The driving question that launched my career in psychology nearly four decades ago feels especially salient in this moment: Why are some people more resilient to life’s slings and arrows than others?
Written by Dr. Richard J. Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds.
Although hurricane seasons vary from one year to the next, findings released last year suggest that greenhouse gas emissions are making intense storms more common. The study, conducted by scientists at NOAA and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, found that the probability of major tropical storms has increased each decade by about 6% since 1979.
To determine the 40 most obese counties in the U.S., 24/7 Tempo analyzed county-level data on adult obesity rates from the 2021 County Health Rankings & Roadmaps report, a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.
Evolutionary biologist David Baum was thrilled to flick through a preprint in August 2019 and come face-to-face — well, face-to-cell — with a distant cousin. Baum, who works at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was looking at an archaeon: a type of microorganism best known for living in extreme environments, such as deep-ocean vents and acid lakes.
The University is working with Canoo to develop new electric vehicle technologies while lowering the overall cost of owning an electric vehicle. In May 2021, the two organizations signed an agreement to develop a Canoo research center at UW-Madison.
Academics at the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions, which is housed within the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Education Research, published the findings of their research into online internships yesterday.
The study, which included survey data from nearly 10,000 students at 11 colleges and universities, found just 22 percent of respondents participated in an internship in the past year. Of these internships, half were in person and the remainder online. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Rapid Response Research program, known as RAPID.
A new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study shows a strain of coronavirus that spurred fast moving outbreaks at two University of Wisconsin-Madison dormitories in the fall didn’t spill over to the greater Madison community.
Drink This Instead: If you’re going to drink beer, choose Guinness. Despite its heavy, hearty dark appearance, this stout has 20 fewer calories per 12-ounce serving than a Bud. But there’s more: A University of Wisconsin study found that moderate consumption of Guinness worked like aspirin to prevent blood clots that increase the risk of heart attacks. That’s because the antioxidants it contains are better than vitamins C and E at keeping bad LDL cholesterol from clogging arteries.
Typically the Great Lakes follow a specific seasonal cycle, said Adam Bechle, a coastal engineering specialist with the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute. The lakes bottom out in the winter when there’s more evaporation occurring as cold air moves in over the warmer water. Lake levels are highest during the summer, after snow melts and runs into them and rain falls.
But there wasn’t as much snow this winter, and this spring has seen most of the state enter drought-like conditions.
Water levels have been climbing steadily in the Great Lakes since 2013. Before that, historic low levels going back to the 1990s caused issues, too, forcing some cities to dredge out harbors and ports so boats could gain access. Fluctuating water levels also impact beaches, and recreation is impacted, too.
“So even those who aren’t directly impacted by the lakes, they still have an impact on their lives,” Bechle said.
Includes interview with Greg Nemet, a professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs.
After a year fraught with unemployment payment delays, high rates of unemployment denials, call center headaches and other issues, a new University of Wisconsin report suggests the state should outsource at least a portion of its unemployment system.
The report by conservative UW economics professor Noah Williams detailed areas the state lagged behind most other states as the wave of unemployment claims swamped the state’s Department of Workforce Development last year.
Noted: Rawan Hamadeh of Brookfield, who just finished her freshman year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was at the festival surveying people about their vaccination status.
“There are a lot of rumors being spread about the vaccine and how safe it is,” Hamadeh said. “Our goal is, if they aren’t vaccinated and they don’t want to be vaccinated, to try to educate them and inform them that there is nothing in the vaccine that can harm you.”
Pioneered by researchers at UW-Madison, microgrids — which can include a combination of generators and batteries — are designed to function as self-contained systems that can seamlessly disconnect from the larger system, functioning as islands during power outages.
In January 2021, University of Wisconsin researchers studied 145 student athletes who had Covid-19 and found myocarditis in only 1.4% of them, none of whom required hospitalization. In March, a group of sports cardiologists reported on nearly 800 professional athletes who had tested positive for Covid-19. Less than 1% of these athletes had abnormal findings on cardiac magnetic resonance scans or stress echocardiography. None of these athletes had cardiovascular trouble when they returned to play.
In a December study led by a team of researchers with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, experts broke down the four pillars they believe are essential to cultivating mental well-being: awareness, connection, insight and purpose. All these sound pretty lofty, but the pillars can be broken down into small daily habits that, over time, train the brain.
The University of Wisconsin ranked Pinellas County as one of the most segregated counties in the state, condensing half of the Black population into four zip codes in South St. Pete.
The DARE project is overseen by the University of Wisconsin at Madison. (That’s in Dane County, a rare Midwestern outpost of pop/soda parity, according to popvssoda.com.) An online subscription to the dictionary is $49 a year. There’s more info at dare.wisc.edu.
Knowing they had found something special, Gunderson and Meyer frantically shaved off slabs of the fossil-bearing rock, preventing them from being pulverized in the pursuit of limestone. They donated their find to the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum, where thousands of Waukesha specimens now fill drawer after drawer.
