Babies Born With Low Birth Weight: Reflects the percentage of live births where the infant weighed less than 2,500 grams, or about 5.5 pounds. (2012-2018; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, The University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. County Health Rankings & Roadmaps)
A report from the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, released this month, concluded that the Maricopa County recount “lacks the essential elements” of a credible review.
UW Health is seeking people at risk for Alzheimer’s disease, but with no signs of it, to study an experimental drug like one approved this month amid hope and controversy.
“The question we are asking is ’How does gravity make cotton roots grow?’ and the experiment is to remove gravity and the only place you’ll get to do that is on the space station,” [UW–Madison botany professor] Simon Gilroy said.
“It’s very rare to find a fossil like this, with a face in good condition. You dream of finding this stuff.”
JOHN HAWKS, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, speaking about the discovery of a massive skull that is at least 140,000 years old. Scientists said it could be a new species of ancient human.
Quoted: “We were very surprised,” says Timothy Gómez, professor of neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the new study. “We were expecting this to be all mTOR.”
She was studying athletic training at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when she met the athlete who would change the trajectory of her career.
Now a 34-year-old assistant professor at UW-Madison’s Department of Kinesiology, Mosinee native Julie Stamm was an undergraduate then, in the midst of the clinical portion of her studies — working with a high school football team, getting hands-on training in treating athletic injuries.
“We had a lot of concussions that fall, probably seven or eight just in preseason camp,” Stamm said.
Quoted: This suggests that butterflies as far north as Scandinavia are affected by habitat in countries like Chad and Nigeria. “It’s brilliant, really,” said Karen Oberhauser, a monarch expert and professor of entomology at the University of Wisconsin Madison, who was not involved in the study. “Until you know this, you’d never think that, ‘Wow, what’s going on so far away could have an impact.”
Noted: Regardless of the specific cause of your hamster’s hair loss, your veterinarian will be your best ally in coming up with a strategy to tackle the problem. Christoph Mans, DVM, a clinical associate professor of zoological medicine at the University of Wisconsin, said that in some cases deep skin scrapes are necessary for a diagnosis. Finding the cause can be important in case there’s a serious health problem at play.
Noted: Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered that mindfulness meditation could actually enhance immune function. Participants in the study were injected with the flu vaccine. Half of them also received mindfulness training, while the others did not. After eight weeks, the mindfulness group showed greater levels of antibodies, effectively giving them better flu-fighting ability. (P.S. a strong immune response isn’t the only health benefit of meditation.)
Deb Fitzgerald sits down with Steve Vavrus, Sr. Scientist at the Nelson Institute at UW-Madison, to talk about climate change and what’s in store for Wisconsin in general and Door County’s specifically. They also discussed what’s causing climate change, and some ways people can change their behaviors to reduce their carbon footprints.
Quoted: “It compounds on itself,” said Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wisconsin Madison. “When you’re dry, you get warm. When you’re excessively warm, you tend to build and strengthen the anticyclone, which encourages continuation of clear skies, which in turn encourages a lack of precipitation, which makes it drier, which makes the incoming solar radiation more able to heat the ground.”
Quoted: “The spotter sensor is a basketball-sized, solar-powered yellow buoy that will be anchored,” said Chin Wu, a lead researcher from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The GPS drifter tracker looks rather like a red post floating upright in the water. It will be drifting with the current. We’d appreciate it if the public would allow the equipment to operate.”
Quoted: “Previous evidence has shown that sleep may influence the development or progression of Alzheimer’s disease in various ways,” Barbara B. Bendlin, PhD, the study’s author from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said in a statement. “For example, disrupted sleep or lack of sleep may lead to amyloid plaque buildup because the brain’s clearance system kicks into action during sleep. Our study looked not only for amyloid but for other biological markers in the spinal fluid as well.”
Two teams of researchers — one from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and the other at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands — designed experiments to identify which genetic mutations were essential for a successful jump from birds to people. They injected bird flu viruses into the noses of ferrets, waited for the viruses to replicate, and then transferred the new viruses to new ferrets. Soon the viruses evolved to become better at replicating in the ferrets.
