Aclinical trial of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine in children under 12 will start enrolling participants at UW Health Friday, as researchers and regulators move closer to potentially authorizing shots for the only age group not yet eligible in the United States.
The pretty white flowers and stem of the false asphodel (scientific name Triantha occidentalis), a common species found on the west coast of North America, were studied in more detail by University of British Columbia and University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.
The DNR’s most recent estimate of wolves in Wisconsin, during the winter of 2019-20, put the population at about 1,000. The department’s goal is 350 wolves statewide. But conservationists maintain the February hunt was devastating to the state’s wolf population since it was held during the animal’s mating season. A University of Wisconsin study released last month also estimated another 100 wolves were killed by poachers after the animals lost their endangered species protection.
The Company is working with the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System under a clinical trial agreement to conduct a Phase I/II clinical study to evaluate the safety and feasibility of psilocybin in adults with methamphetamine use disorder. Study start-up activities have taken place and enrollment activities are to continue throughout the remainder of the year. As a result of the study, clinical data will provide proprietary and valuable information on the safety, efficacy and dosing of psilocybin to support future pivotal FDA clinical studies in oral forms of delivery including oral thin film strips. The clinical study will be conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of Medicine and Public Health and School of Pharmacy, which holds a Wisconsin special authorization and DEA license to perform clinical research with psilocybin.
Noted: Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has developed something called the integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT). IIT holds that consciousness is actually a kind of information and can be measured mathematically, though doing so is not very straightforward and has caused some to discount the theory.
A new study out of Madison, Wisconsin shows that building dense, amenity-rich market-rate housing in vulnerable neighborhoods leads to higher evictions.
While there are significant differences between Madison and San Francisco, the data has implications for new local attempts to encourage more dense housing into existing residential areas that may be threatened by gentrification and displacement.
The author, University of Wisconsin Professor Revel Sims, looked at areas where five-unit or larger buildings were constructed in areas with older buildings and lower-income residents.
Noted: The team, led by Sebastian Heinz of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, took a look at several telescopes’ data from the 2015 outburst to probe the dust clouds, finding that most of the grains are likely graphite and silica. More importantly, the observations found that the dust cloud is not the same density in all directions, contradicting the theory suggested in previous studies.
Quoted: Climate change is driving the extreme heat and record-breaking drought that have set the stage for wildfires to burn more than 3 million acres so far this year, according to Jonathan Patz, a professor and director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Patz has served as a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned in its 2018 report that drastic shifts are needed to reduce global warming to stave off the worst effects of climate change.
“These extreme events of drought and heat waves are definitely linked to climate change,” said Patz. “They don’t only affect those states that are burning in the West, but the wildfire smoke travels across the country. We’ve seen very high levels in northern Wisconsin and across the state.”
The groundbreaking of the $60 million Usona facility came as the company embarks on a Phase 2 study of psilocybin to treat depression. That study will take place at UW-Madison, Johns Hopkins University, Yale University and other sites. A first-in-human study by Usona is planned for 2022.
The first sequenced genome of a daddy-long-legs has revealed the genetic tricks that these creatures use to make their lengthy, grasping legs.
Most of these leggy invertebrates are not spiders but belong instead to a group called harvestmen (order Opiliones). Guilherme Gainett at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Vanessa González at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC and their colleagues sequenced the genome of the long-legged harvestman Phalangium opilio and found that the creature has a single cluster of Hox genes, a type of master gene that influences the body plan of all animals.
Noted: Some scientists have wondered whether such duplications might help explain some of the wild variety of the animal kingdom, said Prashant Sharma, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and also an author of the study. Complex genomes and more varied organisms might seem to go together.
But despite harvestmen’s variety — there are more than 6,000 species in the group — there is no sign of duplication in the harvestman genome, the researchers report. And horseshoe crabs, arachnids that had at least one genome duplication in their evolution, have only a handful of species.
“Arachnids really challenge this idea,” Dr. Sharma said. Having more genes might help organisms diversify, but only if environmental conditions and other factors line up correctly as well, he speculates.
After Rhinelander Mayor Chris Frederickson found out in 2019 that at least one of his city’s municipal water wells was contaminated with a dangerous compound, he got in touch with Jim Tinjum.
Tinjum is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also heads the geological engineering program, which is how Frederickson found him.
“I was contacted to help them figure out where the PFAS was coming from and what to do about it,” Tinjum said.
Noted: University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers warned in a new study that Wisconsin’s plans for another hunt “raise questions about sustainability.”
The state’s stated goal is maintaining a stable population of wolves, a top predator that helps sustain ecosystem health, study co-author and Madison environmental studies professor Adrian Treves told The National Geographic.
