Noted: Schmelzer has a degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in recreation resource management and also served 14 years in the United States Air Force and the Wisconsin Air National Guard.
Written by Kathleen Bartzen Culver, James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics, an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communications and director for the Center for Journalism Ethics.
The first sequenced genome of a daddy-long-legs has revealed the genetic tricks that these creatures use to make their lengthy, grasping legs.
Most of these leggy invertebrates are not spiders but belong instead to a group called harvestmen (order Opiliones). Guilherme Gainett at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Vanessa González at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC and their colleagues sequenced the genome of the long-legged harvestman Phalangium opilio and found that the creature has a single cluster of Hox genes, a type of master gene that influences the body plan of all animals.
Peanut butter sandwiches and canned foods.
That’s what made up most of the diet of one student in the first year of professional school at UW-Madison.
Fresh fruit and vegetables were too expensive; time to prepare much of anything nutritious was impossible.
“No one wants to work anymore.” This is a common refrain from business owners around the country as the economy opens back up. Conservative commentators claim that unemployment insurance is keeping people from going back to work and fueling widescale laziness—but is that really what’s going on?
Today on the show, labor economist Laura Dresser joins Thursday host Allen Ruff to challenge these myths of the “labor shortage” narrative. They talk about the working class in Wisconsin, the pandemic economy, the importance of worker power, and the real reason employers are struggling to hire.
Laura Dresser is associate director of the Center On Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) and assistant clinical professor in the School Of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is co-editor of The Gloves-Off Economy: Workplace Standards at the Bottom of America’s Labor Market(Cornell University Press, 2008) and co-author of the annual State of Working Wisconsin report from COWS.
University of Wisconsin Madison leaders have yet to make good on their promise to remove a 70-ton boulder on campus deemed racist by some student protesters.
Progress has stalled as officials review concerns that its removal could interfere with Native American effigy mounds.
Campus spokesperson Meredith McGlone told The College Fix the project to move Chamberlin Rock is on standby.
Quoted: Thomas Friedrich is a professor of virology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and another study author. He said vaccination, while extremely effective, is not necessarily a magic shield.
“This does not indicate that the vaccine is not effective,” said Friedrich. “What it does mean is that in some people who are vaccinated — at least for a certain amount of time after infection — there’s enough virus around in their systems that they could pass the virus on to others.”
Dave O’Connor, also a UW-Madison professor of virology and the third co-author of the study, said it’s important to continue to recalibrate expectations as circumstances change.
“The vaccines are imperfect, but they’re still going to help keep me out of the hospital right now, and we should be really thankful for that,” said O’Connor. “But we also need to be on guard, because just because we might be done with the virus doesn’t mean the virus is done with us.”
Noted: Some scientists have wondered whether such duplications might help explain some of the wild variety of the animal kingdom, said Prashant Sharma, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and also an author of the study. Complex genomes and more varied organisms might seem to go together.
But despite harvestmen’s variety — there are more than 6,000 species in the group — there is no sign of duplication in the harvestman genome, the researchers report. And horseshoe crabs, arachnids that had at least one genome duplication in their evolution, have only a handful of species.
“Arachnids really challenge this idea,” Dr. Sharma said. Having more genes might help organisms diversify, but only if environmental conditions and other factors line up correctly as well, he speculates.
Much of southern and western Wisconsin has continued to experience abnormally dry conditions this year, with far southeastern Wisconsin seeing severe drought earlier this summer.
But agronomist Chris Kucharik from the University of Wisconsin-Madison said lower precipitation hasn’t had as much of an impact on the state’s crops as he was anticipating.
“I’m a bit surprised at how well the crops have been doing,” Kucharik said. “Honestly, once the crop is in the ground, (farmers) are kind of at the mercy of what happens during the growing season with the weather.”
After Rhinelander Mayor Chris Frederickson found out in 2019 that at least one of his city’s municipal water wells was contaminated with a dangerous compound, he got in touch with Jim Tinjum.
