Noted: The stickiness of erroneous beliefs such as a connection between autism and vaccines is often cited as proof of a growing mistrust of science, as an institution, in American culture, but that’s probably not the most useful framing, said Dominique Brossard, professor of science and technology studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Nathan Gibson, ethno-American music curator at the University of Wisconsin Madison, discussed his research on the Starday record label, which originated in Beaumont in the 1950s.
With Nigel Hayes, there’s always two stories to tell.
Big-budget diversity initiatives on a number of campuses have drawn praise and skepticism in recent years. The praise sounds like this: money dedicated to a cause signals its value and enables needed change. The skepticism centers on questions such as whether all students will benefit from, say, the hiring of 20 new professors who contribute to an institution’s diversity goals, or whether well-funded campuses will simply poach inclusion-attuned scholars from others, leaving winners and losers.
A Republican plan to punish students who disrupt free speech on college campuses ran into opposition Thursday at its first public airing in the Legislature, with critics saying it impedes the very thing it seeks to protect.
The discovery of a new human ancestor in 2015 stunned palaeontologists across the globe. Headlines lauded the work for rewriting our history; for filling gaps in the evolutionary record, while others claimed it had the potential to upend everything we know about our cultures and behaviours. This ancestor was dubbed Homo naledi.
When Lakshmi Sridharan moved from India to Madison in the late 1960s to attend graduate school at UW-Madison, the local Indian American community looked much different than it does today. There were no Indian restaurants, no colorful Holi celebrations, no theaters showing Bollywood movies. On campus, the community was so small and close-knit that whenever someone’s relative from India would visit, all the Indian students would get together to share news from home and eat traditional foods.
Noted: “The jury’s still out,” said Dr. Michael Fiore, founder and director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention, a 25-year-old program.
It makes sense that the more we run our air conditioners during the heat of the summer, the more pollution we put into the air. But now scientists have figured out exactly how much more.
Noted: Martha Maurer, a policy program manager and researcher at the Pain and Policy Studies Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agreed that opioid abuse in the United States was an epidemic.
Two years ago, scientists announced the discovery of a puzzling new species of early human: Homo naledi. The 15 partial skeletons were uncovered deep inside a cave in South Africa — and featured human-like hands and feet, but surprisingly small brains the size of a gorilla’s (a third the size of modern human’s).
Far in the back of a twisty, narrow cave in South Africa lie the remains of three pre-humans with small heads and clever hands.
A new scholarship program could help retain Wisconsin’s “best and brightest,” at University of Wisconsin System campuses.
A team of scientists from around the world led by a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor has found a second chamber with fossils of a species related to humans, the Homo naledi.
A year and a half after adding a puzzling new member to the human family tree, a team of researchers working in South Africa have offered an additional twist: the species is far younger than its bizarrely primitive body would suggest, and may have shared the landscape with early Homo sapiens.
Noted: “Funny speeches are best,’’ said Negrut, the speech maven. She points approvingly to Modern Family sitcom creator Steve Levitan’s You Tube video previewing his speech this month at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It features MF’s Phil Dunphy (Ty Burrell) announcing Levitan as the speaker, but claiming never to have heard of him.
To see the impact Tom Pleger had on friends and colleagues, one need look no further than his Facebook page.
“Jump Around” is 25 years old this week. It got some extra publicity last year when House of Pain attacked the Donald Trump campaign for using its hit song.
JOHANNESBURG — A species belonging to the human family tree whose remnants were first discovered in a South African cave in 2013 lived several hundred thousand years ago, indicating that the creature was alive at the same time as the first humans in Africa, scientists said Tuesday.
A new haul of ancient human remains has been described from an important cave site in South Africa.
Just as a high-profile expedition to retrieve fossils of human ancestors from deep within a cave system in South Africa was getting underway in 2013, two spelunkers pulled aside paleoanthropologist Lee Berger. They had found what looked like an ancient thigh bone in a completely different cave. “Can we go get it?” they asked.
Deep within the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa, archaeologists have discovered the remains of at least three Hominin naledi.
