“Science and technology play an enormous role in our society, but many media outlets have been forced to reduce their newsrooms and their coverage. There is a great need to promote a better understanding of science and how it works,” said Sean B. Carroll, vice president of HHMI’s Department of Science Education. “We’re proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with the world’s most respected news organization to ensure that the best evidence around important scientific topics is presented clearly and distributed widely.”
Author: Kelly Tyrrell
Editing Human Embryo Genes Could Be Allowed Someday, Scientific Panel Says : Shots – Health News : NPR
National Public Radio
Scientists could be allowed to make modifications in human DNA that can be passed down through subsequent generations, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine say. “It is not ready now, but it might be safe enough to try in the future,” R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who co-chaired the committee, said. “And if certain conditions are met, it might be permissible to try it.”
Human gene editing receives science panel’s support
New York Times
“If we have an absolute prohibition in the United States with this technology advancing, it’s not like it won’t happen,” said R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the committee’s other leader. “We see an advantage of setting out a stringent regulation that guards against the uses that people are most fearing and signals to the rest of the world what it should look like when it’s done right.”
UW Medical Students Address Urban Doctor Shortage
WTMJ Ch 4 - Milwaukee
There’s a shortfall of doctors in urban communities. The University of Wisconsin has diagnosed the problem, and is working to fill the gap with a program sending medical students to under-served cities.
UWSP Veterans Seminar Expands in UW System
Wausau Daily Herald
The Back from the Front seminar is open only to first-year students who are veterans or currently enlisted. The course helps the students put the skills they learned in the military to use in the civilian world.
UW System Funding has Republicans Divided
WBAY - Green Bay
“I would prefer to see us — and I think I’m hearing that from a lot of my colleagues as well — more of a targeted approach where we target dollars to programs that can help students graduate within their four year period and also target dollars towards financial aid,” said Nygren, a Republican from Marinette.
Study says Wisconsin DNR underreports gray wolf poaching
Journal Sentinel
A University of Wisconsin-Madison study shows the human toll on wolves is higher than previously estimated and that state officials have underreported wolf deaths in past analyses.For years, wolves have been shot illegally, struck by cars and trucks or legally killed by authorities acting on reports that wolves were killing and threatening livestock and pets.
Badgers honor Black History Month
Journal Sentinel
Wisconsin’s players are set to debut new warm-up tops when the Badgers host Indiana at noon Sunday.These aren’t ordinary T-shirts.With senior Nigel Hayes as the catalyst, the players will be wearing shirts with the names of 28 prominent individuals in black history.
Testing Paul Ryan’s damning attack on the Affordable Care Act: ‘Obamacare has failed’
Politifact Wisconsin
Rated “Mostly False”: “There were things that succeeded and there things that didn’t go as planned,” said Donna Friedsam, health policy programs director at the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.
Trump’s “Muslim ban” could provoke a constitutional crisis: Will the executive branch ignore the courts?
“Unprecedented.” It’s a word that gets tossed around a lot lately, with regard to Donald Trump. This time, however, it’s justified. Behind all the chaos, confusion, and international consternation of Trump’s thinly-veiled Muslim immigration and travel ban there’s a clear-cut constitutional crisis brewing, as argued on Twitter by Donald Moynihan, director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin.
Donald Trump’s views on research funding has UW-Madison scientists worried
Capital Times
Last week, David Bart had to tell students assisting him in research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to stop working until federal officials lifted a short-lived freeze on grants from the Environment Protection Agency. The students are back at work for the time being, but questions over what to expect in support for scientific research under President Donald Trump’s administration continue, said Bart, an assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture who studies human-environmental interactions.
Data illuminate a mountain of molehills facing women scientists
Eos
To realize its full potential for innovation and success, science needs all kinds of scientists, said Tracey Holloway, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and president of the Earth Science Women’s Network. “For the well-being of the human enterprise, we want all hands on deck.”
