Author: jplucas

Noted: For instance, John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is concerned about the study authors’ claims that the Moroccan fossils belong to the Homo sapiens clade.

Noted: Cara Moravec is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and she uses CRISPR in her research all the time. She found a few anomalies in the study that raised some concerns for her in regards to the interpretations of the findings. She says off-target effects are a known issue with CRISPR but that this study isn’t the best representation of those problems.

Noted: John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved in the new study, said that it was a plausible idea, but that recent discoveries of fossils from the same era raise the possibility that they were used by other hominins.

Quoted: “The license holder is held accountable to certain standards of food handling, food sourcing, food holding,” said Monica Theis, senior lecturer for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Food Science. “If those steps to enforce that are no longer part of the process, then there’s a risk there that people could get sick.”

Quoted: “It’s a great idea,” said Alan Sorensen, an economist at the University of Wisconsin who has studied drug prices. Referring to doctors, he added that “even a small moving of the needle on their prescribing behavior can have a pretty big impact on costs.”

In a controversial decision that sparked national protests, President Donald Trump officially withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord Wednesday. The decision comes months after working to dismantle multiple Obama administration climate change efforts including the Clean Power Plan and other EPA regulations on coal and oil.

“It’s a huge mistake for the United States to pull out of the Paris agreement for lots of reasons,” says Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For 15 years, Patz served as a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and has been leading research on the links between health and climate change for more than two decades.

Noted; “I don’t think anonymization will work, but it’s the first thing that people think of,” says Molly Carnes, a professor of geriatrics and director of the Center for Women’s Health Research at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Carnes leads a team that has poked at the dynamics of peer review by recreating study sections. Among their findings is that ambiguous standards for reviewing grant proposals and comments from other reviewers can influence the panel’s assessment of the proposed research. Those variations could also lead to bias, she says, although the group has not specifically examined racial factors.

Noted: Keeping the system as it is, however, comes with its own set of issues and leaves the problem of student-loan defaults unfixed. Some policy wonks have suggested that a complete switch to automatic enrollment in income-driven repayment plans could lessen defaults, but that is not enough, said Nicholas Hillman, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison

Noted: If this activation is prolonged, it could “trigger a chain of events” that leads to cellular degeneration, which is related to cognitive impairment, say neuroscientist Chiara Cirelli, who led the research. Sleep is “very, very important” to normalize the functions of the brain’s synapses, she said.

Noted: Daniel Young has observed insect decline firsthand. The UW-Madison entomologist has been studying a rare lake trout beetle for years. He calls the insect hotel project a marriage between art and science that nature needs right now.

Noted: “Fear of the unknown affects everyone, and this may be particularly true for pregnant women,” said Larissa Duncan, lead researcher in the study and an associate professor of human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: On Earth, that amount of time is somewhere between thousands and millions of years, according to anthropologist John Hawks, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

BEIJING — Chinese people cheering on their country’s ascent sometimes comfort themselves with the idea that Asia’s other behemoth, India, is years from surpassing China’s population and decades from emerging as a potential economic peer.