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Category: Research

Wisconsinites observe negotiations at United National Climate Change Conference

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Several representatives from the University of Wisconsin-Madison are observing the negotiations in Dubai. Sumudu Atapattu, director of the Global Legal Studies Center at the University of Wisconsin Law School; Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at UW-Madison; and Nova Tebbe, a PhD student focusing on the health benefits of climate mitigation policy, will share what they learn with a virtual audience on Dec. 4.

Under new bill, Wisconsinites could seek mental health services from out-of-state providers via telehealth

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Ignatowski, the Institute for Reforming Government director, noted that Wisconsin is ranked No. 32 in the United States for the number of mental health professionals.

That ranking is based on 2021 data from the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, a program of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Data from 2023 show that there are 420 people for every one mental health provider registered in Wisconsin. The national ratio is 340 people per one provider.

Tom Still: Expert on AI jitters — Calm down, learn to use it, keep people at its center

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Wisconsin State Journal

Enter the steadying voice of Charles Isbell Jr., a nationally recognized expert in computing and AI who started work this summer at the UW-Madison as its latest provost.

If the UW-Madison were a private company, the role of provost might best be described as “chief academic officer.” It is historically the No. 2 position on campus behind the chancellor. Isbell is settling into that role across UW-Madison’s many colleges and schools, but he also brings a wealth of experience in what is one of the defining technological moments in a generation.

COVID Vaccine Prevented Thousands of Premature Births in Pandemic—Study

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Newsweek

In their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Torche and Jenna Nobles from the University of Wisconsin-Madison analyzed birth records from siblings born in California between 2014 and 2023. By comparing sibling births, the researchers found that from July to November 2020 mothers were nearly twice as likely to give birth three weeks before their due date.

Bipartisan bill would make it easier to treat veterans’ PTSD with magic mushrooms

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Wisconsin Public Radio

To give Wisconsin veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder more options, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is working to make it easier for researchers to treat those with acute PTSD with the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms.

The bill would create a state trust fund called the “medicinal psilocybin treatment program” that would be administered by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Opinion | Biden Trade Policy Breaks With Tech Giants

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New York Times

The truth is that Ms. Tai is taking the pen away from Facebook, Google and Amazon, who helped shape the previous policy, according to a research paper published earlier this year by Wendy Li, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who used to answer the phone and interact with lobbyists at the U.S. trade representative’s office.

Wisconsin’s ‘Happy Days cohort’ is helping researchers understand aging

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Wisconsin State Journal

“We’re trying to understand how this rich data that we collected when they were younger and in middle age is influencing their memory and cognitive function now,” said Michal Engelman, a UW-Madison sociology professor who directs the study.

“There’s biological and physiological processes, but there’s also the social and economic environment,” Engelman said. “All of these things work together to shape people’s well-being through their life course.”

Reducing intake of one amino acid improves longevity & health in mice

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New Atlas

Studies into the benefits of protein-restricted diets have shown that lower protein consumption is associated with a decreased risk of age-related diseases and mortality and improved metabolic health. Now, exploring alternatives to calorie-restricting diets, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that reducing the intake of a single amino acid in mice extended their lifespan, making them leaner, less frail, and less susceptible to cancer.

“We like to say a calorie is not just a calorie,” said Dudley Lamming, corresponding author of the study. “Different components of your diet have value and impact beyond their function as a calorie, and we’ve been digging in on one component that many people may be eating too much of.”

New analysis looks at relationship between gender, wages and trust in tap water

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Wisconsin Public Radio

A recent analysis from a UW-Madison professor finds that bottled water consumption is most prevalent among low-income women, signaling a distrust in household tap water. We speak with Manny Teodoro, an associate Professor in the LaFollette School of Public Affairs/Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison.

Is eating cheese on your resume? In Wisconsin, it could be

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WUWM

When the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Dairy Research publicized it was looking for a new crew of cheese tasters, the response was exuberant, as you might expect in a state known as the country’s cheese capital.