Communication: Post-truth predicaments
Nature
The term ‘post-truth’ is now a mainstay in political discourse, its use firmly established in any analysis of the European Union referendum result and the outcome of the US presidential election. Academics already struggle to communicate their research findings to the broader society — a problem that is likely to be exacerbated if the public is happy to disregard facts. Dominique Brossard suggests that scientists “Show that you care.”
Long Island City warehouse turned into haven for cats with flu virus
A Long Island City warehouse has been transformed into a safe haven for more than 500 cats who may have been exposed to an unusual flu virus. “We came to the decision that it is in the best interest of the cats to move them all to a quarantine facility while we clean the buildings.” She contacted experts at the University of Wisconsin’s Veterinary Diagnostic Lab. They determined the virus was a rare strain of avian flu — the first time it had ever spread to domestic cats.
We got the mesentery news all wrong
Discover Magazine
Discover Magazine corrects their error: So what hell is an organ? Tom Broman, a science historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, laughs when I ask him.
Conditions that form more hurricanes also protect U.S., study finds
New York Times
When climatic conditions favor a lot of hurricane activity, they also create a buffer zone that weakens the storms as they approach the coastal United States.“It’s an incredibly lucky phenomenon,” said James Kossin, an atmospheric scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the author of the study, published Wednesday in Nature, which looked at hurricane data from 1947 to 2015. Kossin is based at UW–Madison, which is not mentioned in the story.
More hurricanes does not mean more intense East coast storms, study finds
A high rate of hurricane activity far out in the tropical waters of the Atlantic Ocean doesn’t necessarily translate into a high number of big, powerful storms that could ravage the East coast. That’s one of the key findings of new research conducted by James Kossin, a federal atmospheric research scientist based at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
11 surprising predictions for 2017 from some of the biggest names in science
NBC News
What scientific discoveries will 2017 bring? What technological innovations? Probably not time travel — or time-shares on Mars. But no one really knows for sure, and when we asked some of the biggest names in science and technology to share their predictions for the coming year, there was a bit of pushback. Includes UW–Madison’s Tracey Holloway.
Avian flu strain spreads to 45 cats
A rare avian influenza strain, H7N2, has infected domestic cats for the first time, the University of Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory reported today. The outbreak has stricken 45 cats at the Animal Care Center shelter in New York City. One older cat whose infection progressed to pneumonia was euthanized.
What does research say about how to effectively communicate about science?
The Conversation
Dietram Scheufele: Truth seems to be an increasingly flexible concept in politics. At least that’s the impression the Oxford English Dictionary gave recently, as it declared “post-truth” the 2016 Word of the Year. Many scientists and science communicators have grappled with disregard for, or inappropriate use of, scientific evidence for years – especially around contentious issues like the causes of global warming, or the benefits of vaccinating children.
UW-Madison prof: Scientists should avoid polarizing language in discussing research
Capital Times
At a time when “post-truth” has been sanctioned as the 2016 word of the year, scientists need to do a better job of talking about their work, said Dietram Scheufele, a professor of science communication.a University of Wisconsin-Madison who served on a national panel that looked at the issue.
Trump sets private prisons free
The New Yorker
Last year, Anita Mukherjee, an assistant professor of actuarial science at the University of Wisconsin, studied Mississippi’s prison system, and found that people in private prisons received many more “prison conduct violations” than those in government-run ones. This made it harder for them to get parole, and, on average, they served two to three more months of prison time.
New Wisconsin Institute for Discovery director sees a ‘hunger’ for change at UW
Capital Times
Jo Handelsman describes herself as a “changemaker.” Judging from her dossier, the incoming director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery is not wrong.
Trump counties tied to Obamacare
Donna Friedsam agreed. Friedsam, a policy director at the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, said that prohibiting coverage denials while dropping the coverage mandate could “collapse the individual insurance market” in the United States.
