Microplastics are ubiquitous. The tiny plastic particles have been found in the air, oceans and food — they’ve even made it to our gut.
But for all the research on microplastics, there’s been little study on nano- and microplastic pollution in the Great Lakes. Now, University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professors Haoran Wei and Mohan Qin are pioneering that effort.
Quoted: Dr. Patricia Tellez-Giron, family medicine physician at UW Health, associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and Latino Health Council chair, has been practicing family medicine for 25 years. In that time, she’s been able to uniquely observe intergenerational care as her patients grow from infancy into new family systems as adults.
Tellez-Giron said it’s common, especially for Hispanic or Latino children, to be split between two cultures, which can feel like navigating two worlds simultaneously. This speaks to an absence in diverse counselors, Tellez-Giron said, and specifically, culturally competent counselors — that is, health care providers who understand and can uplift a client’s cultural identity.
“Often, the therapist does not understand our culture, why we are protective, how we all raise the kids together,” Tellez-Giron said. “And then (the therapists) tell the kids, ‘You have to be independent. You have to demand your independence.’ That creates, definitely, tension in the family.”
Wisconsin Watch is joining a nationwide project led by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers that aims to protect democracy by limiting the spread and impact of misinformation.
With a newly announced $5 million award from the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program, researchers will continue development of Course Correct, a tool designed at the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication to help journalists identify and combat misinformation online.
Danielle Yancey will moderate a panel titled “Lasting Impacts: How the Pandemic has Amplified our Health Inequities” on Tuesday, October 11, the second day of the 2022 Wisconsin Leadership Summit.
Danielle Yancey (Menominee/Santee) has worked in public service for nearly twenty years focusing on programs that promote social justice, education access, and equity. Currently, she serves as the director for the Native American Center for Health Professions at the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Danielle grew up on the Menominee Indian reservation in north central Wisconsin. She is an alumna of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with undergraduate degrees in women’s studies and social welfare, Master of Science in urban and regional planning, and holds a sustainability leadership graduate certificate from Edgewood College.
CSRC is collaborating with the University of Virginia, University of Michigan Medical School, University of California San Diego, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Iowa State University and University of Wisconsin-Madison through the new projects.
Quoted: Jack Williams, a climate scientist and chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Geography, explained that prairie plants, with their deep roots and soil horizons, can store carbon and mitigate climate.
“There’s a lot of below-ground carbon sequestration in grasslands,” Williams said. “So a healthy grassland can also be a good climate mitigation strategy.”
Ellen Damschen, a UW-Madison professor in the department of biology, echoed that view, stressing that it’s important because small, local seed populations are at greater risk of getting wiped out.
“If seeds move, they’re moving their genes. You want to allow population sizes to get bigger, and you want to allow movement between sites,” she said.
UW experts walk through sustainable benefits of ammonia as fuel source.
Today, a new exhibit is being opened to the public at the Chazen Museum of Art on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. The culmination of multiple years of research and planning, the UW-Madison Public History Project exhibit looks to ask questions about the real history of UW-Madison itself. The Public History Project looks to give voice to a lesser-known history of UW-Madison through students, staff, and associates of the university who have been affected by marginalization across identities.
“That’s the perfect storm,” said Volker Radeloff, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who helped lead the research. “Millions of houses have been built in places that will sooner or later burn,” he said, even as climate change increases the risks of major wildfires across the West with extreme heat and dryness.
When you have pasture-based systems and organic crop production, you have a smaller carbon footprint. That’s how Nicole Rakobitsch puts it. Rakobitsch is director of sustainability at Organic Valley, the largest organic dairy cooperative in the United States, and also part of a University of Wisconsin-Madison research team behind a first-of-its-kind study. The peer-reviewed research uses a “breakthrough methodology” that includes accounting for the carbon sequestration benefit of grazed pastures.
12. Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation/University of Wisconsin 143
Quoted: The effectiveness of methods like goats, mowing and herbicides to control invasive species like buckthorn and bush honeysuckle is something that University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers are studying. It’s part of a multi-year project that’s underway at two plots in Sun Prairie and Prairie du Sac.