Governor Scott Walker is calling on lawmakers to approve a self-insurance model for state employees.
Africa’s richest fossil hominin site has revealed more of its treasure. It’s been a year and a half since scientists announced that a new hominin species, which they called Homo naledi, had been discovered in the Rising Star Cave outside Johannesburg.
Not even two months ago, the Trump administration shocked the biomedical research community by proposing an 18-percent cut to the budget of the National Institutes of Health.
Homo naledi, a strange new species of human cousin found in South Africa two years ago, was unlike anything scientists had ever seen. Discovered deep in the heart of a treacherous cave system — as if they’d been placed there deliberately — were 15 ancient skeletons that showed a confusing patchwork of features. Some aspects seemed modern, almost human. But their brains were as small as a gorilla’s, suggesting Homo naledi was incredibly primitive. The species was an enigma.
On a cloudy day in February, Will Cox pointed to a pair of news photos that prompted a room of University of Wisconsin, Madison, graduate students to shift in their seats. In one image, a young African American man clutches a carton of soda under his arm. Dark water swirls around his torso; his yellow shirt is soaked. In the other, a white couple is in water up to their elbows. The woman is tattooed and frowning, gripping a bag of bread.
RACINE, Wis. (AP) — Mechanical engineering students from University of Wisconsin-Madison are taking their book work off the page and onto the track for an international race car competition for college students.
Noted: “Now that I think back, there was no evidence for the assumption that he was retiring except that it was called a retirement celebration,” said Mark Hill, a PhD student of Patterson’s in 1987, and one of the speakers at his party.
Thomas Pleger, the president of Lake Superior State University, died today two days after undergoing emergency brain surgery. He was 48.
For years, scientists have believed women suffer from depression more frequently than men. But new research from a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor found the gender gap begins much earlier than once believed, breaking away between boys and girls as young as 12.
That liberals run American universities is never going to be a man-bites-dog news headline, but the urgent question ought to be: When are university liberals going to stand up and defend liberalism?
SAN DIEGO — In the competition for marquee commencement speakers, the University of California, San Diego thought it had scored a coup this year — a Nobel Peace Prize winner, best-selling author and spiritual North Star to millions of people.
Every generation faces its own particular challenges, its own dragons to slay. For the post-World War II baby boomers, the generation that came of age in the mid-1960s, the defining beast of the era was the Vietnam War. Some went to fight in it, some got draft deferments or left the country to avoid it, some took to the streets of cities and college towns across the county to protest it. Some did all of the above.
The last thing Lillian Zwilling thought she would be was a music video star. It took her until age 90 to realize her 6:03 of fame. Created by the UW Hollywood Badgers — a team of student filmmakers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison — Lillian’s video uses singer/songwriter Rachel Platten’s “Nothing Ever Happens if You Stay in Your Room” to tell her story as a resident of St. Mary’s Care Center on Madison’s southwest side.
If you stayed up late enough watching ESPN’s coverage of the NFL Draft’s first round, you saw the Pittsburgh Steelers make former Wisconsin outside linebacker T.J. Watt the 30th overall pick. And with the 32nd and final pick of the night, the New Orleans Saints drafted former Badger Ryan Ramczyk, a guy from Stevens Point with only one year of Division I football experience yet considered among the best offensive tackles in the country.
Republican lawmakers have introduced two bills in the last week that create penalties for college students who disrupt campus events, such as speeches by controversial personalities. Those proposals are drawing criticism from free speech advocates though, who argue they would stifle free speech rights.
Noted: University of Wisconsin-Madison entomology department chair Susan Paskewitz said other less common tick-borne diseases like Ehrlichiosis, Babesiosis, Anaplasmosis and Powassan virus have been on the rise as well.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Republicans have introduced another bill that would allow University of Wisconsin System and technical college officials to expel students who inhibit free speech rights.
Racist hate speech on campus has become the de facto litmus test for free speech protections today. But racist hate speech may not be doing what progressive free speech defenders think it is doing.