River fish feed millions
Nature
Peter McIntyre at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his colleagues used data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to build a global map of river fisheries, which have historically received less attention than their marine counterparts. They found that pressure from fishing was most intense in areas where biodiversity was also highest, raising concerns about conservation.
Wisconsin addresses shortage of rural doctors
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
As the state’s rural population ages, increasing its need for health care, Wisconsin is facing a shortage of physicians in rural areas that is projected to get much worse in coming decades.
To address it, the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, the Medical College of Wisconsin and the state’s health systems are developing residency programs in rural areas — knowing that doctors are more likely to practice where they do their training.
Are millennials motivated to turn out to vote on Election Day?
Today Show
Some polls suggest that Hillary Clinton’s support among millennials may be surging, but there is a lot of anger and disappointment from that huge bloc of voters. In the latest installment of our “Red, White and You” series, NBC’s Ronan Farrow investigates whether efforts to court millennials’ votes will pay off.
Giving Every Child a Monthly Check for an Even Start
“This is an old idea whose time has come,” said Timothy Smeeding, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who directed the Institute for Research on Poverty there from 2008 to 2014. Daniel P. Moynihan, who advised former President Richard Nixon and was a Democratic senator from New York, actively supported this idea. So did Milton Friedman, the guru of conservative economic thinking from the 1960s through the 1980s.
Wisconsin is a hotbed of stem cell issues
Appleton Post Crescent
Recent legislative attempts in Madison would make it a state crime to donate fetal tissue derived from abortions or do research on tissue lines. It also proposes prosecution of researchers using this type of tissue. The dean of the UW Medical school, Robert Golden, said researchers follow ethical guidelines and federal law and hope to someday eliminate the use of fetal tissue.
Fetal cell lines were critical in the development of the polio vaccine and other types of fetal tissue research have saved countless children from the devastation of infectious diseases. But now, many of these types of vaccines could be at risk if the bill just proposed in the Wisconsin Legislature becomes law.
UW-Madison teams snag innovation awards
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Two research teams — one with a potential vaccine for the Zika virus and the other with a new way of monitoring sedated patients — have won $10,000 each in an innovation competition organized by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
What’s Driven Up Cost of College in Wisconsin?
Appleton Post-Crescent
Trying to nail down why Wisconsin’s state universities have become more expensive for students is kind of like the chicken and the egg dilemma.
Slashed budgets push University Of Wisconsin faculty to Minnesota
Minnesota Daily
After nine years of research and teaching chemistry at Wisconsin’s Madison campus, Mahesh Mahanthappa left Wisconsin this year to teach chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota.
Sykes: Free college isn’t the solution: How the push for “college for all” sets up students to fail
Salon
Despite the evidence that we already have too many students in higher education, the hot new idea among the political class is to double down by pushing for “free college tuition.”
Basketball star Bronson Koenig in North Dakota: ‘Anything is possible for you’ as Native Americans
Racine Journal Times
“I just wanted to say thanks to everybody for accepting me into the community,” he said. “Like I was talking about before, I didn’t really have any Native American role models growing up, other than maybe Jim Thorpe, but that was a long time ago. You guys can do whatever you want as long as you believe and put in the work. So anything is possible for you guys as young Native Americans, just like it was for me.”
New website connects Wisconsin employers to UW students
WEAU
The site includes tools that allow employers to search what majors exist at each campus, direct links to career services website, and contact information for staff.
Circus World calls PETA’s latest complaint ‘insulting’
Wisc News
PETA officials are encouraging people to avoid circuses that feature performing animals after a USDA inspection at Circus World in July found that one of its elephants appeared to have trouble walking. Following the USDA inspection, Kurt Sladky, a professor of Zoological Medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine, was brought in to examine Bunny, but he found little wrong with the elephant.
