Noted: According to a Jan. 6 preprint of a study conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, if you develop a fever while you have COVID, you may be immune to COVID for a longer period of time.
“Such an inflammatory response may be key for developing a strong anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody response,” according to the study’s authors. And if you want to stay safe, These 3 Things Could Prevent Almost All COVID Cases, Study Finds.
Microsoft’s AI for Good Research Lab is working with the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), the University of Wisconsin, and the Quebec AI Institute (Mila). Mila was founded in 1993 by professor Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian computer scientist renowned for his work on artificial intelligence (AI) and neural networks. Professor Bengio was the principal investigator on the project.
In 2012, Koning, then a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, began investigating the Ngao valley reserves to see how widespread and successful they truly were. Over the next eight years, he spent a total of 18 months living with communities across the region, where he documented around 50 different reserves. He selected 23 to study in depth, interviewing villagers and snorkeling the waters inside and outside the reserves to count and measure fish, along with study co-author Martin Perales.
That said, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a battery-free implant that’s powered by stomach movements.
This new study, led by Fanny Mofette, a postdoctoral researcher in applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, looked at the effects of these alert messages on deforestation. Mofette and their team observed an 18% drop over two years in 22 African countries. The carbon emissions avoided with this reduction could be saving anywhere between $149 million and $696 million in economic damages, University of Wisconsin-Madison officials said in a statement.
Much of the South’s early communications infrastructure was installed in the 1960s, expanded during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and remains in use today. According to industry experts and data from institutions like the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, it is nearing the end of its life span. Without serious intervention by federal and state governments, these systems may not hold up to extreme weather events as they grow in intensity and frequency due to climate change.
The research was led by Fanny Moffette, a postdoctoral researcher in applied economics in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Moffette collaborated with Jennifer Alix-Garcia at Oregon State University, Katherine Shea at the World Resources Institute, and Amy Pickens at the University of Maryland.
Richard J. Davidson, director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has discovered that optimism practitioners are more active on the left side of the prefrontal cortex. This area of the brain, among other circuits, is responsible for our cognitive control and emotional response. Davidson proved that by consciously directing attention, we can influence our emotional reactions.
The news should be welcomed by the most hard-nosed of business people and economists as well. According to a recent news article published by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the savings resulting from the reduction in carbon emissions range anywhere from $149 million to $696 million. These fiscal numbers are “based on the ability of lower emissions to reduce the detrimental economic consequences of climate change.”
“They counted every rocket in the Soviet Union,” said Volker Radeloff, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose lab has used the images in its studies. “These images kept the Cold War cold.”
Over time, Corona cameras and film improved in quality. With an archive of almost one million images, the program detected Soviet missile sites, warships, naval bases and other military targets. “They counted every rocket in the Soviet Union,” said Volker Radeloff, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin — Madison whose lab has used the images in its studies. “These images kept the Cold War cold.”
“This is really a small revolution,” said study lead Fanny Moffette, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“In the last 10 to 15 years, there has been an explosion of research linking well-being in its many forms to numerous indicators of health. When that work [began], we didn’t know that purpose in life would emerge as such an important predictor of numerous health outcomes,” says Carol Ryff, psychologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and director of the MIDUS (Midlife in the United States) national study of Americans. Research has shown that people who have high levels of purpose in life spend fewer nights in hospitals, have lower odds of developing diabetes, and over two times lower risk of dying from heart conditions than do others.
Children can still read the emotional expressions of people wearing masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers say.
“We now have this situation where adults and kids have to interact all the time with people whose faces are partly covered, and a lot of adults are wondering if that’s going to be a problem for children’s emotional development,” said study co-author Ashley Ruba, a postdoctoral researcher in the Child Emotion Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
When masks cover a significant part of the face, how well can people understand the facial expressions of the people wearing them? Children can still understand, to an extent, the expressions on masked faces, according to a new study published in PLOS One.
Quoted: Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the forecast is slightly higher than last quarter’s estimate, partly because of a price rally for corn and soybeans seen around harvest time.
“Cash revenues, from soybeans especially, are up compared to where they were in September. It’s rare to have prices go up at harvest when everyone is bringing crops in,” Mitchell said
Quoted: “It’s a more hopeful view of well-being,” study researcher Cortland Dahl of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, a cross-disciplinary research institute, told HuffPost. “It’s the idea that you can take active steps that improve well-being, very much so in the way that you might take steps to improve physical health.”
Quoted: Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin who consulted on guidelines for prioritizing the COVID-19 vaccine for the National Academies of Science, said showing confidence in the vaccine is good reason for elected officials to be vaccinated early in the process. This may be especially true for Republican leaders. A December poll from ABC News/Ipsos showed Republicans were four times as likely as Democrats to say they would never get the vaccine.
“The amount of vaccine hesitancy that has been created in the last 20 years, 25 years is profoundly disturbing and goes deep into our society. So it takes a long time to build up confidence for people, and people who are unsure,” Charo told ABC News.