Tinjum is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also heads the geological engineering program, which is how Frederickson found him.
“I was contacted to help them figure out where the PFAS was coming from and what to do about it,” Tinjum said.
Noted: University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers warned in a new study that Wisconsin’s plans for another hunt “raise questions about sustainability.”
The state’s stated goal is maintaining a stable population of wolves, a top predator that helps sustain ecosystem health, study co-author and Madison environmental studies professor Adrian Treves told The National Geographic.
Treves called plans for a November hunt unwise, particularly since officials have no clear understanding of the impact of the February killings. Hunters often seek out the largest animals, for example, which are frequently pack leaders whose loss could leave entire groups to starve to death. The killing of fertile females would further reduce the population.
The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, UW-Stout and UW-La Crosse have announced they “expect” employees, students and guests to wear masks indoors regardless of vaccination status, stopping short of reinstating a requirement as two other UW schools have.
Quoted: Even though the situation in the industry remains tough, Mark Stephenson, head of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said “2020 was not as bad a year for dairy farmers.”
Milk prices had been low since 2015 — “for a longer period of time than we’ve seen in quite a while,” according to Stephenson. Farmers did their best to cut costs, and waited for demand to increase and boost prices with it.
Quoted: “It’s [the delta variant] able to bind to the cells in our nasal passages and our lungs more tightly and as a result someone who gets infected is more capable of pumping out a lot more virus,” said Dr. Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at UW-Madison.
Researchers led by Guilherme Gainett from the University of Wisconsin-Madison first sequenced the genome of Phalangium opilio (technically not a spider but a close relative), thought to be among the most widespread of more than 6,000 different species of daddy long legs — also known as harvestmen — documented worldwide.
Noted: Utilizing RNA interference, researchers at the University of Wisconsin Madison were able to sequence the genome of Phalangium opilio and modify six of the arachnids’ eight legs and turn them into half their normal size.
“We’ve shown… how the combinations of these genes create a blueprint in the embryo to differentiate between what’s going to be a leg that is used for walking and what is going to be a pedipalp, which can be used to manipulate food and assess the surroundings,” the study’s lead author, Guilherme Gainett at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview with New Scientist.
Noted: Mr. Thomas, 43, said he got a taste of running a business while attending the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He was captain of his college bowling team for two years, and organized an on-campus league five nights a week. “I would call that my entry into entrepreneurship,” he said.
Quoted: “If they have issues with their immune system or are immunocompromised, I would say now is probably not a great time to travel, because there are so many things that are outside of your control,” said Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics.
Researchers studying how poverty and adversity affect children’s development often track how negative experiences — be they poverty itself or factors such as having an incarcerated parent — affect decision-making, stress levels or aspects of brain function. But Seth Pollak, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says that most of these efforts miss a crucial but long-overlooked component: children’s perceptions of their experiences.
Pollak spoke with Knowable Magazine about the importance of studying individual differences in experience.
A top university official in Wisconsin is butting heads with state Republican legislators over who has the authority to impose COVID-19 restrictions on campus.
Just hours after a Wisconsin state legislature committee on Tuesday required all University of Wisconsin schools to receive permission before issuing new coronavirus guidance, University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank reinstated her campus’s indoor mask mandate.
Quoted: “We know that masking allows children to be in school safely, reduces transmission of COVID, and, really importantly, if children are masked, then it provides much less disruption to kids, because they don’t need to be quarantined if they’re exposed to a case of COVID,” said Greg DeMuri, a pediatric epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Two days after the Journal Sentinel detailed the myriad reasons he was not retained as a men’s basketball assistant at Wisconsin, Alando Tucker used social media to deny he had done anything wrong.
State employees will have to wear face masks starting Thursday because of a surge in coronavirus cases, Wisconsin officials announced Wednesday.
