Skip to main content

Author: gbump

Digestive problems may respond to diet changes

Consumer Reports

Although chronic digestive disruptions warrant a doctor’s attention, “generally about 80 percent of patients will benefit from doing some sort of diet intervention,” says Melissa Phillips, a clinical nutritionist at the University of Wisconsin Health System’s Digestive Health Center.

Wisconsin Fares Well Comparatively When It Comes To Credit Card Debt

Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Financial capability specialist Peggy Olive breaks it down like this: half of all people who have a credit card balance pay it off entirely each month. Another quarter carry a balance a few months of the year, and the rest regularly owe money on their cards.”Definitely, there’s different ways that people handle that credit card debt,” said Olive, who works with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Human Ecology’s Center for Financial Security and UW-Extension.

Could microbes be affecting Venus’ climate?

Space.com

The researchers used a suite of satellites to monitor the long-term variations in ultraviolet light. As Sanjay Limaye, a planetary scientist at University of Wisconsin–Madison, explained:The difference between Earth and Venus is that on Earth most of the energy from the sun is absorbed at ground level while on Venus most of the heat is deposited in the clouds.

Labor report chronicles severe decline of unions in Wisconsin

The Capital Times

University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) released its annual “State of Working Wisconsin” this week, showing that since the passage in 2011 of Act 10 — the law that stripped public unions of bargaining rights — union membership has declined by 53.9%. That’s three times the decrease of 14.9% in neighboring Minnesota. The decrease nationally was 21.2%.

Pferdehirt, Wayne P.

Wisconsin State Journal

In 1991, Wayne was recruited to the University of Wisconsin-Madison/UW-Extension to help establish the UW Solid & Hazardous Waste Education Center. In 1998, Wayne became director of the online graduate engineering programs at UW-Madison. He directed the Master of Engineering Management program starting in 1998, one of the nation’s top-ranked online graduate degree programs. Wayne also recently directed the Master of Engineering in Engineering Data Analytics program.

UW-Madison students move in for start of school year

WISC-TV 3

New UW-Madison students started moving into dorms on campus this morning. The Class of 2023 moves in this weekend in residence halls that they were assigned to in June. Some students have been moving in during recent days for trainings or orientation activities, but it’s safe to say they’re excited for the next chapter in their lives.

Revisionist History Podcast

Revisionist History

Featured: Throughout the 1970s, a biologist named Howard Temin became convinced that something wasn’t right in science’s understanding of viruses. His colleagues dismissed him as a heretic. He turned out to be right — and you’re alive today as a result.

Rick Esenberg and Luke Berg: The doublethink of the campus free speech debate

The Capital Times

Ultimately, the UW Board of Regents deserves great credit for crafting this campus free speech policy and taking, head-on, the unique and growing threats to civil discourse on today’s college campuses. With the above modifications, Wisconsin students and taxpayers can be assured that UW campuses will remain incubators of ideas, forums for debate, and truly “safe” for speakers of all points of view.

Fossil DNA Reveals New Twists in Modern Human Origins

Quanta Magazine

Quoted: “But that kind of very simple approach isn’t very good at sorting out the complexity” of how those lost populations interacted, said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Nor does it allow researchers to test specific hypotheses about how that interbreeding unfolded.

Cross names interim UWGB chancellor

Wisconsin State Journal

The system announced Thursday that Cross picked Sheryl Van Gruensven as interim chancellor. Van Gruensven currently serves as UW-Green Bay’s vice chancellor for business and finance. She’s also the co-founder and co-leader of UW-Green Bay’s Women’s Leadership group.

Graphic Novels With Fresh Voices From the Margins

The New York Times

Flowers’s loose, expressive line is a little messy, a little scribbly, with both cursive and all-caps text floating through the images. She is a protégée of the great cartoonist of childhood, Lynda Barry, also known for her expressive style. A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Barry has explained how important handwriting is to the experience of reading comics; in her view, judging “good” and “bad” drawing misses the point of comics, which has more to do with the personality of the hand of the cartoonist than with any kind of realism.

Humans Dominated Earth Earlier Than Previously Thought

New York Times

Quoted: Because information about the past informs predictions of global change in the future, in terms of climate and land use, hard evidence of past land use is invaluable, experts say. “It’s an important paper,” said John Williams, a paleoecologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the project.

What Meditation Does To Your Brain When You’re Annoyed, According To Experts

Bustle

“We begin to see stabilization of changes in the brain after 1,000 to 1,500 hours of meditation practice,” Dr. Richard Davidson, PhD, William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the founder of the Center for Healthy Minds, tells Bustle. “You can think of it as learning a musical instrument; if you got 24 hours of training in playing the violin, you still wouldn’t be very good at playing it.”

An all-woman team will edit the flagship political science journal this year. Here’s why that matters. – The Washington Post

Washington Post

In a bold move, the American Political Science Association recently appointed us — a team of 12 women — to edit the flagship journal of the discipline of political science, the American Political Science Review (APSR).

Aili Mari Tripp is Wangari Maathai Professor of political science and gender & women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Amazon Is on Fire, but Earth Has Plenty of Oxygen

The Atlantic

Shanan Peters, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is working to understand just how it was that our lucky planet ended up with this strange surplus of oxygen. At a presentation in June, at the North American Paleontological Convention in Riverside, California, he pulled up a somewhat unusual slide.

Hot Toddy: Can This Home Remedy Really Cure Your Cold?

Men's Health

Hot liquids help move mucus and germs out of your system. They “increase the mucociliary clearance rate,” explains Bruce Barrett, M.D., Ph.D., professor in the department of family medicine and community health at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Basically, it helps your body sweep mucus and germs out of your body.

Classroom ‘exodus’: Education schools grapple with finding the next generation of teachers as more leave the profession

The Capital Times

While UW-Madison’s teacher education program has a large market share among the state’s preparatory programs due to its size, the number of students earning teaching degrees declined by 25 percent between 2010 and 2016, according to data compiled in a 2018 paper by researchers at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.