250 people applied for five part-time jobs available. The Center rigorously trains them to analyze cheese made and provided by graduate student researchers, pizza makers and the state’s esteemed cheese industry.

What the new state geologist wants Wisconsinites to know about shared natural resources

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Wisconsin Public Radio

The state Geological and Natural History Survey researches and provides environmental data that helps inform institutional decisions that can affect our environment. We’ll talk with Sue Swanson, Wisconsin’s new state geologist who is also director of the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey through University of Wisconsin-Madison, about who they work with and how their data is used.

If you think gratitude and thankfulness make you feel better, you’re right. And science backs it up.

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

When neuroscientists talk about gratitude, they often cluster it with other social and moral emotions like appreciation and compassion. That’s no coincidence. These emotions activate similar networks in our brains, said Cortland Dahl, a scientist at the Center for Healthy Minds, part of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

“Gratitude, I would say, is a very specific version of (appreciation), where we’re oriented to something we really appreciate that has benefited us personally — somebody else’s presence in our lives, how they’ve supported us, being the most common expression of that,” Dahl said.

Lawmakers back project to treat PTSD in veterans with magic mushrooms

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The Capital Times

The bill would create a pilot project in collaboration with researchers at UW-Madison to explore the medicinal benefits of psilocybin to treat PTSD among a select group of veterans. Program participants would need to be military veterans ages 21 and older, who are not members of law enforcement and who have been diagnosed with treatment-resistant PTSD.

Dane County approves $8 million for housing for immigrant dairy workers. Sheriff’s office will try to close language gaps.

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Dane County is home to more than 170 dairy farms, according to state records. It’s unknown how many provide housing to workers, but a recent statewide study on immigrant dairy workers by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School for Workers found that close to three-quarters of surveyed workers lived in employer-provided housing, typically on the farm

An aging, declining population of hunters spells trouble for Wisconsin deer management

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Social scientists, including Thomas Heberlein of the University of Wisconsin (now professor emeritus of community and environmental sociology), have been examining and documenting a decline in hunting in the U.S. for decades.

The rate of decline in gun deer hunting was predicted 16 years ago by a team of University of Wisconsin and Department of Natural Resources researchers.

The researchers, Richelle Winkler and Jennifer Huck of UW’s Applied Population Lab in Madison and Keith Warnke of the DNR, released a draft of their study in 2007 titled “Deer Hunter Demography: Age, Period, and Cohort Analysis of Trends in Hunter Participation in Wisconsin.“

Grass and Shrub Fires More Destructive Than Forest Fires in U.S.

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New York Times

Volker Radeloff, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the new study, pointed to both the Marshall fire and the recent Lahaina fire in Hawaii as two extreme examples of the risks wildfire can pose outside of forests. Both started with burning grasses and grew into devastating urban infernos.

Wildfires Threaten More Homes and People in the U.S. Than Ever Before

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Scientific American

Forest fires are well known for their ferocity. They accounted for just 33 percent of houses destroyed by wildfires in the early 2000s, however, the study authors found after analyzing the locations of homes within wildfire perimeters since the 1990s. In contrast, 64 percent of such houses were destroyed by grassland or shrubland fires. This is because even though forest fires are particularly destructive to buildings, much more of the area burned in the U.S. is made up of grasslands and shrublands, says the study’s first author Volker Radeloff, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “We had a hunch,” he says, “but the actual numbers surprised us.”

UW-Madison team works to identify lost service members from Wisconsin and beyond

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Every county in Wisconsin has at least one service member missing in action since Pearl Harbor. A team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is working to identify them and others at sites around the world.

Graduate and undergraduate students, professors and others at the university make up the team working on the Missing in Action Recovering and Identification Project, or UW MIA RIP. They all volunteer their time to travel to sites around the globe to find and repatriate the remains of soldiers lost in war.