The move came shortly after the two largest University of Wisconsin schools, in Madison and Milwaukee, put in place their own mask requirements. The policies are being enacted as the delta variant of COVID springs up around the world, including among those who have been fully vaccinated.
Branches of the University of Wisconsin and school districts in Arizona and Florida are ordering students and staff to wear masks indoors in spite of statewide regulations and laws that prohibit them from doing so, as the Delta variant’s rapid spread sparks new showdowns over mask orders between state and local governments nationwide.
Noted: The study started in Dane County and contains a disproportionate level of samples from that area, cautioned David O’Connor, one of the authors of the new study and a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Scientists stressed that despite having comparable levels of virus, vaccinated patients remain far less likely than the unvaccinated to become severely ill, hospitalized or die from COVID-19.
Also, O’Connor said the 83 Dane County cases showed that unvaccinated people are more than twice as likely to get the virus as those who’ve been vaccinated.
“What we’re seeing here is that the vaccines are doing a superb job of keeping people out of the hospital,” O’Connor said.
Noted: Mildred Fish was born in Milwaukee in 1902; her husband, Arvid Harnack, was German. They met as graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, and eventually settled in Berlin.
Quoted: Although underpaid, poorly treated service workers certainly exist around the world, American expectations on their behavior are particularly extreme and widespread, according to Nancy Wong, a consumer psychologist and the chair of the consumer-science department at the University of Wisconsin. “Business is at fault here,” Wong told me. “This whole industry has profited from exploitation of a class of workers that clearly should not be sustainable.”
Noted: Some species’ hindmost legs can grow so long that competing suitors will line up to compare them. “Whichever male has the longest leg wins, and it’s the one that is going to mate,” Guilherme Gainett, a developmental biologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me.
Some answers might be hidden in the harvestmen genome. Gainett and Sharma, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, recently teamed up with the genomics expert Vanessa González, of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, to cobble together the first-ever draft of the genome of Phalangium opilio, the world’s most widespread harvestman species.
The director of Wisconsin Public Media, Gene Purcell, has died following a traffic crash in Madison. Friends and colleagues say they’re heartbroken by the sudden loss of a man who lived a commitment to public broadcasting with humility and authenticity.
Quoted: “For this idea of boosters, it’s going to be hard to control. You just have to rely on local public health departments and local providers to prevent that from happening,” said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “It’s conceivable that the two races in Wisconsin could unfold somewhat differently, said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The governor’s race will largely be about Evers’ handling of the pandemic, the budget he recently signed, and the state’s economic situation,” Burden said via email. “The Senate contest is more likely to focus on the Biden administration and whether the president’s efforts to address the pandemic and the economy are necessary remedies or harmful government overreach.”
Noted: Fascinated by the way these appendages develop differently, Guilherme Gainett at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues teamed up with genome specialists at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC to draft a sequence of the genome of a lab-raised harvestman.
“We’ve shown… how the combinations of these genes create a blueprint in the embryo to differentiate between what’s going to be a leg that is used for walking and what is going to be a pedipalp, which can be used to manipulate food and assess the surroundings,” says Gainett.
Quoted: Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said she has some sympathy for Chris Cuomo and his desire to help his brother.
“As hard as it is to see your brother mired in controversy, your obligation as a journalist is to the public you serve,” she said. “If it’s true that Chris Cuomo drafted the statement later put out by the governor’s office or he encouraged an approach that emphasized contrition, his involvement was deeper than what he disclosed to viewers in May. That moves far beyond being ‘looped in to phone calls’ with staff members. It’s playing an active role in shaping the narrative of the controversy.”
Noted: In Wisconsin, a Republican-controlled legislative committee passed a resolution Tuesday requiring University of Wisconsin campuses to get the committee’s approval for mandatory COVID-19 vaccination, masking or testing policies, the Wisconsin State Journal reported. Under the measure, the UW system will have to submit COVID-19 policies to the committee within 30 days. The committee will then have the ability to vote to suspend all or parts of the policies. Tony Evers, the state’s Democratic governor, does not have the ability to veto the committee’s actions.
