right now. I was sexually assaulted this past October. I’d like to share my experience in order to spread awareness for survivors of sexual assault — specifically male survivors.