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Author: rueckert

How the Home Insurance Market Became So Distorted

The New York Times

Deciphering the cost of home insurance from one place to another is almost impossible. But two professors — Benjamin Keys of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Philip Mulder at the University of Wisconsin — found a workaround. They obtained data showing how much millions of American households pay to mortgage service companies, which typically includes insurance. Then they deducted payments for mortgages, property taxes and other fees, leaving them with an estimate of home insurance premiums.

Feds pull plug on Russia ‘bot farm’ that spread social media lies

USA Today

Dietram Scheufele is a professor of science communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies misinformation. The number of bots taken offline by the FBI operation is small compared to the myriad fake accounts on social media, he said. But he felt encouraged that the feds were going after the roots of AI-generated misinformation instead of flagging doctored videos. “I feel heartened,” the German native said. “We’ve seen tons of activities that are putting bandages on symptoms but haven’t really addressed the root cause – removing the tumor.”

How Long Is Milk Good After the Sell-By Date? | How Long Milk Lasts

Readers Digest

There are a lot of factors that affect how long milk is good for after the sell-by date. The biggest is whether the milk has been through pasteurization, which John A. Lucey, director of the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Dairy Research in Madison, defines as “the process of heating every particle of milk or milk product in properly designed and operated equipment to any of the specified pasteurization time/temperature combinations designed to destroy all human pathogens” in a 2015 paper published in the journal Nutrition Today.

Bird flu makes step in evolving toward human spread

Washington Examiner

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Texas A&M Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Laboratory, and two Japanese universities studied how H5N1 has evolved since the March outbreak by infecting humanized mice and ferrets in experiments funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Amid attack on affirmative action, race-conscious scholarships are latest targets – The Washington Post

Washington Post

The University of Wisconsin system is removing race as a factor in more than 160 scholarships, grants, fellowships, study abroad and hiring programs, according to the system’s director of media relations, Mark Pitsch. Individual universities, he said, are also discussing scholarship criteria with donors who funded specific awards to ensure they comply with the court’s ruling.

New research uncovers troubling ‘triple threat’ facing the world’s oceans: ‘The impacts of this have already been seen and felt’

The Cool Down

Andrea Dutton, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, compares the situation to the end of the Permian period 252 million years ago, when similar environmental changes led to Earth’s largest known extinction event. “Oceans aren’t just a nice backdrop for your selfies in summer; we rely upon them for our lives. It’s very important to recognize this,” Dutton said.

Not Everyone Has an Inner Voice Streaming Through Their Head

Scientific American

Most of us have an “inner voice,” and we tend to assume everybody does, but recent evidence suggests that people vary widely in the extent to which they experience inner speech, from an almost constant patter to a virtual absence of self-talk. “Until you start asking the right questions you don’t know there’s even variation,” says Gary Lupyan, a cognitive scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “People are really surprised because they’d assumed everyone is like them.”

June sizzled to a 13th straight monthly heat record

NPR

“Our world is in crisis,” said University of Wisconsin climate scientist Andrea Dutton. “Perhaps you are feeling that crisis today — those who live in the path of Beryl are experiencing a hurricane that is fueled by an extremely warm ocean that has given rise to a new era of tropical storms that can intensify rapidly into deadly and costly major hurricanes. Even if you are not in crisis today, each temperature record we set means that it is more likely that climate change will bring crisis to your doorstep or to your loved ones.”

Infant mortality rate rose in wake of Texas abortion ban, study shows

AP News

But the results did not come as a surprise to Tiffany Green, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economist and population health scientist who studies the consequences of racial inequities on reproductive health. She said the results were in line with earlier research on racial disparities in infant mortality rates due to state differences in Medicaid funding for abortions. Many of the people getting abortions are vulnerable to pregnancy complications, said Green, who was not part of the research.

Bringing Back Local Milk, Ice Cream, and Cheese

Civil Eats

As the ballooning demand continues to shape market forces, the shift towards fewer, larger farms is inevitable, says Charles Nicholson, associate professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. With smaller-scale dairies harder hit by labor shortages and fluctuating milk prices, “this long-term trend would be hard to change with public policy or private initiatives [alone],” he says.

How ‘Rural Studies’ Is Thinking About the Heartland

The New York Times

Another scholar who disagreed with Mr. Frank’s diagnosis was Kathy Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But like Mr. Frank, she was interested in the question of how social class shaped politics, and thought that the way to get an accurate picture was through fieldwork. Over five years, starting in 2007, she visited 27 small towns in Wisconsin.

The World of Luxury Fruit: Does a $156 Melon Taste Sweeter?

The New York Times

Some of the fruits have long been given as gifts, especially in Japan and Korea. That trend is catching on in the United States, as is the taste for flawless berries and melons that travelers may have tried overseas, produce experts said. And as the luxury goods industry has grown, so too has the interest in luxury fruit, said Soyeon Shim, a scholar of consumer and financial behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The market has become much more global,” she said. Ms. Shim added, “you can buy anything you want.”

