While some radiopharmaceuticals have been utilized in thyroid cancer treatment for decades, new radiation drugs are showing promise in many other areas, according to Dr. Steve Cho, a professor and section chief of the nuclear medicine section of the Department of Radiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health.
Research that makes pathogens more dangerous or likely to spread would be banned at Wisconsin colleges and universities under a bill proposed by Republican state legislators, who point to incidents and controversy involving bird flu studies at UW-Madison.
The CDC established the National Wastewater Surveillance System with Wisconsin and five others as founding members. Wisconsin demonstrated the value of having an academic, public health and state lab all working together on the effort, said Martin Shafer, a senior scientist at UW-Madison and the Wisconsin State Lab of Hygiene.
“It was an amazing couple of years where close to 70 or 80 different jurisdictions (were getting started),” said Shafer, adding, “Everybody kind of did something a little bit different. So that spurred a lot of innovation.”
Journalism professor Mike Wagner audited the studies that granted academic researchers around the nation access to Facebook’s internal records. The studies were produced in partnership with social scientists at Meta, the company that owns Facebook.
In the early 2000s, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that Ricard’s brain produced gamma waves — which have been linked to learning, attention and memory — at such pronounced levels that the media named him “the world’s happiest man.”
The notion of planting miles of trees to hold back encroaching deserts is misguided and damaging; we should promote programs that secure livelihoods and respect dryland ecologies instead
Co-authored by nature-society geographers Matthew Turner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Diana Davis of the University of California-Davis) and Emily Yeh of the University of Colorado Boulder.
Senator Tammy Baldwin is celebrating millions of dollars for the Marshfield Agricultural Research station– or MARS.
Baldwin toured the facility in Stratford in which she helped them get $6-million dollars.
The senator met with officials from UW Madison and their facility in Stratford to talk about the importance of funding for the school’s Wisconsin Rural Partnership program, and how crucial it is that farms receive adequate funding.
Now, new research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison could give doctors a better understanding of which patients are affected by these strains by mapping the location of antibiotic resistance in great detail.
Laurel Legenza is a postdoctoral researcher at UW-Madison’s School of Pharmacy and lead author of the new study. She used data from cases of E. coli infections at three Wisconsin health care systems to map out where bacteria were susceptible to two common antibiotic treatments.
With an annual economic impact of about $105 billion, according to a UW-Madison study, agriculture is one of the three pillars of the state’s economy, along with tourism and manufacturing. The dairy industry contributes about $46 billion to that total.
A new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and the University of Southern California Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics found that the $35 cap on monthly out-of-pocket costs of insulin for Medicare beneficiaries has led to a significant increase of insulin prescription fills, especially for Black and Latino patients.
A conservative estimate from a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison study puts the number of undocumented Hispanic workers on medium-to-large farms at roughly 6,200. That figure excludes the many immigrant workers on smaller farms, those with fewer than 500 cows.
Satellite imagery of Typhoon Khanun as the eye passed south of Okinawa on Tuesday. (UW-Madison CIMSS)
A series of Meta-supported are finding Facebook’s algorithms alone weren’t responsible for harmful polarization in the 2020 presidential election cycle. But an independent audit found Meta maintained strong control over what data to provide researchers for study. We talk with Mike Wagner, a professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW-Madison, about research into the power of social media algorithms and what makes an independent study.
Feng He, a senior scientist with the Center for Climatic Research within the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Wisconsin would see some pretty abrupt changes under a collapsed current, likely mirroring the major warming episode between 48,000 and 68,000 years ago.
Michael Wagner, a social scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was asked to observe the work and wrote a commentary accompanying the Science papers , says Meta’s business interests may have influenced the project at some points. For instance, he says Meta researchers believed that the experimental studies changing users’ feeds were unlikely to show any big effects—and they pushed to get these papers done first. “You could read it as ‘the big splash is going to be that there aren’t huge effects that are so deleterious to democracy that we need to have a bunch of new regulations on our platform.’”
“It’s a little too buttoned up to say this shows Facebook is not a huge problem or social media platforms aren’t a problem,” said Michael W. Wagner, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, who served as an independent observer of the collaboration, spending hundreds of hours sitting in on meetings and interviewing scientists. “This is good scientific evidence there is not just one problem that is easy to solve.”
Still, collaborations with platforms may not be the model for research going forward and perhaps it shouldn’t be, according to Michael W. Wagner, professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, who served as the collaboration’s independent rapporteur.
The work was not a model for future research since it required direct participation from Meta, which held all the data and provided researchers only with certain kinds, said Michael Wagner, a professor of mass communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was an independent auditor on the project. The researchers said they had final say over the papers’ conclusions.
“Meta set the agenda in ways that affected the overall independence of the researchers,” wrote Michael Wagner, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
And despite valid concerns from many of the researchers involved, in the end Meta did grant them most of the independence they were seeking. That’s according to an accompanying report from Michael W. Wagner, a professor of mass communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who served as an independent observer of the studies. Wagner found flaws in the process — more on those in a minute — but for the most part he found that Meta lived up to its promises.