Only counties with populations of 25,000 or more were included. The percentage of population reporting sub-optimal health is from the 2021 County Health Rankings and Roadmaps, a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
UW-Madison professors at the forefront of sequencing COVID-19 strains in the community are expanding their research tracking the virus’ spread while fostering closer ties with more public health agencies with the hope of improving future pandemic response.
Noted: John Hawks is an expert in paleoanthropology, genetics, and evolution. He is also professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Keith Findley co-founded the Wisconsin Innocence Project, and was the co-director for years. Now he teaches on criminal law, evidence and wrongful convictions at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
“One of the things that innocence advocates have noticed over the years is that not always, but sometimes, prosecutors, when confronted with very powerful evidence of innocence, go to great lengths to try to preserve the convictions,” Findley said. “Including making plea offers that are essentially so good that it’s hard to turn them down, even for an innocent individual.”
Noted: Fittingly, the thrashing invaders were first confirmed in the state by both Williams and Brad Herrick, ecologist and jumping worm specialist at UW-Madison Arboretum. The worms were discovered during a 2013 talk they were leading about invasive species at the Arboretum in Madison.
In 2013 when the jumping worms were first documented, they were probably already established in Wisconsin and the Midwest, Herrick said.
“They have been in North America for around 100 years,” he said, creeping here from the northeastern part of the country. “The Midwest states have been the recent invasion.”
Herrick, also known as Dr. Worm by Williams, is beginning his PhD study on the biology, ecology and control of jumping worms. He is helping lead a statewide jumping worm survey beginning in July.
Noted: Milwaukee’s new traffic unit is using DOT data to focus its enforcement efforts on intersections and stretches of road identified as particularly dangerous. The DOT partners with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory to collect collision report data that flows in from law enforcement agencies across the state every day and organize it into an interactive statewide map of crashes.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Carbone Cancer Center is looking at new ways to prevent colon cancer for those living outside city limits. Colorectal cancer is the second-most deadly form of cancer, but when caught early, it’s easy to prevent.
Research on UHSA’s campus will exclusively use Revive’s intellectual property, developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with the aim to be the foundation for novel psychedelic therapies for research and commercial use in Antigua and Barbuda;
UW-Madison professors at the forefront of sequencing COVID-19 strains in the community are expanding their research tracking the virus’ spread while fostering closer ties with more public health agencies with the hope of improving future pandemic response.
UW-Madison agronomy and environmental studies professor Chris Kucharik details how limited rain and hot weather are contributing to drought conditions across southern Wisconsin.
Dr. Dudley Lamming is a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism. His latest study’s press release states that in 2014, Lamming was reading about an Australian study that had come upon something remarkable: The mice that had been fed the least amount of protein were the healthiest.
To be fair to the opponents of gain-of-function research, most experts agree that some extreme versions of this work are truly reckless, Moreover, as Jacobsen wrote, lab leaks have occurred with some frequency over the past few decades. An early controversy over gain-of-function research came to a head in 2011, when University of Wisconsin researcher Yoshihiro Kawaoka announced that his lab had successfully modified the highly lethal H5N1 bird flu to make it airborne among ferrets.
When we don’t sleep, we’re irritable, unproductive, and unhealthy. When we don’t sleep for prolonged periods of time—and suffer from what’s known as chronic insomnia—life gets even worse. Chronic insomnia is linked to near-countless physical and mental health issues. For instance, this research published in the scientific journal Circulation reports an association between insomnia and increased risk of heart disease and stroke. Other studies, including this new report released by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, conclude that sleep issues may increase the likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s.
The funds will also allow MadREP to update its comprehensive economic development strategy, called Advance Now 2.0, as well as the extensive accompanying reports on industry sectors. The 900 pages of reports, released in 2019 after years of research by MadREP and University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension, examined several key sectors for the region. Now, with new data released since, the agency would like to refresh those reports before acting on their findings. The agencies have not yet determined what contractors they will hire to conduct the studies.
Morgridge Institute for Research Virology Director Paul Ahlquist identifies both research advancements and social science as the key to tackling the next pandemic.
Quoted: Dry conditions have been holding pretty steady for the past month or so, said Christopher Kucharik, a climate researcher and professor of agronomy and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The longer they continue, though, the more intense drought becomes, with southeast Wisconsin moving from a moderate to severe level as June started and hot weather descended.