Quoted: Paul Barford, a University of Wisconsin computer science professor and co-author of a study on the effects of climate change on the internet, sounded less worried about cables sinking anytime soon, because of the financial interests of the telecoms firms involved with cables. But he still says planning now is important. From the get-go, “simply assessing what the current state of this infrastructure is would be something that the government could potentially motivate and potentially help to facilitate,” Barford said. And considering how “unbelievably expensive” these cables are, with costs running into “tens and hundreds of millions of dollars,” it would be a boon if the federal government poured in “funding to help facilitate new deployments or to harden current infrastructure.”
A contactless thermometer is helping some UW-Madison students track COVID-19 symptoms, and the thermometer was designed and created on the university’s campus.
Quoted: According to Dominique Brossard, a science and risk communication expert at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, that is because, “Humans do not make decisions based on facts. Facts alone do not change our mind.”
Bennett worries that Black kids aren’t afforded the same opportunities to imagine their way into mischief that white kids are. Surveying the children’s-entertainment landscape, he sees stories in which Black characters either don’t exist or exist merely to satisfy some goal of representation. Black authors are rarer still: According to data collected by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, less than 5 percent of children’s books published in 2019 were written by Black authors.
The lead researcher of the study at Wisconsin, Tim McGuine, said in an interview in August that “the greatest risk [to student-athletes] is not covid-19. It’s suicide and drug use.” The study caught the eye of the organization overseeing high school sports, the National Federation of State High School Associations, which was already dealing with an uptick in reports from state athletic directors about mental health concerns for teen athletes whose seasons were in flux.
Enter Revive Therapeutics, a biotech company with its fingers in several pies: the emerging psychedelics industry, where it has a research partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison for formulation development and a clinical trial for substance use using psilocybin; the cannabis industry, where it has patented several unique cannabinoid delivery methods; and more recently, the market for coronavirus treatments, where it is one of fewer than 20 companies undertaking a phase 3 FDA trial—and the one with the lowest market cap.
The Madison School District and the UW-Madison School of Education announced Monday the formation of a joint early literacy task force to analyze teaching methods for reading and make recommendations to the district to reduce achievement gaps.
Noted: The new Harris Poll was commissioned by DailyPay, the Bipartisan Policy Center Funding Our Future campaign, and The Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin. The survey was conducted online from Nov. 17-19 and surveyed 2,075 U.S. adults ages 18 and older, among whom 593 are millennials between the ages 24-39.
“This data shows the resilience of younger generations in the face of the second major economic shock of their financial lives,” added J. Michael Collins of the Center for Financial Security, referring to this year’s pandemic and the Great Recession of 2007-2009.
Quoted: “Research would confirm again and again, when people feel that what’s asked from them is not actually followed by those in power, there’s a sense of betrayal that will occur,” said Dominique Brossard, professor and chair of the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Some scientists believed from the start that it would be possible to repurpose this basic cellular function for medicine. In 1990, a Hungarian-born scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, Katalin Kariko brashly predicted to a surgeon colleague that his work would soon be obsolete, replaced by the power of messenger RNA therapies. That same year, a team at the University of Wisconsin startled the scientific world with a paper that showed it was possible to inject a snippet of messenger RNA into mice and turn their muscle cells into factories, creating proteins on demand.
The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease flagged the article, “Observations on Homosexuality Among University Students,” which was written by UW professor Benjamin Glover. The study based itself on psychotherapy work and Glover’s belief that he could “cure” homosexual attraction.
Over a few weeks, there was nearly a 300% increase of patients in Wisconsin exhibiting the condition compared to 2019, said Lisa Arkin, director of pediatric dermatology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Trends were similar across the United States. “This was a real pivot because there aren’t so many dermatologists doing COVID-19 research,” Arkin said. “Suddenly, in the spring, there was an avalanche of patients, many of whom had had symptoms for several weeks.”
MIT professor and physician Jeffry Harris utilized public health data with anonymized smartphone tracking data to reach his conclusion. Harris collected the smartphone data from late August through early October and compared it to COVID-19 cases from the 19 census tracts on and around UW-Madison’s campus.
A recent complaint against the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center (WNPRC) over mistreatment of animal research subjects at UW-Madison is just one item in a decades-long list of grievances animal rights groups have brought against the laboratory.
The Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene and the Department of Health Services are collecting samples from over 100 wastewater treatment facilities, the largest network of its type yet, to trace patterns in the spread of COVID-19.
But while there have been some songs here and there, Dipo Oyeleye, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said European and American music have largely been devoid of COVID-19 topics.
Genetic sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 — the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 — reveals that the virus, which was once distinct between Dane and Milwaukee Counties, now reflects patterns of geographic mixing across the state, according to a paper published by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers this month.
Only 46 out of 4,035 books for children and teens reviewed in 2019 were by Indigenous authors, according to data compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Fit Families, now based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, started as an extension of Columna’s work in Guatemala for children with visual impairments, but now offers workshops for children with autism.