That comes as the state’s labor force participation rate — a measure of people working or looking for work — among teens aged 16 to 19 declined from 66.5 percent in 2000 to 56.5 percent in 2022, according to research from the University of Wisconsin-Extension. That still exceeded the national rate in 2022 of 36.8 percent among teens.
We talk to an expert on early childhood media consumption about the potential harms of unregulated kids’ content on YouTube, and what parents need to be aware of. We also talk to a PBS Wisconsin education engagement specialist about what outreach is being done to help kids and parents make healthy media choices.
And yet 35% of the audience were men. What gives? “The current level of uncertainty and turbulence and anxiety accounts for part of that crossover among genders,” said Nancy Wong, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “People associate ‘Barbie’ with a more comfortable, simple and stable time in their lives.”
Somesh Jha, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Google researcher who specializes in A.I. security, called the new paper “a game changer” that could force the entire industry into rethinking how it built guardrails for A.I. systems.
Interview with Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UW Madison, about why it’s so hot, and what this means for our climate.
While paper converters often go overlooked, they play an important role in both Wisconsin’s paper industry and its economy, according to a recent study from the Wisconsin Paper Council and University of Wisconsin titled, “Adding Value to Our Economy – Paper Conversion in Wisconsin.” More than 145 paper converters operated in Wisconsin in 2022, according to the study.
That number gets bigger a lot faster if you factor in companies that use paper along with plastic and other types of products, Scott Bowe, a professor and wood products specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in the May 31 episode of the Wisconsin Paper Council’s “The Paper Files” podcast about the study.
Written by Chris McCahill, managing director of the State Smart Transportation Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It’s been proven that protracted hot weather can make people depressed,” said Dr. Charles Raison, who has done research on heat intolerance and summer-related depression. “It seems as if the system that modulates body temp also modulates mood.”
Raison, professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said people with mental illness often have trouble with thermal regulation. “From our data, we know that people with depression tend to run body temperatures higher than average, and they don’t sweat as much. So being depressed could set you up to not be able to tolerate heat well.”
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, anesthesiology professor Matthew Banks is tinkering with something in between leaving the trip alone and anesthesia: What if you let people have their full-on psychedelic experience, but then erase their memory of the trip altogether? Do you need to remember a trip for the benefits to stick?
For 37 years, the Center for Dairy Research (CDR) has helped innovate the dairy industry.
“Cheese-making has been around, there are lots of different guesses right now, but probably somewhere in the region of 8000 years,” CDR and University of Wisconsin Madison Professor of Food Science John Lucey said.
UW-Madison has produced at least 485 doctoral degree graduates with research related to plasma physics (a fundamental study) and fusion energy since 1965. The nuclear engineering department within the College of Engineering is one of the nation’s best.
Joan Hinton was a physics graduate student at the University of Wisconsin when she was tapped for Los Alamos. She worked on a team building the first reactor able to use enriched uranium as fuel. Hinton also witnessed the Trinity Test. Just weeks after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagaski, killing more than 200,000 people, Hinton drove physicist Harry Daghlian to the hospital after he was exposed to a lethal amount of radiation from a plutonium core. He died about three weeks later.
In the participating nursing homes, residents who had at least two minor flu symptoms — like a runny nose, congestion, sore throat, cough or fever — would be tested. The results would be returned within 12 hours, and often within 15 minutes.
A new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health found rapid flu testing for residents of nursing homes helped detect outbreaks sooner and keep more people out of the hospital.
Other imposter content commonly takes the form of websites or social media accounts, said Mike Wagner, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Wagner is the lead investigator for the NSF-funded research project in which Wisconsin Watch and the Cap Times are participating. “We’ve had misinformation since we’ve had information, and we’ve had people sharing things that aren’t true since they shared things that are true,” Wagner said.
“Other carbon sources turn off uric acid utilization,” explained Federico Rey, an associate professor at UW-Madison and the principal investigator in the study.
Leading that revolution is the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which in August opened the Transdisciplinary Center for Research in Psychoactive Substances, expanding upon clinical psychedelic studies that have been on campus for seven years. The UW School of Pharmacy is also home to the nation’s first master’s program in psychoactive pharmaceutical investigation, where researchers are studying ketamine’s effects on the brain.
UW-Madison researchers have found that black-legged ticks, commonly referred to as deer ticks, can harbor transmissible amounts of prions, the protein particle that causes chronic wasting disease in white-tailed deer.
UW-Madison insect researcher Patrick Liesch spent more than a decade studying the emerald ash borer — an invasive, ash-tree killing beetle the size of a grain of rice — before he finally saw it in person.
In a 2020 study, UW-Madison researchers found that a wide range of community outreach programs can help people socialize and give them something to look forward to, which can boost a sense of connection.