Treves called plans for a November hunt unwise, particularly since officials have no clear understanding of the impact of the February killings. Hunters often seek out the largest animals, for example, which are frequently pack leaders whose loss could leave entire groups to starve to death. The killing of fertile females would further reduce the population.
Researchers led by Guilherme Gainett from the University of Wisconsin-Madison first sequenced the genome of Phalangium opilio (technically not a spider but a close relative), thought to be among the most widespread of more than 6,000 different species of daddy long legs — also known as harvestmen — documented worldwide.
Noted: Utilizing RNA interference, researchers at the University of Wisconsin Madison were able to sequence the genome of Phalangium opilio and modify six of the arachnids’ eight legs and turn them into half their normal size.
“We’ve shown… how the combinations of these genes create a blueprint in the embryo to differentiate between what’s going to be a leg that is used for walking and what is going to be a pedipalp, which can be used to manipulate food and assess the surroundings,” the study’s lead author, Guilherme Gainett at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview with New Scientist.
Researchers studying how poverty and adversity affect children’s development often track how negative experiences — be they poverty itself or factors such as having an incarcerated parent — affect decision-making, stress levels or aspects of brain function. But Seth Pollak, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says that most of these efforts miss a crucial but long-overlooked component: children’s perceptions of their experiences.
Pollak spoke with Knowable Magazine about the importance of studying individual differences in experience.
Noted: The study started in Dane County and contains a disproportionate level of samples from that area, cautioned David O’Connor, one of the authors of the new study and a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Scientists stressed that despite having comparable levels of virus, vaccinated patients remain far less likely than the unvaccinated to become severely ill, hospitalized or die from COVID-19.
Also, O’Connor said the 83 Dane County cases showed that unvaccinated people are more than twice as likely to get the virus as those who’ve been vaccinated.
“What we’re seeing here is that the vaccines are doing a superb job of keeping people out of the hospital,” O’Connor said.
Analysis of nearly 300 COVID-positive samples collected in Wisconsin between June 28 and July 24 showed no significant difference in “viral load” between 79 fully vaccinated people and 212 unvaccinated people, according to a study by researchers at UW-Madison, Public Health Madison and Dane County and Exact Sciences.
Noted: Some species’ hindmost legs can grow so long that competing suitors will line up to compare them. “Whichever male has the longest leg wins, and it’s the one that is going to mate,” Guilherme Gainett, a developmental biologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me.
Some answers might be hidden in the harvestmen genome. Gainett and Sharma, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, recently teamed up with the genomics expert Vanessa González, of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, to cobble together the first-ever draft of the genome of Phalangium opilio, the world’s most widespread harvestman species.
Quoted: “For this idea of boosters, it’s going to be hard to control. You just have to rely on local public health departments and local providers to prevent that from happening,” said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Fascinated by the way these appendages develop differently, Guilherme Gainett at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues teamed up with genome specialists at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC to draft a sequence of the genome of a lab-raised harvestman.
“We’ve shown… how the combinations of these genes create a blueprint in the embryo to differentiate between what’s going to be a leg that is used for walking and what is going to be a pedipalp, which can be used to manipulate food and assess the surroundings,” says Gainett.
Construction of a separate facility for Usona comes as it conducts a phase 2 study of psilocybin to treat depression at UW-Madison and six other sites, including Johns Hopkins University and Yale University. An early phase, first-in-human study of a second, novel compound is planned for 2022.
Revel Sims, an assistant professor in the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that when housing with five or more units is under construction and as residents begin to sign leases, neighborhood evictions increase.
Noted: “Karl Polanyi for President,” a 2016 article in Dissent that Konczal coauthored with Patrick Iber, is a useful companion piece to Freedom from the Market, and helps illuminate the intellectual genealogy of its arguments.
As Konczal and Iber explain, Polanyi’s most famous work, The Great Transformation (1944), is devoted in large part to a critique of the idea that the so-called “free market” is a precondition for, and guarantor of, freedom more generally. “Polanyi’s work dismantles this argument in two important ways,” they write, first by showing that “markets are planned everywhere they exist.”
Noted: La Follette School Assistant Professor Lindsay Jacobs is one of the authors of the report
Americans may be richer than they think and less unequal than they’ve been led to believe. That’s the takeaway from a recent working paper by five economists from the University of Wisconsin and the Federal Reserve, which adds to standard wealth measures by including Social Security and pension guarantees.
Noted: The idea, first put forth in a 2012 paper by Jennifer Francis, now at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, and Stephen Vavrus, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is that two well-established trends — Arctic amplification (intensified global warming at higher latitudes) and depleted sea ice — can force the polar jet stream to dip farther south, thus causing more intense bouts of winter weather than might have otherwise occurred.