Colleges across the state are working to reevaluate on-campus masking policies in the weeks leading up to the start of the fall semester, as new national data on the delta variant’s spread among vaccinated people,updated masking recommendations and political pressure further complicate a quickly evolving situation.
With four weeks left before the start of the fall semester, Marquette University officials announced that more than 85% of students have been vaccinated against COVID-19.
University of Wisconsin officials who want to ward off a rising COVID-19 caseload now must get permission from the Legislature to implement masking, testing or vaccination requirements, according to a plan Republicans adopted Tuesday.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison announced it would require students, employees and visitors wear masks indoors regardless of vaccination status starting Thursday, as COVID-19 cases surge and political pressure mounts.
Noted: He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1957 and then served two years in the Army. He earned a law degree from University of California, Berkeley, in 1961.
Noted: “Karl Polanyi for President,” a 2016 article in Dissent that Konczal coauthored with Patrick Iber, is a useful companion piece to Freedom from the Market, and helps illuminate the intellectual genealogy of its arguments.
As Konczal and Iber explain, Polanyi’s most famous work, The Great Transformation (1944), is devoted in large part to a critique of the idea that the so-called “free market” is a precondition for, and guarantor of, freedom more generally. “Polanyi’s work dismantles this argument in two important ways,” they write, first by showing that “markets are planned everywhere they exist.”
Translated from Spanish
Quoted: In fact, for the historian and writer Patrick Iber, author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America, “it is very possible that a student activist in Nicaragua, fighting against the Ortega dictatorship, could move to the United States. and endorse Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren as president. Not everyone would, of course, but it would not be inconsistent, “he said in an interview with El Tiempo Latino.
Americans born in the 1990s have experienced various economic traumas in their lives, says the professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I think that when people express their support for socialism, what they are saying is that the capitalist system is not working well enough. They are saying: “My society says this is capitalism, and I am suffering, so I am against capitalism,” he explains. “These failures, even if someone from Venezuela or Nicaragua would prefer them to the failures of their systems, they are real and it is fair that politics is a scenario in which people demand that their countries do better.”
Noted: La Follette School Assistant Professor Lindsay Jacobs is one of the authors of the report
Americans may be richer than they think and less unequal than they’ve been led to believe. That’s the takeaway from a recent working paper by five economists from the University of Wisconsin and the Federal Reserve, which adds to standard wealth measures by including Social Security and pension guarantees.
Quoted: The CDC study “raises the very worrisome possibility that high viral loads can occur in people who have delta, and this is a fundamental as we have to approach the fall and winter,” said David O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Noted: The idea, first put forth in a 2012 paper by Jennifer Francis, now at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, and Stephen Vavrus, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is that two well-established trends — Arctic amplification (intensified global warming at higher latitudes) and depleted sea ice — can force the polar jet stream to dip farther south, thus causing more intense bouts of winter weather than might have otherwise occurred.
Noted: In July, University of Wisconsin scientist Adrian Treves and two colleagues concluded in their new study that the population of gray wolves in Wisconsin is significantly lower than estimated by the DNR. While the DNR made claims about how the February trophy killing season would not cause much of a change in the overall wolf population numbers, mass slaughter during the middle of the breeding season would indeed have a significant impact on the population. This study shows that the population of gray wolves in Wisconsin in April likely falls between 695-751 rather than the far fluffier projections presented by the Wisconsin DNR.
Noted: A native of St. Cloud, Minnesota, and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Dolinsky, 53, worked for stations in Escanaba, Michigan, and Davenport, Iowa, before joining CLTV as a general assignment reporter in 1992.
Noted: Dr. Tiffany Green, who was not among the authors of the new research, told Medical News Today that the study aligns with separate research regarding patients who had undergone a cesarean birth.
Dr. Green, of the departments of population health sciences and obstetrics & gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is senior author of a study that was presented at the 2020 Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine Conference.