For the last couple of years, one of the two biggest topics of discussion regarding college education in the U.S. has been the widespread assault against free speech by “progressives.” (The other is the rising level of student debt and the inability of many students to pay off their obligations.) Speakers who don’t toe the leftist party line are shouted down and students who don’t are apt to be accused of “hate speech” and hauled before a “bias response team.” Debate, say many leftists, should be curtailed in the interests of “fairness” and “sensitivity.”
Noted: “But it had kind of been bothering me that nobody looked at how energy use on hot days also contributes to ozone,” said study author Tracey Holloway, a researcher at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “How do you control air pollution on the dirtiest days? And how much are our power plant emissions changing when we have those hot chemically reactive days?”
A medical breakthrough that might save millions of lives could be crawling in your backyard.AdvertisementWISN 12 News’ Kent Wainscott investigates the groundbreaking research in Wisconsin aimed at stopping deadly, antibiotic-resistant superbugs with actual bugs.
Noted: The magazine’s promotional materials are directed more at adults shopping for young people than at teenagers themselves. That’s because nostalgia is an important ingredient in the magazine’s relaunch, said Susan B. Ridgely, a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
William Cox, a social psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his colleagues conducted a study on prejudice-based aggression using 166 undergraduate students as participants.
A year after a rash of racist incidents and student protests spread across its campus, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is opening a center for black students Wednesday in an effort to show better support for the black community on campus.
Noted: But a top U.S. toxicologist disputes that assessment, noting that “trace amount” isn’t a scientific term, and is often used subjectively to play down any problems. Minute levels of chemicals can have dangerous effects on the body, said Dr. Warren Porter, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Another expert told The Globe that levels above 1 ppm are not considered trace amounts.
University of Wisconsin graduate student Michael Davis says he feels isolated, excluded and afraid as a black student on the predominantly white campus, where he’s been called a racial slur multiple times.
Noted: Karen Strier, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin who has studied monkeys in the Atlantic Forest in Brazil since the 1980s, said she had never seen monkeys die from disease in such high numbers. She described a “sense of emptiness” in a reserve near Caratinga in Minas Gerais State, where howler monkeys had largely vanished.
Noted: The magazine’s promotional materials are directed more at adults shopping for young people than at teenagers themselves. That’s because nostalgia is an important ingredient in the magazine’s relaunch, said Susan B. Ridgely, a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Share on twitter Share on reddit2Share on linkedin55OGphoto/iStockphotoHow science fares in the U.S. budget dealBy Science News StaffMay. 1, 2017 , 11:15 AMCongress has finally reached a deal on spending bills for the 2017 fiscal year, which ends on 30 September. House of Representatives and Senate leaders announced last night that they expect lawmakers to vote this week on an agreement that wraps together all 12 appropriations bills that fund federal operations.
Noted: Hilary Dugan, the study’s lead researcher and an inland water researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said that eventually the chloride will kill plants and animals that aren’t able to adapt.
Noted: “This is a big deal, it’s a big deterrent if other cities follow suit. But Airbnb isn’t dead, it certainly has more to its business model,” said Andra Ghent a professor of real estate and urban land economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“You’re the whitest black guy I know”.
A tiny, blonde 7-year-old girl stands in front of a chalkboard, hand whirring away at a complicated math formula in a scene from the new movie, “Gifted,” starring Chris Evans, Jenny Slate and Octavia Spencer.
If there was any doubt that a Republican-led Congress might give a strong boost to federal science spending, the Trump administration probably sealed the deal.
One of the Republican lawmakers who helped write a proposed a bill that could expel students for disrupting events at University of Wisconsin system schools, said he expects the bill to get bipartisan support.
The National Institutes of Health will get a $2 billion funding boost over the next five months, under a bipartisan spending deal reached late Sunday night in Congress. The agreement marks a sharp rejection of President Trump’s proposal to cut $1.2 billion from the medical research agency in the current fiscal year.
Quoted: “You’re looking for your place as they are looking for their next faculty member,” said Dr. Taucia Gonzalez, an assistant professor of education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Finding the right fit is important.”
Gov. Scott Walker expressed support for a bill that calls for suspending or expelling students who disrupt free speech on college campuses.