Fancy dorms aren’t the main reason tuition is skyrocketing
FiveThirtyEight
Few understand what has caused the tuition boom, particularly at the public institutions that enroll roughly two-thirds of all students at four-year colleges. Many commenters, particularly in the popular press, focus on ballooning administrative budgets and extravagant student amenities. Those elements have played a role, to be sure, but by far the single biggest driver of rising tuitions for public colleges has been declining state funding for higher education.
Designer thinks about death every hour: Why do we dwell on dying?
LiveScience
Fashion-designer-turned-director Tom Ford said he thinks a lot about death. Many people probably share Ford’s morbid tendencies, at least to some extent, Pelin Kesebir, an assistant scientist and psychologist at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Live Science.
UW-Madison engineering student receives awards for developing noise cancellation theory
Daily Cardinal
UW-Madison formally congratulated Chris Nguyen, a fourth-year biomedical engineering major, Monday morning at Engineering Hall for winning the grand prize in General Electric’s “Unimpossible Missions: The University Edition” competition.The challenge asked participants to debunk common idioms such as “A snowball’s chance in hell,” or, for Nguyen, “You can’t unring a bell.” Noise cancellation technology and research on sound waves were used to help Nguyen support his theory.
Climate change is thawing deadly diseases. Maybe now we’ll address it?
The Guardian
In 2013, the National Academy of Sciences hosted a forum on the influence of global environmental change on infectious diseases. In his keynote speech, Dr Jonathan Patz stood in front of a large slide of a mosquito and warned: “Global warming’s greatest threat may also be the smallest.”
Scientists have much to gain by sharing their research with the public
The Conversation
“Doing both – traditional media and social media – is more powerful in boosting citations than doing just one of the two,” says Dominique Brossard, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of life sciences communication, who demonstrated a link between “h-index” – a measure of the quality and influence of a researcher’s work – and whether the researchers in question interacted with journalists and were mentioned on Twitter.
.
Berquam: UW program benefits all students
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Christian Schneider’s Aug. 12 column dismissing the value of programs promoting cultural understanding at universities read like it was inspired by the sort of touchy-feely “diversity training” lampooned on TV shows like “The Office.”What we’re actually doing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this year is quite different. The issues we’re addressing are real and the new Our Wisconsin program is a rational, evidence-driven response to them.
Inside the epic quest for a more perfect taffy
Washington Post
If you’re hitting the beach this August, you may find yourself indulging in one of those characteristic treats of America’s boardwalks: saltwater taffy, made by a process conventionally known as “pulling” taffy. But if you’re a fluid dynamics professor at the University of Wisconsin, you might prefer to characterize it as “mixing” — mixing air with sugar, essentially. And you might start to get curious about the mesmerizing spirograph patterns traced by the rods on those taffy machines, and wonder, above all else, if there isn’t a more efficient way to achieve that silky result.
Educator spotlight: local watersheds for global understanding
National Geographic
Nichole Von Haden, a UW grad, is this week’s National Geographic Educator of the Week. She created a comprehensive unit on watersheds that promotes critical thinking across multiple disciplines. The unit uses a local context as a gateway for students to understand global problems. Nichole is an educator mentor in Madison, Wisconsin.
For Jimmy Anderson, call to politics followed life-changing accident
Wisconsin State Journal
Anderson, who won a Democratic primary election and became the overwhelming favorite to be the next representative from Assembly District 47, moved to Wisconsin from California to attend UW-Madison Law School. The fact that the university is a national magnet for young talent underscores why it must be protected from further funding cuts, he said.
UW-Madison researchers in the right spot to collaborate on Zika research
Capital Times
Last October, Dave O’Connor and Tom Friedrich were talking about what they had learned about the emerging Zika virus when they realized they were in a sweet spot to take on an important public health research project. The University of Wisconsin-Madison not only has a School of Medicine and Public Health and a School of Veterinary Medicine, but the campus also offers facilities to breed and infect mosquitoes and has a primate center to allow for non-human primate experiments.