Wisconsin veterans with PTSD could seek psilocybin treatment under a bipartisan bill

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder could have access to medicinal psilocybin treatment under a bipartisan bill.

The proposal would create a pilot program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison run in collaboration with the university’s Transdisciplinary Center for Research in Psychoactive Substances and its School of Pharmacy. Veterans age 21 and older suffering from treatment-resistant PTSD would be eligible to participate as long as they are not currently serving as law enforcement officers.

Democratic lawmakers propose funds for universal, free school meals

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WORT FM

Earlier this summer, the Healthy School Meals for All coalition and UW-Madison Professor Jennifer Gaddis released the first statewide survey of the Wisconsin school nutrition workforce.

That report found that of the approximately 5,089 K-12 school nutrition workers across the state, 94% were women, and 88% were white.

It also found that four out of five school food workers who were not managers worked part-time, and that a quarter of schools across the state offered poverty-level starting wages for school nutrition workers.

Why it may be better to skip raking your leaves

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CBS News

There is an exception, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison horticulture department. If your trees have serious foliar fungal diseases, you should be raking your leaves. “While most leaf spots on leaves are cosmetic and harmless to the overall health of the tree, fallen diseased leaves do serve as a source for spores that can infect next year’s emerging leaves,” according to a post from the school. “Significantly diseased leaves should be raked and removed from the area and disposed of properly, such as by burying, burning where allowed, or hot composting.”

How and Why Do Violent Tornadoes Form?

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Smithsonian Magazine

Atmospheric scientist Leigh Orf of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has taken advantage of advances in supercomputing to build ten-meter-resolution models that can directly simulate tornadoes. At this scale, turbulence comes alive, Orf says. His models reveal how small areas of rotation could combine to kick off a tornado. “It fully resolves non-tornadic vortices that merge together in ways that are very compelling and I’ve never seen before,” he says.

AI revolution in diabetes care: How technology is beating this silent killer

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Forbes

Take the case of Rufus Sweeney, a 4th-year medical student at UW-Madison and Oklahoma Choctaw. When he discovered his pre-diabetes condition, he turned to glucose monitoring apps in the market that recommended lifestyle changes, from diet adjustments to sleep tweaks. His breakthrough came when he prioritized physical activity over all other app notifications.

Weather Guys: Sea ice update, waterspouts and celebrating 75 years of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UW-Madison

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Sea ice is one way that scientists can learn about the effects of climate change. The Weather Guys are back to share about this year’s sea ice season. They’ll also fill us in on waterspouts and 75 years of the UW-Madison Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

New drone technology could help scientists finally understand how tornadoes form

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Inverse

Most models working at coarser resolutions can’t actually see simulated tornadoes, inferring them instead based on areas of air with a lot of spins. Atmospheric scientist Leigh Orf of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has taken advantage of advances in supercomputing to build 10-meter-resolution models that can directly simulate tornadoes. At this scale, turbulence comes alive, Orf says. His models reveal how small areas of rotation could combine to kick off a tornado. “It fully resolves non-tornadic vortices that merge together in ways that are very compelling, and I’ve never seen before,” he says.

Can the gray wolf help control CWD-infected deer? Great Lakes tribes and UW scientists team up to find out

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WUWM-89.7 Milwaukee

Last week, as scientists gathered inside a cozy research station in north central Wisconsin, not far from Minocqua, Michael Menon was one of the researchers in the room.

He’s the UW-Madison PhD student chosen to conduct the wolf study that’s being funded and co-led by the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission.

Wisconsin poverty has come down from highs of the 2008 recession, but still above early 2000s lows

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Steven Deller, the report’s author and an agricultural and applied economics professor at UW-Madison, said he attributes the state’s inability to return to the low poverty rates it saw in the late ’90s and early 2000s to a shift away from more highly-paid manufacturing jobs toward a more service-based economy, the state’s decline in unionization and a slow recovery from the Great Recession.

Roughly 70% of Wisconsinites hold onto old opioid prescriptions. Drug Take Back Day can help.