Noted: In July, University of Wisconsin scientist Adrian Treves and two colleagues concluded in their new study that the population of gray wolves in Wisconsin is significantly lower than estimated by the DNR. While the DNR made claims about how the February trophy killing season would not cause much of a change in the overall wolf population numbers, mass slaughter during the middle of the breeding season would indeed have a significant impact on the population. This study shows that the population of gray wolves in Wisconsin in April likely falls between 695-751 rather than the far fluffier projections presented by the Wisconsin DNR.
Noted: Dr. Tiffany Green, who was not among the authors of the new research, told Medical News Today that the study aligns with separate research regarding patients who had undergone a cesarean birth.
Dr. Green, of the departments of population health sciences and obstetrics & gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is senior author of a study that was presented at the 2020 Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine Conference.
Dr. Green and her team found that, “Black patients reported higher average levels of pain compared to white patients, but still received similar amounts of pain medication.” Controlling for reported pain scores, explained Dr. Green, they received less pain medication than their white counterparts. This was also true of Asian patients.
Written by Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin and the author of Shape and How Not to Be Wrong.
Quoted: The CDC based their recommendation on new evidence about the delta variant. Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said he would classify the latest science as “a bit of a game-changer.”
“We didn’t know this was going to be the case until we discovered that people who are vaccinated and get a breakthrough infection can potentially spread that to other people and that wasn’t the case before delta,” Sethi said.
Quoted: Public health officials do not know how long the immune system protects itself after an infection with COVID-19 and encourage all eligible people to get the vaccine.
“The duration of that protection is unknown,” said Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. “The science is already showing that people who have had the vaccine have better responses to the (delta) variant than people who had past infection.”
Quoted: The authority of the minister and her deputies in advocating vaccination doesn’t guarantee a new national attitude, says Aikande Kwayu, honorary research fellow specializing in political governance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is based in Tanzania.
“Their actions and statements during the last administration influenced a lot of conspiracies, lies and also denial about the pandemic,” says Kwayu.
Quoted: Lead author Adrian Treves, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, argues that without a more precise number the hunt quota should be set as low as is possible.
“A quota of one would comply with the statute [mandating a hunt] and acknowledge that we have no clue how successfully the wolves reproduced this year,” Treves said. “Because the hunt happened during the mating season, we would need good data on how many packs produced pups, and that is data we do not have.”
Quoted: “I have The Nature and Properties of Soils in front of me — the standard textbook,” said Gregg Sanford, a soil researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “The theory of soil organic carbon accumulation that’s in that textbook has been proven mostly false … and we’re still teaching it.”
Quoted: “If you look at the language of some of these bills, they’re really pretty broad,” says Diana Hess, dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s school of education. “There’s a lot of things that are in the language that would make it really hard to teach civic education.”
For today’s show, Tuesday host Carousel Bayrd talks about uncovering UW–Madison’s campus history with Kacie Lucchini Butcher, director of the Public History Project. They discuss some of the project’s research, including fraternity ties to the Ku Klux Klan, housing discrimination, blackface and minstrelsy on campus, and the UWPD.
Quoted: Adrian Treves, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied wolf-hound conflicts, found that neighboring Michigan, which has stricter hounding regulations, has seen far fewer dogs injured or killed by wolves. Lighter regulation in Wisconsin means more dogs in the woods, Treves said, which leads to more conflict. “Houndsmen prefer to hunt in a place that lets them do what they want to do.”
Noted: Another, and probably underestimated, factor may be the weather. Mississippi summers usually see average temperatures rise above 80℉ (26.7℃), a threshold at which the likelihood of violence in prisons increases.
That is the finding of a working paper by Anita Mukherjee of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Nicholas Sanders of Cornell University. The authors matched county-level weather variations across Mississippi with violent incidents reported in the state’s 36 prisons and jails between 2004 and 2010. Using these data, they built a statistical model that controlled for the time of year that the violence took place, the type of institution and other factors. They calculated that on days with average temperatures of 80℉ or higher the chances of violence increased by 20%. The hot weather leads to an average of 44 additional incidents of severe violence—those that result in serious injury or death—each year,
Noted: Green county has seen one of the state’s fastest growths in Latino population, increasing by an estimated 228% from 2000 to 2019, according to the Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Monroe is the largest city in Green county and has seen a steady increase of Latino immigrants over 20 years. With a population of only about 10,800, new people stand out, which has made the adjustment, like the farm work, incredibly difficult for some dairy workers.
Quoted: “These early plants are relatively easy and that’s a good place to start,” said Greg Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in the development of climate-friendly energy technology. “As that gets shown and proven, you get some transportation networks, then it gets easier to do the harder stuff later.”
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison plan to meld computer modeling and social science in hopes of providing better responses to future pandemics. The goal is to be ready with quicker and more equitable strategies to distribute vaccines.