Researchers are examining how each of those management techniques work when used alone or together, according to Mark Renz, professor and extension specialist in UW-Madison’s agronomy department. He noted a study by researchers at Purdue University in Indiana previously found goat grazing could reduce invasive species over the span of five years.
“So it works, it just takes time,” Renz said. “And the challenge as a land manager like the Brule Forest is trying to figure out is it worth it to do that approach with goats or is an integrated approach better or what works best for their situation?”
“This study was the first to demonstrate that participants’ expectations of how their cognitive performance ’should’ change as a result of cognitive training can influence the actual outcomes that they show,” said Jocelyn Parong, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral research associate department of psychology’s Learning and Transfer Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, via email.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are also exploring ways to customize pigs to address other medical problems. The scientists are using gene editing to create pigs with gene mutations that cause the disease neurofibromatosis type 1, or NF1. Around one in 3,000 babies in the U.S. is born with the condition, which can cause tumors on nerve tracts in the skin and eyes, learning disabilities and gastrointestinal problems.
Led by The Water Council with core support from the MKE Tech Hub, the Wisconsin Technology Council, Marquette University and the Madison Region Economic Partnership, a “letter of intent” filed with NSF also lists some major companies — A.O. Smith, Rockwell Automation and Sentry Equipment Corp.
Others include UW-Madison’s Department of Engineering Physics, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, UW-Milwaukee, the UWM Research Foundation, the Wisconsin Center for Manufacturing and Productivity, the BrightStar Wisconsin investment fund, STEM Forward, WEC Energy Group, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, the Urban League of Greater Madison, the Business Council, state Sen. Dale Kooyenga, R-Wis., who is tied to a U.S. Army water innovation project, and the August Brown management consulting firm.
Column by Erik Iverson, chief executive officer of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF).
Using goats as a strategy to mow down invasive plants has slowly gained popularity in recent years, though concrete information about the practice’s effectiveness is hard to come by. Now, two of Madison’s largest employers are partnering on a new study to examine how effective the practice actually is.
It’s not talked about much, but it’s more common than you may think, according to University of Wisconsin experts. The condition affects approximately 10% of men per decade of life (i.e., 40% of men in their 40s, 50 percent of men in their 50s, 60% of men in their 60s).
The Center on Wisconsin Strategy has been publishing its State of Working Wisconsin report since 1996. The 2022 report, released ahead of Labor Day, derives its data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census Bureau and other federal sources.
“If I was going to pick a single year to think of the best possible picture for workers in this century, I would pick this year,” said Laura Dresser, a professor in the UW-Madison Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work and a co-author of the report. “I see more consistent evidence of a shift.” Dresser is also an associate director for the COWS.
Access to land and the ability to purchase it were rated as the top barriers to entering farming in a new survey released by the National Young Farmers Coalition and analyzed by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center. According to the survey, 59% of young farmers named finding affordable land to buy as very or extremely challenging, and 45% of young farmers named finding available land to buy as very or extremely challenging. The rates were higher — 68% — among farmers of color.
Philadelphia is ranked the least healthy county in the state, according to the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.
The authoritative measure of Wisconsin’s economic circumstance — as least from the standpoint of the working-class families that make up the vast majority of the state’s population — suggests that we actually have something to celebrate this Labor Day. Indeed, according to the State of Working Wisconsin report from the UW-Madison’s Center on Wisconsin Strategy, “2022 provides better news about work and for workers than any year in this century.”
A recent study looked at the relationship between meth and opioid use with non-fatal drug overdoses in rural areas across 10 states, including Wisconsin. We speak with an author of the paper on who uses multiple drugs and how they can best receive treatment, Dr. Randall Brown.
The findings “challenge our ideas about what sleep is,” says Benjamin Baird, a researcher who studies dreams at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was not involved in this study. Sleep has classically been defined as unresponsiveness to external environmental stimuli—and that feature is still typically part of the definition today, Baird explains. “This work pushes us to think carefully—rethink, maybe—about some of those fundamental definitions about the nature of sleep itself and what’s possible in sleep.“
The researchers, led by psychology professor Dr. Nicholas Buttrick of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, hypothesize that this correlation exists because of the Reconstruction period in American history, which occurred immediately after the Civil War — “a moment when a massive upsurge in the availability of firearms co-occurred with a worldview threat from the emancipation and the political empowerment of Black Southerners.”