The Big Winners of This Supreme Court Term

The Atlantic

In a famous 1974 paper titled “Why the Haves Come Out Ahead,” the University of Wisconsin law professor Marc Galanter argued that litigation systematically favors repeat players with the wherewithal to take fullest advantage of the courts. Key to his argument was the point that courts are “reactive”: They only do something when someone asks them to. That favors “the claimant with the information, ability to surmount cost barriers, and skill to navigate restrictive procedural requirements.” And most repeat players, Galanter said, tend to be “larger, richer and more powerful” than single-shotters.

Black Americans’ Responses To Trump’s Notion Of ‘Black Jobs’

Forbes

Inequitable access to high-quality education plays a role in systematically routing young Black Americans into a narrow set of jobs. “Although our schools should be preparing all students for well-paid satisfying work, far too many of our Black and Brown students are relegated to poorly resourced schools,” says Gloria Ladson-Billings, the Kellner Family Distinguished Professor Emerita of Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Wetlands may be the key to saving the Mekong River

National Geographic

But those habitats are often understudied. While the stretch of river in northern Cambodia has been designated a Ramsar site—a wetlands area of international importance—little research has assessed the ecological damage to the flooded forest there. “What we have is basically interviews with people,” says Ian Baird, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has studied fisheries across the border in Laos for several decades.

How Multi-Omics Is Empowering The Discovery Of Cancer Biomarkers

Forbes

A 2023 study from a team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison demonstrated the promise of fragmentomics. Researchers used machine learning to identify patterns in fragments of circulating tumor DNA, which is genetic material that cancerous tumors shed into the bloodstream as they grow. The researchers trained an algorithm to not only detect cancer in blood samples but also to identify the specific type of cancer present.

East Palestine train derailment polluted 16 states, study says

The Washington Post

When it began to rain in various places, the pollutants were pushed from the air and deposited on the ground. The National Atmospheric Deposition Program, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, collects these ground depositions weekly across 260 sites across North America. David Gay, who serves as coordinator of the program, routinely analyzes the data to monitor air pollutants. “If you have a lot of pollution in the atmosphere, you get a lot of wet deposition pollution at the ground,” Gay said.

See the Photos of the Rare Cicada Emergence

TIME

That slight overlap does not necessarily mean the two broods will breed with one another. “Is there a possibility of interactions and hybridization? That could occur—but given the long life cycles, it’s really hard to study,” PJ Liesch, the director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab, tells TIME.

Study on tween screen use shows link between parents and kids

The Washington Post

The study caught the attention of Megan Moreno, professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and co-director of the American Academy of Pediatrics Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health. Moreno, whose expertise is in the field of adolescent health and digital media, says she has been troubled by the widespread message — “almost to the edge of moral panic” — that social media use is causing adverse mental health outcomes for adolescents. “That has been a narrative I’ve been really interested in because I’ve really been wanting to see: Where is that evidence?” she says. “And it hasn’t been there.”

A Bird-Flu Pandemic in People? Here’s What It Might Look Like.

The New York Times

Crucially, no forms of the bird flu virus seem to have spread efficiently from person to person. That is no guarantee that H5N1 will not acquire that ability, said Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist and bird flu expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.“ I think the virus is clearly changing its property, because we never saw outbreaks in cows,” Dr. Kawaoka said.

Opinion | Debating Covid’s Origins: A Lab or a Market?

The New York Times

Understanding the origin of Covid-19 is crucial for improving future pandemic responses. I strongly disagree with Dr. Alina Chan’s opinion piece. The overwhelming majority of scientific evidence points to a natural origin, like all pandemics in history.

Marta M. Gaglia
Madison, Wis.
The writer is an associate professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The US is losing wetlands at an accelerating rate − here’s how the private sector can help protect these valuable resources

The Conversation

Wetlands aren’t the most eye-catching ecosystems. They include swamps, bogs, fens and other places where soil is covered by water most of the time. But they perform a huge range of valuable services, from soaking up floodwaters to filtering out pollutants and providing habitat for thousands of species of mammals, fish, reptiles, insects and birds.

Professor of Law and Associate Dean, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Women Are America’s Safety Net

The Atlantic

In November 2020, in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic, Calarco, who is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told the writer Anne Helen Petersen, “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.”

Groups claim manure digesters contribute to pollution in Kewaunee County

WPR

Researchers, including Brian Langolf of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, say digesters cut greenhouse gas emissions by capturing methane from manure in open lagoons. Around 36 percent of methane emissions from human activities are tied to livestock or agricultural practices, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The biggest cropland changes were near Ogallala Aquifer, study shows

The Washington Post

“A lot of the assumptions were that this former cropland had a lot of overlap with formal conservation programs,” Tyler Lark, an assistant scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment who co-authored the study, said in a news release. “But we saw that they’re almost entirely distinct pools.”

The truth about ‘zombie cicadas’: ‘The fungus can do some nefarious things’

Fox News

P.J. Liesch, director of UW Insect Diagnostic Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explained that the fungus does “really interesting things” to the cicadas it infects. “The fungus can do some nefarious things,” he told Fox News Digital in a phone interview. “It can produce some amphetamine-like compounds, which end up affecting the behavior of these infected cicadas.”