For hundreds of years, Wisconsin’s indigenous languages faced suppression and extermination. Concerted efforts to wipe out native tongues played out in a variety of arenas — from schools to government policies.
Enwejig hopes to address some of those past injustices. The group, which formed last year on the UW-Madison campus, works to bring visibility and recognition to Wisconsin’s native languages.
For more on the group’s mission, our producer Jonah Chester spoke with Brian McInnes, an associate professor of civil society and community studies/American Indian studies at UW-Madison.
A new center at UW-Madison will be studying health disparities in Wisconsin and beyond. Its early work will look at health outcomes in the state’s different neighborhoods. We talk with a doctor leading the research about the big questions she’s hoping to answer.
For the first time, cotton seeds will germinate and grow in space over the next few days, under the supervision down here of UW-Madison botany professor Simon Gilroy.
Gilroy says he wants to clarify this is not to supply fabric for those in orbit. “Yeah, our classic joke when talking about the experiment is the astronauts are going to make their own suits. It’s not what’s its for,” Gilroy tells WUWM.
A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is taking his experiments to new heights at the International Space Station (ISS).
Dr. Simon Gilroy is a botany professor at the university. An experiment he and colleagues have been working on for the past three years is now making its way to the ISS after being launched Thursday.
As storm-water infrastructure is failing, climate change is driving more frequent and intense rainfall. A 2019 study by University of Wisconsin researchers found in the eastern half of the United States, 100-year storms — ones with a 1 percent chance of happening in any year — were occurring almost twice as often as in 1950. In 2020, there were a record 20 storm and hurricane events each causing more than $1 billion in damages, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Researchers Dave and Shelby O’Connor spent the last year understanding the virus that shut down the world. But for decades, the husband and wife have worked to understand another deadly virus.
They’re using a $1.2 million dollar grant from the American Cancer Society to examine more than 200 rural primary care clinics in the upper Midwest.
Republicans in the state legislature have approved education funding that’s more than a billion dollars short of what Gov. Evers proposed. We get the latest. Then, we talk about how a lifeguard shortage is affecting the state’s pools. And, we talk about an effort by UW-Madison to research health disparities.
University of Wisconsin-Madison botanist Simon Gilroy is set to launch cotton seeds to the International Space Station for experiments designed to improve cotton plants grown on Earth.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket scheduled to blast off Thursday from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center will carry 48 seeds from the UW-Madison botanist’s lab to the International Space Station, where astronauts will attempt to grow them in a system developed in Madison.
I think this view is overly rosy. If we scientists are not forced to confront the issues of laboratory safety and risky research in a serious and sustained manner, history suggests that we will not do so. In 2012, controversy erupted when it transpired that two sets of researchers — at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands — were altering highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses to enhance their transmissibility among mammals (to understand their potential to cause a pandemic). The subsequent debate led to a three-year moratorium on the funding of experiments designed to enhance the transmissibility or disease-causing capabilities of influenza viruses or coronaviruses.
That rapid change began to show up across the globe between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago, around the same time people began clearing land to grow crops, said Jack Williams, a UW-Madison geographer who uses fossil records to study how life adapts to climate change.
Economic conditions for Black residents are among the worst in urban America, despite sustained efforts to improve them. In Pittsburgh, nearly 45% of Black children live in poverty. Only Milwaukee, Buffalo and Cleveland have higher rates, according to a University of Wisconsin study last year of the nation’s 50 largest cities.
Some universities — including the University of California at Davis, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Johns Hopkins University — have public adoption pages for their own research animals.
Restricting dietary intake of certain amino acids may reduce obesity and diabetes while increasing longevity, even though many athletes build muscle and derive other health benefits from supplements of the compounds, UW-Madison research suggests.
SHAPE: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else, by Jordan Ellenberg. (Penguin Press, $28.) In fine-grained detail, “Shape” reveals how geometric thinking can allow for everything from fairer American elections to better pandemic planning. It offers a critique of how math is taught, an appreciation of its peculiar place in the human imagination and biographical sections about beautiful minds and splendid eccentrics. Ellenberg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is “rather spectacular at this sort of thing,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. His “preference for deploying all possible teaching strategies gives ‘Shape’ its hectic appeal; it’s stuffed with history, games, arguments, exercises.”