Dr. Green and her team found that, “Black patients reported higher average levels of pain compared to white patients, but still received similar amounts of pain medication.” Controlling for reported pain scores, explained Dr. Green, they received less pain medication than their white counterparts. This was also true of Asian patients.
Quoted: In response to a second statute cited by Flaherty, related to failure to pay fines, fees, surcharges or court costs, Cecelia Klingele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School professor, said “a judge can decide to impose a jail sentence until the money is paid.” She also noted that, “implicit in that power is some ability to monitor whether the money is paid or the work is done, though the statute does not spell out what such monitoring might look like.”
Noted: Malone has a master of arts in business from the Wisconsin School of Business at University of Wisconsin–Madison and a fine arts degree from the University of Southern California. He and his wife and their two daughters, all Midwest natives, will move to Minneapolis this summer.
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee will require all students, employees and visitors to wear masks when gathering indoors beginning next week, in line with new masking guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from the Milwaukee Health Department.
The university will also require weekly COVID-19 testing for unvaccinated faculty, staff and students who are not 100% online.
Noted: At University of Wisconsin System schools, institutions have not put in place a mask or vaccine mandate, but are encouraging students to get vaccinated. This fall, UW-Madison will allow students who are vaccinated to not follow weekly COVID-19 testing requirements.
Private institutions like Marquette University and Beloit College will require vaccines.
Written by Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin and the author of Shape and How Not to Be Wrong.
Noted: At the University of Wisconsin, administrators are acknowledging the mental health difficulties of the pandemic year by urging first- and second-year students to establish healthy coping mechanisms and participate in a 30-day meditation challenge through the Healthy Minds Innovations app (which does not connect students with therapists).
This might be the year for ticks. Or cicadas. But not so much for mosquitoes.
With a long and cold spring earlier this year, mosquitoes didn’t have as much of a chance to ramp up in numbers, said Lyric Bartholomay, a professor in the department of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wiscconsin-Madison.
“I don’t have complete evidence of that, but that’s what I suspect,” she said.
Mosquitoes are pesky, no doubt, but Bartholomay said they’re also integral to the health of local habitats, specifically to birds, bats, ducks and other species that feed on them.
In fact, Bartholomay said that in places where mosquito larvae are well controlled, birds get less protein, which then impairs their own reproduction.
“It’s very likely that (mosquitoes are) really important in a way we under-appreciate,” she said.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center and professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told USA TODAY the image was misleading.
“Because elections are decided by the votes of actual people rather than the land represented by county borders, it is incorrect to conclude that a state is ‘red’ or ‘blue’ because most of the counties in that state are of the same color,” he wrote in an email. “Many counties in the U.S. have extremely small populations that do not contribute much to the statewide result.”
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee will require all students, employees and visitors to wear masks when gathering indoors beginning next week, in line with new masking guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from the Milwaukee Health Department.
The university will also require weekly COVID-19 testing for unvaccinated faculty, staff and students who are not 100% online.
Quoted: Keith Findley, a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Yamahiro can essentially pick any licensed attorney in the state for the task.
That person will then review all the evidence in the case. They could ask the police for more reports or issue subpoenas as well.
“She or he will then evaluate all of the evidence and determine whether it’s appropriate to proceed with a prosecution,” Findley said.
Noted: When she heard the news, Caitlin Yang, a University of Wisconsin-Madison student, took a moment and let the wave of emotion wash over her, alone in her apartment.
Yang, a rising junior and member of the Hmong American Student Association, said Lee’s victory showed that Hmong women could break down gender barriers and defy norms in a culture where parents don’t normally place much importance on athletic achievement.
She hoped Lee’s victory would empower women to “find who they are and what they are capable of and know that they are capable of it,” she said.
Noted: The attraction probably wasn’t our recent swampy weather; Gunkel was born and raised in Waukesha County, and went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