Wisconsin researchers have turned to sharks to develop new ways to detect and treat cancer. Dr. Aaron LeBeau, an associate professor of pathology and radiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been leading the research.
In 2002, 3% of kids’ books were about Latinos, according to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Simon Goldberg at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and colleagues compiled data from 14 meta-analyses including a total of 145 randomized-controlled trials (RCTs) of mental health apps among 47,940 participants. The sample size may seem impressive, but the results were weak. Overall, the authors didn’t find convincing evidence that apps were effective, only “highly suggestive evidence” of efficacy for anxiety, stress, depression, and quality of life
Most people don’t think of their own households as reproducing sexist societal dynamics, research by Allison Daminger, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has shown. That would be too painful. Instead, we find ways to rationalize the housework disparity, making excuses like “She’s a perfectionist” and “He’s laid back.” This isn’t really true — as Daminger points out, some men who claim they aren’t detail-oriented hold jobs as project managers or surgeons.
Climate hazards like flooding, drought and wildfires are making known infectious diseases worse for people, according to a new study.
The research identified more than 1,000 pathways for events tied to climate change like extreme rainfall, sea level rise and heatwaves to make people sick, according to Jonathan Patz, one of the study’s co-authors.
“We’ve known for a long time the impacts of climate change,” said Patz, a professor with the Nelson Institute and Department of Population Health Sciences at UW-Madison, describing direct effects like heat waves and mosquito- and water-borne disease. “In this study, these viral and bacterial diseases show up as worsening from the effects of climate change.”
UW-Madison scientists studying the genetics of orangutans in zoos were stumped. The lineages they found didn’t match those made public when the orangutan genome was sequenced in 2011.
Quoted: “Catching the star engulfing a planet is going to be difficult to do” because it’s “a short-lived event,” said Melinda Soares-Furtado, a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a co-author of the study. “But the signatures that are left behind can be observable for much, much longer — even billions of years.”
University of Wisconsin researchers found a drug that reduces asthma attacks in children living in low-income urban neighborhoods, according to a study published in The Lancet.
Noted: The non-scientific survey the Ideas Lab has been conducting as part of its Main Street Agenda project has spotted a similar partisan breakdown, with Republicans far more likely to rank inflation and the state of the economy as their top concern heading into this fall’s midterm elections. The project is a collaboration between the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin, Wisconsin Public Radio and the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
24/7 Tempo reviewed health data from the 2022 County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute joint program, to identify the most obese metro areas in every state.
Ah, internships: a time for exploring new interests, hands-on learning, and…exploitation?
Not always. But often. Data from the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison estimates somewhere between 31% and 58% of internships in the United States don’t pay.
When a woman answering a customer-service number for InSinkErator was asked if the company can cite any research about the effects of using disposals in homes with septic systems, she pointed to a 1998 paper on the company’s website in which a company engineer summarizes and interprets research done at the University of Wisconsin.
People hospitalized with COVID-19 in the first 20 months of the pandemic were more likely to die if they had active cancer but not if they had a past history of cancer, according to a large new study led by UW-Madison researchers.
Chemotherapy and other treatments can suppress immune systems and cancer can deplete other physical reserves, making it harder to fight infections like COVID-19, said Dr. Margaret Nolan, the UW-Madison scientist who headed up the study.
Quoted: “We’re looking at 18 different varieties from around the world and which ones can maybe produce the best grain or the best for future use if industrial hemp becomes more of a mainstream crop,” UW-Madison Extension Chippewa County Agricultural agent, Jerry Clark, said.
UW-Madison Extension Buffalo County Agricultural Educator, Carl Duley, says the fiber and grain produced from industrial hemp has many different uses.
“Right now they are approved for human food, not for animal feed at this point, but they are used a lot in health food stores like granola,” Duley said. “There’s a lot of flour made after the oil is squeezed out.”
Climate change is an issue that scientists across the globe have been trying to combat since the late 1800s.
