Author: jplucas

Dr. Matthew Leota is a University of Wisconsin Madison Research Scientist who studies mosquito borne illnesses. He says they encountered the Zika virus while researching something else in Columbia. “I’ve been primarily working on a virus called Dengue virus and another virus called Chikungunya virus, which are transmitted by a mosquito called Aedes Aegypti, and so Aedes Aegypti is also the mosquito that is currently spreading Zika virus around the Americas, and so it was somewhat coincidentally that we came upon Zika virus working in Columbia.”

Quoted: “It’s no different than, ’Why do we teach science in school?’ ” said Diana Hess, who has researched civic education and students’ discussion of controversial political issues, and is dean of the school of education at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Researchers are working on a number of new weapons for combatting insect-borne disease. One potential is a common bacterium, wolbachia. Mosquitoes infected with it in laboratory studies are unable to transmit dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever. Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes are being introduced in Medellin, Colombia, part of a project aimed at eliminating dengue. Matthew Aliota, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, will be studying the method’s prospect for controlling Zika and other mosquito-borne diseases.

Quoted: “Typically the way people have predominantly viewed snow was almost like a simplifying agent of the landscape,” says Jonathan Pauli from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A lot of what was known about winter only really considered what happened to the animals traversing its surface, even among ecologists, he adds.

Noted: The row with the GOP frontrunner arguably lends weight to the notion that Fox News is politically neutral but James Baughman, a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison says this would not have factored in Mr Ailes’ decision. (Subscription required.)

Quoted: Michael Corradini, professor of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he hopes the bill will pass because he feels nuclear power is a better alternative to fossil fuels and ultimately help in the fight against climate change.

Quoted: Katy Culver, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who researches social media, said she has a hunch.”I would suspect it’s mainly issues of privacy law and data security,” she said.

Michael Wagner, also at UW-Madison,  said he thinks Facebook hired Van Hollen to handle lawsuits.

Quoted: “Students living in poverty are not arriving to school in the morning on a level playing field,” said Seth Pollak, one of the study’s authors and a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison. “They are hungry, tired, stressed. No one is reading to them at home. The children we were studying didn’t even have crayons or Magic Markers at home.”

Noted: Politicians getting so far out ahead of public opinion is “pretty unusual,” said Barry Burden, a political-science professor and the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “When we see examples of true leadership it’s usually on topics that matter only to a segment of the population, or that have a technical element that makes [the issue] difficult for most of the public to understand.”

Noted: Tate and others say slavery books for children are an intricate art of communicating historical crimes that neither overwhelms nor misleads readers. “There’s no checklist for the right way to do this,” says Megan Schliesman, a librarian at the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We’re in the midst of a huge learning process.”