Research at UW-Madison has been crucial to the COVID-19 response in Wisconsin, and the university is now getting some new help to keep the research going — to try to get ahead of whatever the next threat may be. Virology professor Thomas Friedrich is one of the researchers involved currently with coronavirus variant sequencing.
Lidar stands for Light Detection and Ranging. Researchers at UW-Madison are using this technology to see smoke in the atmosphere.
The American Medical Association Foundation announced on Tuesday that the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Public Health and Medicine will be the first institution to participate in its new National LGBTQ+ Fellowship Program, which aims to combat shortcomings in the medical care provided to LGBTQ people in the United States.
Cardenolides, also known as cardiac glycosides, are similar to digitalis, a plant compound used in medicine to help with heart conditions, according to JourneyNorth, a citizen-science program operated by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.
Madison:The University of Wisconsin Center for Human Genomics and Precision Medicine opened a new clinic Friday that will use the latest genetic technology, and exploit connections to top scientists around the world in order to help patients who have been at the mercy of unknown diseases. Stephen Meyn, who directs the Center for Human Genomics and Precision Medicine, said the new clinic represents an initial investment of several million dollars and is expected to take on about 100 cases a year “and ramp up from there.” The clinic has already “reviewed more than 50 cases with a wide range of conditions from birth defects to neurologic problems to skeletal disorders and immune system problems, Meyn said. The clinic, located in the Waisman Center, will partner with the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, the Biotechnology Center at UW-Madison, Stanford University in California and The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Meyn said that in addition to the clinic for patients, the project will also include research.
Extremophile research was pioneered by the late Thomas Brock, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He found, against all expectations, that certain hardy microbes could thrive in geothermal springs hot enough to poach an egg. The microbiologist’s curiosity led to the isolation of a molecule—from a heat-loving bacterium—that is now used in labs across the world to amplify and sequence DNA. Brock passed away in April, but his legacy lives on.
The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health will be the first site to host a new national fellowship that aims to make the doctor’s office more supportive of LGBTQ patients.
Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research,_ September 2009 The Findings Research has already shown generations of antacid-crunching deans that the more often college students get drunk, the more likely they are to hurt themselves. Using data from the College Health Intervention Projects, a survey of 12,900 students that screens for problem drinking and other health data, Marlon Mundt of the University of Wisconsin pinned it down: The chance of male college students having an alcohol-related injury jumps by 19 percent for each day a month they guzzle eight or more drinks. Among women, it increases by 10 percent for each day they consume five or more drinks.
Twelve years after scientists in Wisconsin delved into all the genes of a young Monona boy, diagnosed a new disease and saved the child’s life, a new clinic will try to do the same for scores of other people suffering from mysterious illnesses.
Quoted: “We used public data that is so often used against people to help correct situations or improve situations that might be barriers to employment, housing, education, childcare and health,” explained Marsha Mansfield, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Economic Justice Institute and director of LIFT Dane.
States around the country are gearing up for projects that could pair engineering schools and industry, but the dean of UW-Madison’s College of Engineering warned this week the state will be at a disadvantage unless there’s more investment in infrastructure needed to compete. “If we don’t act soon, we’re going to lose out,” said Ian Robertson, dean of Madison’s 4,500-student engineering college. “Others are going to get ahead of us. They’re all gearing up to go after the Endless Frontier money. It’s that simple.”
The league’s Scientific Advisory Board on Thursday announced a four-year, $4 million award to a team of medical researchers led by the University of Wisconsin. The study is part of the NFL’s effort to better understand and prevent lower-extremity injuries, including soft tissue strains such as hamstrings.
The NFL announced on Thursday that they have awarded $4 million to fund a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin. The award, which will be given over four years, is devoted to researching new ways to prevent and treat hamstring injuries.
According to a recent University of Wisconsin study, hundreds of thousands of acres of native forests and grasslands have been converted to agricultural use in the last year — and millions of acres in the last decade — with no penalty to the growers. California vineyards have been eating away native oak woodlands. Wheat farms are taking over former prairie lands in the Northeast. Overseas, organic palm oil sold in the U.S. is being produced on forestland that was once crucial orangutan habitat.
The NFL has awarded the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public health a $4 million grant to study prevention and treatment of hamstring injuries for elite football players. The research is part of an NFL effort to better understand and prevent strains to lower extremities including soft tissues such as hamstrings.
“This will be the largest hamstring study ever conducted in the world,” said UW Professor of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation Bryan Heiderscheit.
A new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum paints a grim picture of the future of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which was facing mounting financial challenges even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Noted: A recent study from UW-Madison showed that about an additional 100 wolves had been killed during the hunt last winter on top of the 218 killed by hunters and trappers.
“Researchers estimate that a majority of these additional, uncounted deaths are due to something called cryptic poaching, where poachers hide evidence of illegal killings,” a university release about the study said.