For the first time in a decade, the Wisconsin State Climatology Office is receiving government funding. A USDA grant will focus the office on rural needs, particularly those of farmers. We talk to Steve Vavrus, the Wisconsin State Climatologist and a senior scientist for the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies Center for Climatic Research at UW-Madison, about this and funding for a statewide network of weather stations.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison and Alliant Energy are partnering to build a solar park that will also serve as a research center to explore mixing solar and agriculture, soil impacts, water issues and more.
According to Newsweek, the UW Carbone Cancer Center is listed as the top cancer hospital in Wisconsin for 2023. We learn about the hospital’s latest work, including prostate MRI’s and proton therapy. Interview with Dr. Joshua Lang, associate director of translational research, and Dr. Nataliya Uboha, an oncologist and faculty leader for Cancer Therapy Discovery & Development, both at the UW Carbone Cancer Center.
It might help to achieve that progress if the new Demography study, co-authored by sociologists Michael Massoglia and Michael T. Light, both of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, had provided an account of exactly why incarceration generally, and Black male incarceration in particular, has declined, but such explanations lie beyond the scope of their research.
Wisconsin schools that had a longer period of virtual or hybrid learning during the pandemic saw graduation rates rise among wealthier students and fall among those at an economic disadvantage, a new study found.
The study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published in the journal Educational Researcher, analyzed data from 429 public high schools in the state during the 2020-21 school year and two years before then.
While demand for child care is high, supply is limited and likely to decrease further. A March report from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty showed that more than 60% of providers planned to increase tuition, while 32% were considering leaving their jobs or closing their centers if Child Care Counts did not continue.
Astrophysicists have long predicted that the Milky Way is a source of ghostly particles called neutrinos, but haven’t been able to detect them. Until now.
In a new study led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a massive detector at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory finally caught a glimpse of high-energy neutrinos being emitted from within the Milky Way.
A surprisingly wide range of medical conditions are being shown to be linked to sexual violence. Many may not appear until years after the events. Cancer is one such condition. “A history of abuse may increase a woman’s risk of and susceptibility to cancer,” a review article by researchers at the University of Wisconsin concludes. Cervical cancer is the most prevalent type linked to abuse, and some studies find more breast cancer in survivors (other research does not support this finding). One possible mechanism: heightened immune and inflammatory factors brought on by chronic stress that have been tied to cancer growth, the researchers note.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and a Green Bay company are working together to upscale a new recycling technique that could help keep flexible plastics out of landfills.
New data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s IceCube neutrino detector has led to the first ever image of our Milky Way galaxy using the subatomic “ghost particles.” An international team of researchers also found the Milky way is a neutrino desert compared to others.
The median home price in Wisconsin has more than doubled over the last decade, as supply has failed to keep up with demand after homebuilding slowed during the Great Recession. That’s according to new data from the Wisconsin Realtors Association, or WRA, and a new report from the University of Wisconsin-Extension.
Steven Deller, professor of agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison, authored the report. He said many were hoping to see downward pressure on prices in response to the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, but that hasn’t happened yet. Deller said high mortgage rates have had a modest effect on demand for homes, but a greater influence on those who currently own a home to postpone older couples from downsizing or young families upsizing, keeping some homes off the market.
“The normal churn in the housing market, the new supply of housing or the increase of existing homes going on the market is actually dropping a little bit more than the decline in demand,” he said.
“Only cosmic rays make neutrinos, so if you see neutrinos, you see cosmic ray sources,” Francis Halzen, a member of the IceCube team and physicist at the University of Wisconsin, tells Popular Science. “The goal of neutrino physics, the prime goal, is to solve the 100-year-old cosmic ray problem.”
UW-Madison researchers have successfully developed an electric motor using 3D printing technology, paving the way for future electric motors to more efficiently use electricity without sacrificing power.
In 2013, IceCube detected the first cosmic neutrinos. In the years since, they’ve been able to narrow neutrino sources down to individual galaxies. “We have been detecting extragalactic neutrinos for 10 years now,” says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the IceCube collaboration.
“We now hope to have established the multi-messenger techniques that will allow us to pinpoint the cosmic ray sources in the galaxy which, arguably, represents one of the oldest problems in astronomy,” Francis Halzen, IceCube principal investigator and physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, tells Inverse.
“It took us 10 years to find the galactic plane in neutrinos,” says IceCube head Francis Halzen at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s totally counterintuitive. It’s like if you went outside at night and saw a sky bright in active, distant galaxies but no Milky Way.”
IceCube had already definitively detected neutrinos streaming in from outside the Milky Way, but it couldn’t be said with certainty that any of them came from within the galaxy, says Francis Halzen, lead investigator of the project and a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. This was rather strange, considering the proximity of the Milky Way’s disk (in fact, our solar system is embedded in it) and the high likelihood that neutrinos form there.
A new solar farm is being developed on land owned by the University of Wisconsin southwest of Madison with the aim of finding a better balance between green energy and agriculture.
Melinda Soares-Furtado, a NASA Hubble fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies planetary engulfment, called the study an “exciting” example of the “unexpected properties” revealed in star-planet interactions. She suggested that future research about the system involve experts on blue stragglers, a class of luminous stars that are thought to be formed by stellar mergers.