University researchers Thomas Friedrich and David O’Connor, and their labs, analyzed the spread of the coronavirus in a Nov. 3 study published in Nature Journal. The initial data indicated Dane and Milwaukee Counties had limited genetic mixing, with reduced rates of spread after Gov. Tony Evers’ Safer at Home executive order was implemented.
The discovery is especially surprising because the ants are well known. “There are thousands of papers on leaf-cutter ants,” says study co-author Cameron Currie, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Just this year, researchers spotted pores in the double-membrane-bound viral factories of coronaviruses, which are eerily reminiscent of the pores found in cell nuclei. “If this result holds up, and assuming that the pore-forming protein was not derived from a eukaryotic genome, then it does blunt one argument against the virus model,” wrote David A. Baum, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in an email.
Quoted: The discovery is especially surprising because the ants are well known. “There are thousands of papers on leaf-cutter ants,” says study co-author Cameron Currie, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We were really excited to find [this in] one of the most well-studied insects in nature,” he says.
We now have the first data released from a third covid-19 vaccine, the one in trials here in Madison. The AstraZeneca vaccine seems to be the least effective of the three so far.
Known as Solvent-Targeted Recovery and Precipitation (STRAP) processing, the experimental technology is being developed by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW Health is a part of the clinical trial for the drug. UW Health’s principal investigator for the Regeneron trial, Dr. William Hartman, said this authorization is a big step.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) will pay a minimum of $32 million to a former research partner after it concealed information related to a patent for a kidney dialysis drug.
The Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) — a video study in part conducted by a WCER director, looking into the practices and presentation of mathematics education approaches — has been recently acknowledged for its originality by the Paris branch of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Fungal infections affect hundreds of millions of people globally each year. “They’re particularly a problem for people whose immune system is suppressed,” says David Andes at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. This includes people being treated for cancer, organ transplant recipients and premature babies.
A new antifungal compound that is effective against even multidrug-resistant fungi has been found in the microbiome of a marine animal.Fungal infections affect hundreds of millions of people globally each year. “They’re particularly a problem for people whose immune system is suppressed,” says David Andes at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. This includes people being treated for cancer, organ transplant recipients and premature babies.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin are taking part in a new study funded by the National Institute of Health examining the development of Alzheimer’s disease in people with Down syndrome.
In another of the studies released earlier this year, researchers at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health found that, based on autopsies, people who lived in the poorest neighborhoods at the time of their death were about twice as likely to have brain changes typical of Alzheimer’s disease as people who lived in the wealthiest neighborhoods. Researchers used the Neighborhood Atlas, a map developed by the University of Wisconsin that charts neighborhoods by socioeconomic status.
“We are in the baby steps of trying to understand what is driving this,” says Ryan Powell, a scientist who helped lead the study.
Ruling found WARF ’systematically diluted the relative value’ of patent.
Anew analysis by UW-Madison researchers finds Madison Gas and Electric’s goal of eliminating carbon emissions by mid century is in line with what will be needed to avoid the worst impact of climate change, but environmental activists want to see a plan for how the utility will hit its target.
“If we’d had a little seismometer on there, we probably would have seen the same types of things you see on seismometers placed on a real glacier,” said Luke Zoet, a glaciologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and lead author of the new research. The results were published in AGU’s journal Geophysical Research Letters.
UW-Madison’s patent-licensing arm “actively concealed” information from a former research partner and must pay back at least $32 million in patent royalties, a panel of federal appeals court judges ruled late last month.
Early results from a clinical trial at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in July showed the plasma helped 94% of patients who were considered severely ill avoid having to go to intensive care or being placed on mechanical ventilation.
FluGen, which has been working with research from UW-Madison for years on developing a universal flu vaccine — one that wouldn’t have to be updated each year, as the flu shot is now — is incorporating a coronavirus vaccine into its plans, though president and CEO Paul Radspinner said there is no timeline for getting the vaccine to human studies as of yet.
A team of UW-Madison engineers is back with another innovation to keep people safe during the pandemic. This fall, they designed the Badger Seal to be worn over a mask.
The “Badger Seal” prevents gaps on the sides, top & bottom of a face mask.
Through a newfound understanding of the way insulin secretion is triggered in pancreatic cells, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have uncovered an exciting new pathway for the development of treatments for type 2 diabetes. Not only does the discovery shine a light on how the cells work to keep blood sugar in check, the team was able to demonstrate how the mechanism could be targeted with a certain enzyme to hold it at healthy levels.
One researcher whose work is compatible with a pond environment is Lena Vincent of the University of Wisconsin-Madison – although she prefers to keep an open mind. She is trying to create sets of chemicals that copy themselves as a group. The simplest example would be a pair of chemicals A and B, where each has the ability to make the other, so A makes B and B makes A. Such a pair of chemicals would be able to self-replicate, even though neither could do so alone. In practice the sets of chemicals are more complicated than that, but the principle is the same.
