Noted: That’s not necessarily good news for everyone, notes Ed Hopkins, an assistant state climatologist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Apart from its positive economic effects for snow removers and ski resorts, those crisp, white flakes also help protect a farmer’s soil come spring.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin Forestry and Wildlife Ecology Professor Mark Richenbach says there are pros and cons to the current system.
It’s used to find potential treatments for a wide range of common diseases and afflictions, including cancer, diabetes, birth defects, HIV, multiple sclerosis, ALS, and Alzheimer’s. Unlike adult tissue cells, fetal tissue cells can be manipulated into almost any kind of tissue, are less likely to be rejected by a host, and have the capacity to replicate rapidly — making them perfect for analysis into how diseases work. They are also being tried as actual treatments for Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injuries, and diabetes, with researchers injecting fetal cells directly into organs in hopes of regenerating them. Fetal tissue was also a vital component in the development of vaccines for polio, chicken pox, rubella, and shingles. The polio vaccine alone saves 550,000 lives a year. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says fetal tissue research has benefited “virtually every person in this country.”
Quoted: “This is the type of worst case scenario that we fear,” said Derrick Herndon, an atmospheric scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies in Madison, Wisconsin, on Friday. He’s never seen a storm grow so powerful so quickly.
Quoted: “You can think of it like the ice skater analogy,” says James Kossin, atmospheric research scientist at NOAA’s Center for Weather and Climate in Wisconsin. “When the skater pulls their limbs in, they move faster and faster.”
Experts say extra vigilance will be needed to prevent Lake Mendota zebra mussels from invading other lakes.
Last week, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Tracey Holloway welcomed hundreds of people to an annual energy summit. Carbon emissions and climate change were at the top of the agenda and EPA Midwest Administrator Susan Hedman delivered the keynote speech.
Slow Food UW has brought fresh produce to University of Wisconsin-Madison students for almost a decade, but this year the organization is looking to expand its reach.
Since July, an anti-abortion group’s deceptively edited videos targeting Planned Parenthood for allegedly profiting off sales of fetal tissue appear to have prompted at least four arson attacks on Planned Parenthood clinics. And even though the allegations were bogus, the vilification of the women’s health organization has done additional damage: Violent threats and a political chill in the wake of the videos have begun to undermine potentially life-saving research on diseases including diabetes, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s. Fetal-tissue donation programs essential to such research have been shut down, supplies of the tissue to labs have dwindled, and legislation is brewing in multiple states that could hinder cutting-edge scientific studies.
Since the beginning of the fall semester, I’ve received all the standard back-to-school emails from university officials, offices and organizations. “Remember to get your free flu shot,” “Scholarship application deadline approaching,” “Join our team.”
Quoted: State grand juries will be cumbersome – they require 17 people – and bringing one into court day after day requires space and is expensive, said University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor David Schultz.
Still, other states have been able to pursue political corruption cases without the John Doe process. Wisconsin prosecutors still have considerable powers and there are more statutes on the books that can be broken now than ever before, said Donald Downs, a UW-Madison political science professor and an expert on criminal law and politics.
Quoted: “For somebody who has a low balance and doesn’t actively manage their bank account, having a traditional bank account can be pretty costly,” explains Michael Collins, a financial literacy expert at the director of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin. “If you’re only trying to save $300 [over the long term] and you’re paying $10 a month in fees, it becomes really hard to justify having a bank account.”
Is the University of Wisconsin-Madison a patent troll?
Erica Halverson, associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is one of many partners at The Bubbler. She sees the program as an important place for people to contribute to the larger society by building things. “The maker movement affords people the opportunity to be producers of ideas in an arts-based way,” says Halverson.
As a cancer survivor, Meg Gaines saw the scarcity of health care resources available to people with serious and life-threatening illness.
Celebrating its ten-year anniversary this fall, the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives has created a ripple effect throughout the hip-hop arts and spoken word community.
When the Center for the Humanities staff at the University of Wisconsin–Madison saw how difficult it had become for humanities students to find academic positions, they looked to the local community to see what possibilities existed for fruitful collaborations.
When was the last time you drew something? For most, it was probably high school. Lynda Barry, director of the Image Lab at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, is looking to change that with her Saturday Science Drawing Jam for Kids—a public drawing event for kids and adults at WID.