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Green Bay Press-Gazette

Expired and unused medications can fall into the wrong hands. Consider that less than 30% of opioid prescriptions are actually taken as prescribed for medical purposes. According to a recent study from Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, roughly 70% of people in Wisconsin hold onto their opioid prescriptions well past their need for medication, and it reaches nearly 90% in older Wisconsinites. One study found that leftover prescriptions accounted for nearly 40% of recreational use in high school seniors.

Wisconsin receives regional tech hub designation from the federal government

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Wisconsin Public Radio

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is one of the partners behind the tech hub application, and contributes to the biohealth industry through academic research and providing an educated workforce through its medical physics, biotechnology and medical engineering programs.

In a statement, Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said the university is thrilled to be part of the collaboration that helped secure the federal designation.

“Our culture of innovation and strong collaborative spirit, both within the university and across the state, make us well-positioned to make the most of this important opportunity,” she said.

Madison’s AVID/TOPS program helps more students graduate and go to college

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Spectrum News

In Madison, AVID/TOPS is a partnership between the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) and Boys and Girls Clubs of Dane County (BGCDC). It began in 2007. It functions as an elective class students have every day.

A new evaluation from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative found that the program is working.

Grammar changes how we see, an Australian language shows

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Scientific American

Gary Lupyan, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says that words can organize the way we think about the world and shape the way we perceive it. In a recent experiment, he and his colleagues measured how hard it was for English speakers to assign circles colored in diverse ways to a random category (such as “A” or “B”) if the colors were easy to name (for instance, “red” or “blue”) or hard to name (“slightly neutral lavender” or “light dusty rose”). All the colors, regardless of how nameable they were in English, were equally easy to discriminate visually from one another. Even so, Lupyan and his colleagues found strong differences in participants’ ability to learn which circles went into the different categories based on how easily nameable the colors were.

How to make the most of your first science festival

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Discover

If you’re a science educator, professional development sessions and lectures on timely topics are often included in science festivals to enrich your curriculum. Take the Badger Talks series from University of Wisconsin-Madison for example, where professors will speak on topics like sustainability, psychedelics research and weather monitoring.

How to avoid, identify and treat concussions

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CNN

Far from being something to brush off lightly, concussions are classified as traumatic brain injuries, Julie Stamm, author of the book “The Brain on Youth Sports: The Science, the Myths, and the Future,” told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the podcast Chasing Life.

“I often use the term concussion because it’s just so commonly used in sport especially. But it is a traumatic brain injury, and it’s often classified as a mild traumatic brain injury — and even that feels like it minimizes the injury,” said Stamm, a clinical assistant professor in the department of kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

PBS Wisconsin Education announces newest addition to ‘Meet the Lab’ collection, ‘Climate Trackers: Superpowered by Ecometeorology’

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PBS Wisconsin

PBS Wisconsin Education is proud to introduce a new addition to Meet The Lab, a collection of online learning resources developed in collaboration with research labs on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. This collection is designed to introduce middle school students to cutting-edge research and develop their identities in science. Like all PBS Wisconsin Education materials, Meet the Lab resources are available for free for all Wisconsin educators.

Madison schools see surprise enrollment increase

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The Capital Times

Soldner said for the actual number of students enrolled, there is an increase of 17 in 3K special programming, 58 fewer students in 4K, 14 more in kindergarten and 48 more in grades 1-12. He said staff will work with the district’s data and research team and outside consultants at the UW Applied Population Lab, which does population projections, to better understand how this affects the overall trend.

The glamorous new face of nuclear power: Miss America, 21, launches PR blitz claiming atomic energy is the way forward – as popularity rockets 57% in just three years

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Daily Mail

The reigning Miss America is preparing to pass on her crown but not before using a bit of its glamour to give nuclear power a PR rebrand.

Grace Stanke, 21, believes the US needs to boost its atomic energy capacity and she’s not alone.