“There are many different pathways into mathematics,” said Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “There is the stereotype that interest in math displays itself early. That is definitely not true in general. It’s not the universal story — but it is my story.”
The University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute has released its 2021 County Health Rankings and found that every county in Wisconsin has a high percentage of excessive drinkers.
Wisconsin is the only state in the country where every county reported excessive drinking among 23% of its adult population or higher.
Researchers at the new UW Center for Health Disparities Research will study how an individual’s environment and social conditions may impact their health.
A new study of online internships shows that, among more than 10,000 students at 11 colleges, most virtual internships last year went to students in middle- and upper-income families, and more positions were unpaid than paid. The analysis, by the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, also found higher levels of dissatisfaction with virtual internships versus in-person ones, mostly due to limited opportunities for engagement and learning.
The year was 1947. The place, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Bacteriology professor Stanley Knight had long admired the research of Nobel laureate H.J. Muller, whose body of work within and after the Manhattan Project focused on mutations in living things exposed to radiation. Muller’s research had been weaponized, but his findings got Knight thinking: Could the science behind radiation-induced mutations be used for productive ends—to make a better piece of cheese? It was a highly Wisconsonian quest.
The high-pitched buzzing of the Cicada’s mating call is one of the most familiar sounds of summer. We see, or mostly hear, small amounts of these large and noisy insects every year, but this year they are coming in the billions if not trillions. Having been underground for 17 years the phenomenon known as Brood X have been emerging from the ground on the East Coast and the Midwest shedding their exoskeletons, and performing their mating call.
Director of UW-Madison’s Insect Diagnostic Lab and insect identification and biology expert Patrick Liesch joins Friday Buzz host Jonathan Zarov to talk about this phenomenon.
In a new study, researchers from the University of Wisconsin Madison asked over 800 local residents in the Madison metropolitan area to assess their attitudes towards using autonomous vehicles in the future and found that study respondents would be interested in using a driverless car about 31 percent of the time, a significant chunk more than taking the bus. Wissam Kontar, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin Madison and lead study author, says that with growing popularity and industry investment in autonomous vehicles, that this “excitement” may be “overshadowing potential environmental impacts.”
Quoted: “Cows in cities were milked every day, and people would bring milk in carts back to their neighbourhoods to sell it,” says John Lucey, food science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“As cities got bigger, milk got further away and took longer to get to the consumer, which meant pathogens could multiply.”
Noted: As it turns out, they have a national board of advisors to help them continually take stock of what books they’re offering (and what other resources they are creating), which includes author-illustrator Don Tate. They also signal boost the work and resources done by other groups, such as We Need Diverse Books, Embrace Race, and the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Noted: A 2018 study lead by University of Wisconsin, Madison professor of pediatrics Dr. Megan Moreno found that some companies were flouting regulations on marketing, with social media posts that appeal to teens and promote therapeutic benefits.
The study noted around 1% of social media posts appeared to directly target teens, with one post explicitly showing a young person in the promotion, with several others using well-known cartoon characters, Reuters reported.
Noted: The Second District Democrat has requested nine earmarks for road and bridge projects totaling $20 million and 30 earmarks for community projects totaling $56 million. The most expensive of these community projects is a $24 million plant research facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to replace a plant breeding facility that Pocan described as an “outdated World War Two building.”
Some of the other requests: $4 million to support the replacement of a 69-year-old hospital in Darlington (Lafayette County); $2.2 million for technology and equipment for the Baraboo fire and ambulance service; $1 million for a new Madison homeless shelter; $1 million toward a new Center for Black Excellence and Culture in Madison; $2.5 million for traumatic brain injury research at UW-Madison; $220,000 for a Reedsburg community center, $848,000 to upgrade Fitchburg’s stormwater management; and $400,000 for a machine shop and shed at the Wisconsin Cranberry Research Station in Black River Falls.
Months after two University of Wisconsin-Madison residence halls were forced into quarantine to stop rising COVID-19 cases on campus, a new study shows the university’s efforts to contain the spread were effective at stopping widespread community transmission.
University of Wisconsin- Madison’s efforts in controlling a COVID-19 outbreak in two of its residence halls likely helped contain the spread of it, a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found Friday.