We all know cell phones and tablets aren’t going anywhere—so the creators of Games + Learning + Society in the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery have embraced this and used it to their advantage.
Nestled on the fourth floor of UW–Madison’s Helen C. White library, Dorothea Salo and Will May’s crowded offices are filled with a mammoth amount of digital information on audio cassettes, VHS cassettes, printed books, floppy disks and more.
The Wisconsin Collaborative Education Research Network, or WCERN, lists the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Education and the UW–Madison Center for Education Research as supporters of this ambitious endeavor to connect research being done in the education field by UW students with the people who need to utilize said research.
There are a lot of important contributions to our world for which the University of Wisconsin-Madison is responsible that tend to get lost in the political policy debates.
There’s a lot of bad blood between stakeholders in our higher education system. There is tension between the Republicans who control the state Legislature and University of Wisconsin-System leaders, between the Board of Regents and the faculty, and between rural residents and the bigger schools, particularly UW-Madison.
Quoted: Stephen Small, a professor in the UW-Madison School of Human Ecology and an expert on adolescent development, says it’s not surprising that most middle-schoolers don’t get enough sleep because they’re coping with the biological changes of puberty, a natural change in sleep cycles, and busier lives as they get older.
Before her daughter was even born, Dr. Patricia Tellez-Giron was investigating options for bilingual education programs in the Madison school district. Tellez-Giron, a UW-Madison School of Medicine associate professor and physician at Wingra Clinic, moved to Wisconsin from Mexico 23 years ago. Now she wants her young daughter to connect with her heritage and learn Spanish.
When Kelsey Van Ert (“Kelsey Pyro”) was a freshman in college, she got a phone call that changed her life — an offer of a full-tuition scholarship to UW-Madison.
Several hundred people demanded the resignation of the entire Iowa Board of Regents in a raucous protest Wednesday that interrupted the state board’s meetings in Iowa City on multiple occasions.
Quoted: “This is a fairly normal phenomenon for the time of the year,” said P.J. Liesch, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab.
Quoted: Francis Halzen from the University of Wisconsin-Madison is intrigued by the study. “I find it amazing that each time we detect a higher-energy event, we actually improve the precision on a fundamental measurement,” he said.
It seems to us that some of the most successful strategies to help people who are struggling, who are dealing with some of life’s biggest challenges, involve meeting folks at the most individual and personalized level possible. In others words, meeting with them one by one.
Quoted: Tom Oliver, professor of population health at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said that the hike is meant to encourage people to get health insurance.
Quoted: “I suspect that the average visitor to the BuzzFeed website does not really see the difference, maybe doesn’t care about the difference between sponsored and non-sponsored information,” says Barry Burden, a political scientist and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
If we’re going to have the “guns on campus debate” – and due to warring pieces of legislation, we must – let’s at least argue the issue using accurate information. And according to that information, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, if it were a city – and it sort of is one, like Vatican City is within Rome – would be one of the safest around.
The subatomic particle known as a neutrino is nicknamed the ghost particle. Every day trillions of them stream through the Earth without ever interacting with the matter around them. But scientists can detect neutrinos using specialized sensors deep underground.
On Oct. 12, it was announced that state legislators Rep. Jesse Kremer, R-Kewaskum, and Sen. Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostberg, circulated legislation that would revoke the exception to Wisconsin’s concealed carry law that allows the University of Wisconsin System and technical colleges to ban concealed carry within campus buildings.
By painstakingly pulling public records, however, Paul Barford has done it. Barford, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin, has created the first public map of the Internet as it exists today, making a hard-to-place form of infrastructure as tangible as the railroad network.
Genome editing, 3-D printing and robotics — these sound like subjects for doctoral students or headlines for a conference of tech savvy entrepreneurs. And they often are. They also are a slice of the activities planned for the fifth annual Wisconsin Science Festival, taking place in 36 communities across Wisconsin on Oct. 22-25, for people of every age and background.
One day in the 1980s, Jennifer Angus was traveling through Northern Thailand researching the dress of tribal minorities when she stumbled on a traditional “singing shawl,” whose tassels were embellished with green metallic beetle wings that made a tinkling sound when they knocked together.