Warming temperatures and increased rainfall over the past few decades have brought uncertainty to Wisconsin’s agricultural sector. One of the major causes of this erratic weather is the greenhouse gasses that continue to warm the planet.
But a small group of scientists at the University of Wisconsin are working on a solution.
An antibody drug decreased asthma attacks by 27% in Black and Hispanic children and adolescents who have severe asthma, are prone to asthma attacks and live in low-income urban neighborhoods, a federally funded study led by UW-Madison researchers found.
Medications like mepolizumab have “revolutionized” treatment for adults with severe asthma, but data in children and diverse populations had been limited, said Dr. Daniel Jackson, a UW School of Medicine and Public Health professor of pediatrics who led the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health.
From the 1930s through the 1970s, roughly a third of women in Puerto Rico were sterilized under population-control policies that coerced women after their second child, according to a publication by the University of Wisconsin.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and collaborating institutions have published a new collection of research papers that identify ways to improve emergency care for people with dementia.
Daniel Grabois, an assistant professor of horn at UW-Madison, joins the show to tell us what electro-acoustic music is, and to tell us about the Electro-Acoustic Research Space that makes it possible for him and his students to experiment with instruments.
“If climate is changing, the risk of these diseases are changing,” said study co-author Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Glioblastoma is one of the most deadly forms of cancer, often returning with a vengeance after surgery to remove it. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have now developed an immunity-boosting hydrogel that can be injected into the brain after surgery to clear out remaining cancer stem cells.
The most likely issue to be experienced with a poorly drained houseplant is root rot. As explained by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Horticulture, this is the common name for any number of diseases that kill off a plant by destroying its roots. Many of these diseases are caused by four different species of fungi, which are commonly found in wet soil: Pythium, Phytophthora, Rhizoctonia solani, and Fusarium.
A University of Wisconsin analysis recently ranked DuPage the healthiest county in the state when it comes to health factors like smoking and access to doctors.
Downsizing a workforce by 1% can lead to a 31% increase in voluntary turnover, according to a study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of South Carolina.
Dr. Donoughe contacted Christopher Rycroft, an applied mathematician now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and showed him the dancing nuclei. ‘Wow!’ Dr. Rycroft said. He had never seen anything like it, but he recognized the potential for a data-powered collaboration; he and Jordan Hoffmann, then a doctoral student in Dr. Rycroft’s lab, joined the study.
Noted: Beyond Usona, the Midwest has been waking up to psychedelic medicine’s potential. UW-Madison and University of Michigan both started research centers for psychedelic drugs in 2021. Ohio State launched such a center earlier this year. University of Chicago has a leading researcher in the field in Harriet de Wit. And the Medical College of Wisconsin has one of the best serotonin-based pharmacology researchers in John McCorvy.
Scientists identified the moth with the help of the University of Wisconsin Diagnostic Lab.
Guests include assistant scientist Tyler Lark and Yanhua Xie, a postdoctoral research associate, both at UW-Madison’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE).
We’ve never seen anything quite like this in our politics.
There have been bitter divisions in the past — the Civil War and Vietnam Era come to mind — but at no time in our history has politics been so fraught with anger, distrust and disinformation — and turbocharged by algorithms that reward fighting and conflict and discourage deliberation.
We need to find our way through this thicket, and I think it begins with encouraging thoughtful discussion.
That’s why we’re collaborating this year with the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wisconsin Public Radio on a project we’re calling Wisconsin’s Main Street Agenda.
In 2020, a study from the University of Wisconsin–Madison found “considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens.”
A UW-Madison educational center celebrated its 30-year anniversary Tuesday.
The OJ Noer Turfgrass Educational Facility is a research facility for professors to study and develop turf grass for the state. It is located on South Pleasant View Road in Verona.
The news came as no surprise to Karen Oberhauser, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. A globally recognized expert on monarch butterflies, Oberhauser has been studying the species for nearly 40 years.
A 2020 study by the Department of Dermatology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison looked into the effects of prolonged exposure to UV and LED light used for gel polish manicures.
The United States has been overcome with extreme weather events over the past week from wildfires to droughts to floods. A new report from UW-Madison shows Wisconsin is also dealing with its fair share of climate change impacts, too.