The official results from those sessions, part of a two-part, 200-person clinical trial, have now been combined with those produced by teams of investigators at NYU, UCSF, the University of Wisconsin, and myriad private practices across the US, in Canada and in Israel.
I didn’t realize that we did that on campus. I was interested because I’d never touched a monkey before. They offered the job to me on the spot, once I said that I was okay with working with nonhuman primates.
While the northern half has seen a smaller increase, Dane County has seen a 20% increase and Milwaukee County has seen a 15% increase, according to data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Scientists started keeping records of precipitation levels in the 1890s, said Steve Vavrus, a climate professor at UW, and since then, all records for the state have been broken.
Climate change explains the rising amount of rain falling from the sky, Vavrus said. As temperatures rise, warmer air can hold more droplets of water.
“More moisture can be wrung out of the air than 100 years ago or so,” he said. “And climate models have been projecting that for a long time that as the climate warms, we’ll get more heavy rains.”
The paper appears in the journal Nature. Additional coauthors are from McGill University; the University of Massachusetts Amherst; Penn State; the University of California Irvine; the University of Bristol; the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Knowing they had found something special, Gunderson and Meyer frantically shaved off slabs of the fossil-bearing rock, preventing them from being pulverized in the pursuit of limestone. They donated their find to the University of Wisconsin–Madison Geology Museum, where thousands of Waukesha specimens now fill drawer after drawer.
That perspective is inevitably important to the many, many multicultural households across America. The children’s book industry has a noted lack of diversity: According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center, only 30% of titles in 2020 featured racially diverse characters. “My hope is that The Bench resonates with every family, no matter the makeup, as much as it does with mine,” Meghan says.
The share of adults 65+ who met CDC exercise guidelines in 2017 and the share of adults 65+ who reported good or excellent health in 2018 were obtained from America’s Health Rankings in its analysis of CDC data. Data on membership associations per 10,000 state residents was obtained from 2018 state-level data provided by the 2021 County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute joint program.
First-of-its-kind research is happening right now at Madison’s Carbone Cancer Center to advance treatment options and discover earlier detection methods.
Noted: Out of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, Milwaukee County ranks 70th in both health outcomes and health factors, according to the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Health outcomes measure length and quality of life, while health factors account for things that can improve health, such as access to education, quality clinical care, healthy food or affordable housing.
Noted: The prime injury culprits are specialization — which the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health defines as participation in a single sport for more than 8 months of the year — and overtraining.
A groundbreaking 2017 University of Wisconsin study of 1,544 Wisconsin high school athletes found that those who specialized were 70% more likely to sustain a lower extremity injury than athletes who played multiple sports.
“Should we really be asking our young kids to do what we’re asking our collegiate athletes?” asked David Bell, associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the Wisconsin Injury in Sport Laboratory.
UWM’s Sandra McLellan and MIT’s Eric Alm are among the world’s foremost experts at detecting very small organisms in very large quantities of sewage — a useful tool during the COVID-19 pandemic. But despite their similar research capabilities, Alm’s work is having a wider impact and creating more economic value and high-paying jobs.
Quoted: “People who wear masks in close settings have a lower risk of being infected than people who don’t,” said Patrick Remington, former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program.
But it may not be necessary to eradicate it to save forests. “In many ways its presence is more of a symptom of a disease rather than the cause,” says Richard Lankau, a researcher at University of Wisconsin. “Things like disturbance, overabundance of white-tailed deer, exotic earthworms—those things often seem to set the stage for bad garlic mustard invasions.”
Unionized workers tend to say they are more satisfied with their job compared to their non-unionized counterparts, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin College of Business, Dartmouth College and University College London.
Geologists with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension recently discovered that these previously overlooked areas contain the harmful contaminant, which can even cause cancer if ingested over time. The team of researchers studied groundwater arsenic contamination in folds of bedrock, which is the result of 1.7 billion-year-old rock pushing up on younger rocks above it.
What about publishing? In the US there’s been a boom in books featuring diverse characters. A study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that more than 12% of children’s books starred African American characters in 2019, compared with 5% in 2012 (in the UK, 5% of children’s books have black, Asian or minority ethnic protagonists, up from 1% in 2017).
UW-Madison researchers are asking smokers to try low-nicotine cigarettes in a study that comes as the Biden administration is reportedly looking at requiring tobacco companies to reduce nicotine in all cigarettes to non-addictive levels.
the Biden administration’s loosening of restrictions on the use of fetal tissue in research will allow UW-Madison scientists to continue such studies, which opponents have tried several times to ban in Wisconsin.
“The proposals we received are evidence of the exceptionally wide breadth of research on our campus targeting inequalities based on factors such as race and ethnicity, socio-economic status, gender, sexual orientation and geography,” says Lonnie Berger, associate vice chancellor for research in the social sciences.
And more teachers now say they feel confident teaching the material. A study released in March by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Montana State University found significant increases in teacher participation in professional development.
Research has borne this out. In a landmark 1994 survey, Harvard professor Richard Freeman and University of Wisconsin professor Joel Rogers asked more than 2,400 nonmanagement workers whether they would prefer representation by an organization that “management cooperated with in discussing issues, but had no power to make decisions” or by one “that had more power, but management opposed.” Workers preferred cooperation to an adversarial stance by 63 percent to 22 percent, a result that held even among active union members.