Paralyzing toxins in Botox ‘DO spread to other parts of your body’: Landmark study reveals alarming dangers of anti-ageing jabs
Daily Mail (UK)
Paralyzing toxins inside Botox can travel to other parts of your body, an alarming newUniversity of Wisconsin Madison study reveals.
The tree detective
Isthmus
Officials around the globe often seek out the help of Alex Wiedenhoeft, who is the team leader of the Center for Wood Anatomy Research (CWAR) at the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory on the UW-Madison campus and one of the world’s foremost forensic wood anatomists and a secret weapon in the fight against illegal logging.
Legal Help for Returning Wisconsin Veterans
Public News Service
Veterans coming home from overseas wars face challenges in adapting to life as a civilian, and many of those challenges involve legal questions. That’s why the UW Law School opened the Veterans Law Center in 2012. Today, at the Appleton Public Library, the Center has a mobile unit staffed with attorneys, paralegals, and volunteers to help veterans with their legal questions.
The search for a new type of neutrino turns up empty
The IceCube experiment, a particle detector at the South Pole that uses the ice itself to measure neutrinos, has shown that (hints of an elusive fourth type of neutrino) were probably just a mirage. After a years of analysis, researchers haven’t found anything. “We don’t see this—unfortunately, actually,” says principal investigator Francis Halzen. “I wish we had.”
Americans may know more than you think about science
Americans know a lot more about science and health issues than traditional surveys of individuals would suggest, according to a new report from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Panelist Noah Feinstein, a UW–Madison sociologist and science educator, is quoted.
Still no sign of ‘sterile neutrino’ particle, candidate for dark matter
Space
Merging Medicine and Entrepreneurship: UW Health Docs Share Lessons
Xconomy
By the time Hans Sollinger helped launch a company for the first time, in 2004, he had performed hundreds of pancreas transplants. In the process, he had built a reputation as a prolific surgeon whose experience few of his peers could match. Sollinger, who practices at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, also known as UW Health, said that the high demand for his services over the years made his first foray into entrepreneurship somewhat jarring.
Olympics: Former University of Wisconsin runner Evan Jager ready to shine in steeplechase at Rio
Wisconsin State Journal
The combination of leaping into water, clearing hurdles and running long distances makes the steeplechase an arduous event. Former University of Wisconsin runner Evan Jager, who will compete in the event at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, knows that from firsthand experience.
Flooding, heavy rains leads to uptick in mosquitoes
Wisconsin State Journal
Heavy rainfall and flooding have made conditions ripe for mosquitoes in the area.The recent influx of the blood-sucking insects is the result of weeks of heavy rain as some varieties of mosquito breed in stagnant water, according to Phil Pellitteri, a UW-Madison entomologist emeritus.
Donald Trump returns to Wisconsin with few GOP friends
Wisconsin State Journal
“Trump’s erratic campaign has put state Republican leaders in a difficult position,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at UW-Madison.
Badgers men’s basketball: Albert ‘Ab’ Nicholas, ex-UW star and prominent booster, dies
Wisconsin State Journal
Albert “Ab” Nicholas, a former standout for the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball program turned successful businessman and prominent booster, died Thursday morning. He was 85.
Albert O. “Ab” Nicholas dies
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Albert O. “Ab” Nicholas, a prominent philanthropist and nationally known Milwaukee money manager, died Thursday.Nicholas, who was 85, donated millions to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, his alma mater; to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee; to Brightstar Foundation for investment in the state’s emerging growth companies; and to many other causes.
Note to users
Clipsheet is experiencing technical difficulties. We are working to resolve them; in the meantime, the number of articles featured will be reduced.
Keeping your child’s sugar intake in check
NBC15
Many of us are aware of the negative health effects from too much sugar, but what about the effects on kids and their eating habits? How can we better monitor their intake of sugar?Clinical Nutritionist Amy Caulum with UW Health Pediatric Fitness joined NBC15’s John Stofflet to share how to keep an eye on those sugars and added sugars.