Last week, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Rep. Mark Pocan met with campus researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UW-Milwaukee to discuss how to remove obstacles faced by young researchers.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say studies show blaze pink is easier for humans to see and harder for animals to spot—but Wisconsin hunters (and hunters across the U.S.) currently face a penalty if they’re not wearing blaze orange. The blaze pink bill, discussed in a public hearing last week, could change that.
LOS ANGELES — When Gov. Jerry Brown of California signed legislation this month banning concealed weapons on school campuses, the nation was in the midst of one of the worst spasms of gun violence at colleges in recent years. There were three such shootings, including one in Oregon that left 10 people dead, as the bill sat on Mr. Brown’s desk.
Predictions about the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle and the complexity of the phenomenon itself can easily create confusion about its impacts on weather and the economy in the U.S. and around the world. Dan Vimont, an associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shared a sobering perspective about ENSO in a Sept. 4, 2015 interview on Wisconsin Public Television’s “Here and Now” program.
Back pain affects 80 percent of the average population and knowing how to deal with it will be useful, according to two University of Wisconsin physical therapists. Fortunately for most people, back pain will subside in two to three days, said Lori Thein Brody, physical therapist and athletic trainer with the UW Sports Medicine and Spine Center.
The news is that Paul Ryan is open to running for Speaker of the House. The House doesn’t return to Washington from recess until Tuesday evening, but people close to Ryan are already saying that he is considering launching a bid for Speaker. Interviewed: Political scientist David Canon.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin Urban Canid Project said recent reports of the conflicts — and in some cases, attacks — have come from Madison, Milwaukee, Neenah and Mequon. Some coyotes have attacked and killed dogs, or even followed residents who were walking their dog.
The prevailing wisdom states that when universities try to cash in on their research — be it chip design or gene splicing — they come out on the losing end.
A jury has awarded $234 million to a University of Wisconsin-Madison foundation responsible for patent licensing in an infringement lawsuit against Apple, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.
Apple fights patent cases fairly often – and doesn’t always win – so Friday’s loss is not a totally new phenomenon. What makes the case unusual was the party that sued: a computer science professor and three graduate students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined the variations and trends in the onset of spring across the Northern Hemisphere’s temperate regions and calculated that the onset of spring plant growth will shift by a median of three weeks earlier over the next century. Their findings were published in the journal Environmental Research Letters yesterday.
A U.S. jury on Friday ordered Apple to pay the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s patent licensing arm more than $234 million in damages for incorporating its microchip technology into some of the company’s iPhones and iPads without permission.
The University of Wisconsin Madison Geology Museum was established in 1848, the same year Wisconsin was granted statehood.
Madison, Wis. — It’s been a long day of travel for eleven pups who flew more than 1,000 miles from Georgia to Madison. It was done in an effort to give them a brighter future.
The National Rifle Association and its supplicants in legislatures around the country and the U.S. Congress have a ready and facile answer for the problem of gun violence in the United States:
Deep beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, sensors buried in a billion tons of ice—a cubic kilometer of frozen H2O—are searching for neutrinos. Not just any kind of neutrino, though. The IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory wants to discover the sources of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays and thus solve one of science’s oldest mysteries.
As a veteran of the global smart phone wars, Apple is used to courtroom battles with fierce competitors such as Samsung and Nokia.
Quoted: Gabriel C. Javier is assistant dean of students and director of the LGBT Campus Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, which also uses a chosen-name system. “I see it as a universal-access issue,” he says. As of June, about 4,300 of the approximately 44,000 students and 20,000 employees on the campus had designated a chosen name.
Wisconsin was one of the last states to allow citizens to carry concealed weapons. Now it is in the vanguard of the debate about whether allowing guns on college campuses will protect students or put them more at risk of violence. How did the state get there?
A federal jury found Apple guilty this week of illegally using a patent owned by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. The jury is set to decide the settlement amount Friday.
Quoted: Bob Drechsel, director of the UW-Madison Center for Journalism Ethics, told 27 News the state’s open records law doesn’t directly address the use of personal email.
The Republican speaker of the state Assembly says he’s fine with people carrying concealed guns in university buildings, and likened it to carrying smartphones.