Out of almost 4,000 books geared toward children and teens that were published in 2019, 232 were written by Black authors, and only 471 featured Black characters, according to data from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
’Innovations like these are what help move health care forward,’ UW chief clinical research officer says.
Independent scientific analysis conducted by George Kraft, a University of Wisconsin scientist working with the Environmental Working Group (EWG), confirms that RDO’s latest proposed irrigated potato site would increase local groundwater and drinking water contamination to double or quadruple the legal limit under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.
In a 2019 paper, Cyber Risk and Security Implications in Smart Agriculture and Food Systems (PDF), experts from Jahn Research Group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Agriculture and Life Sciences argue that that the growing interconnectedness of the U.S. agriculture sector and the “increasing application of smart technology and devices” mean the risk of U.S. agriculture being “negatively impacted by a service interruption caused by a cyber attack or accidents…is rapidly growing
The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health is expanding its enrollment for a study on COVID-19 prevention to essential workers. Dr. Nasia Safdar describes the study and talks about new FDA recommendations on the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine.
The kind of work being done at a Wisconsin lab could be a shot in the arm, so to speak in the fight against the shifting terrain of COVID-19. As the number of variant coronavirus cases increases, lawmakers are hopeful funds from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 can fuel research labs like the AIDS Vaccine Research Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The $1.75 billion package signed into law in March funds COVID-related research focused on detecting variants of the virus.
Noted: The DNR worked with the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey, the United States Geological Survey and the University of Wisconsin System to complete the research. The agencies looked at several different potential impacts, including recreation, fish, aquatic plants and water chemistry.
UW-Madison, which has been studying psychedelic drugs to treat depression and other conditions, is taking another step to embrace the emerging topic of psychoactive medicine by starting a pharmacy master’s program in the field this fall.
When Brock went to Yellowstone to study hot springs, he never imagined his work would revolutionize the study of DNA. “I was free to do what is called basic research … Some people called it useless because it was not focused on practical ends,” Brock said in an acceptance speech for an honorary degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “What use could there be in looking for living bacteria in hot springs and boiling pools at Yellowstone National Park?”
Tens of millions of dollars in federal pandemic aid is proving to be a shot in the arm, so to speak, for Wisconsin’s contributions to the fight against the shifting terrain of COVID-19. As the number of variant coronavirus cases increases, $60 million dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, a $1.75 billion package signed into law in March, will fund COVID-related research by the AIDS Vaccine Research Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A 2020 report by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that just 5.3 percent of the roughly 3,700 books the Center received from U.S. publishers had at least one primary character who was Latino.
A study released in March by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Montana State University found significant increases in teacher participation in professional development.
“Water sustainability is a global issue,” says Zongfu Yu, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, another leading corresponding author. “You can’t set out to solve the water problem without addressing energy.”
Take, for instance, a recent study of tweets mentioning “fake news.” Over the course of 15 months, study authors Jianing Li and Min-Hsin Su of the University of Wisconsin-Madison found an uptick in the number of tweets that used the words “we” or “our” and “they” or “their” in conjunction with the phrase “fake news.” Essentially, the researchers concluded that online discussions about “fake news” were a way for conservatives to create a sense of group belonging (“This is the worst kind of fake news possible.
Research out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests that training educators helps improve whether they feel well-qualified to teach personal finance. Among a 2020 survey of teachers — mostly instructors likely to teach such a course — those who said they would feel very confident teaching it reached 70%, up from 9% in 2009.
Created in 1925, WARF handles patent and license issues for the UW-Madison, returning money to the campus research cycle and often making it possible for young companies to get a start. WiSys is doing much the same for four-year UW campuses outside Madison and Milwaukee while engaging students in research and entrepreneurism.
Students developing mobile application provides ease for patients, medical professionals.
Noted: Jumping worms were first identified in Wisconsin in 2013 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. Just eight years later, the worms have been reported just about everywhere in the state and are highlighted as an invasive species by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
“They are, if not in every county, close to it,” said Brad Herrick, an ecologist at the UW Arboretum.
Quoted: The lack of data on queer BIPOC farmers is also prevalent in academia, said Jaclyn Wypler, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies queer and transgender sustainable farmers in conservative rural communities. Wypler was recently hired as the Northeast project manager of the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network at the National Young Farmers Coalition.
“There is discrimination for BIPOC folks and queer folks within academia, including within the environmental and rural and agricultural departments,” Wypler said. As a result, research studies that highlight their experiences are difficult to adequately fund.
A newly-created master’s degree program at UW-Madison will study how psychoactive chemicals like psilocybin — found in so-called “magic mushrooms” — can treat conditions like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. We hear more about it from the program’s director.
The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health is expanding its COVID-19 prevention study to all essential workers. The study is investigating whether common oral and nasal antiseptics, in addition to masks and hygiene, can help prevent COVID-19 infections.
