The race continues to test and find the first effective COVID-19 vaccine, and a cell and gene product development facility at UW-Madison is helping to produce a vaccine. Waisman Biomanufacturing announced on Monday they are partnering with Heat Biologics to produce a vaccine for phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials.
Alab at UW-Madison’s Waisman Center is partnering with a North Carolina company to make an experimental COVID-19 vaccine for clinical trials, the university said Monday.
Jayhun Lee and his colleagues at the Morgridge Institute for Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, explain in a report in PNAS how a specialised gland in the parasite’s digestive tract, called esophageal gland, is behind an immune-evasion mechanism essential for its survival while in its host.
Existing literature in the field of applied psychology suggests women tend to be more successful than men at managing crises, said Dr. Alexander Stajkovic of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He and Dr. Kayla Sergent of Edgewood College decided to look at how states led by men and women stacked up in terms of coronavirus response, which has largely been managed by governors.
This is the root of the moral panic over cats: the struggle to move beyond treating other beings with domination and control, toward fostering a relationship rooted in compassion and justice.
John Eason, an associate professor of sociology and founder and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Justice Lab, has partnered with the county’s Criminal Justice Council to study the effect of jail population reduction on the cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Scientists at UW-Madison are conducting research studies right now to develop a new COVID-19 test that could be conducted anywhere, is cheaper than current testing and gives results in mere hours.
The Badger Shield+ comes out of the Makerspace at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It is a clear shield that covers the face and is sealed at the bottom by a fabric.
The Center on Wisconsin Strategy, or COWS, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently unveiled a website to track COVID-19’s impact on the state’s economy. In its initial review of the pandemic’s influence, released on July 22, the report shows that inequality in the workplace has been further exacerbated.
A federal agency fined UW-Madison $74,000 in the spring for 28 violations of federal animal research treatment standards.
In 2015, she and two friends — Khoa Tran and Kelly Montgomery — founded an online publishing company called JKX Comics. At the time, all three were pursuing PhDs in science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Each knew how tough it can be to explain research and to engage students in its details.
Researchers at UW are trying to figure out if certain antiseptic solutions can help protect frontline workers from contracting COVID-19.
Researchers at UW have helped develop new device that may be able to diagnosis diseases that might otherwise go undetected.
A lightweight bracelet that can continuously track 3D hand movements could bring activity tracking to the next level, believe researchers from Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It turns out that readers’ comments apparently do matter. Online incivility among users can polarize other people’s perceptions about emerging technologies, researchers at George Mason University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison found.
Songbirds seem to enjoy singing. And while a great deal of research has investigated the development and production of birdsong, little is known about the motivation to sing.
New work out of Lauren Riters’ lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison teases out the relationship between singing, reward, and endogenous opioids in songbirds. The results suggest that studying songbirds can teach us about the shared neurobiological mechanisms underlying social reward in all vertebrates, humans included.
Noted: Madison365 spoke with three local experts: Public Health Madison Dane County data analyst Brittany Grogan, University of Wisconsin infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Ajay Sethi, and Dr. Malia Jones, an associate scientist in health geography at the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: “I don’t think (the finding) was surprising, but it was good to see data that actually described it,” said Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control and prevention at UW Health in Madison.
Noted: Other staples of everyday life, especially the resumption of school, may differ widely in cities and towns across the country. Without data to measure the effect of different educational methods on the spread of the virus, the U.S. will soon embark on what amounts to “uncontrolled experiments,” said Tony Goldberg, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW virologist and influenza expert Yoshihiro Kawaoka said that although he is confident COVID-19 will become endemic, he believes the lifestyle changes people have made should not become permanent.
“Once everyone gets vaccinated we should be able to go back to normal life,” he said, predicting that day might come “in three years, maybe four years.”
Experts at UW-Madison are developing a solution for more successful blood vessel replacements.
Noted: To understand what’s really going on, we spoke to a dozen experts and dove deep into the data. Working with data provided by William H. Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Diversity Explosion, we looked at twenty years of migration by state, and compared that to changes in presidential voting patterns using data from the website 270toWin. And finally, we studied migration patterns by age from a database at the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: It’s also critical for avoiding what Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, calls “prevention fatigue.” For example, if teachers at a school, who otherwise feel perfectly healthy, come to dread their twice-weekly swab, surveillance testing will quickly become unreliable. “They’ll say, ‘I feel fine’ and find a way to skip it,” O’Connor says. “We’re a nation of wusses, myself included.”
Noted: Research by Scott Sanders, a professor in the mechanical engineering and electrical and computer engineering departments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has shown that in situations where people can social distance, three-layered masks are best, with cotton for the internal layer, a non-woven synthetic for the middle and an outer layer of polyester.
But even if there is leaking from the mask, some kind of barrier is better than nothing, said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at UW-Madison.
And, the masks should really be combined with social distancing, added Sethi, who is part of a team developing a model to forecast potential surges in hospitalizations in southern Wisconsin.
The best explanation of how Donald Trump took the Midwest, and so the White House, came in a book published eight months before he did it. Kathy Cramer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison spent years interviewing small-town voters, such as retired farmers in rural petrol stations chatting over bad coffee. She asked how Wisconsin, a once-placid sort of place, had become bitterly confrontational. Her book, “The Politics of Resentment”, tracked how Scott Walker, the two-term Republican governor who left office in 2019, inspired fury from half the population and adoration from the other half. In every election of the past decade, voters were herded into rival camps.
Written by Todd Newman, Assistant Professor of Life Sciences Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Noted: William R. Hartman, MD, PhD, Department of Anesthesiology, is principal investigator for the UW COVID-19 Convalescent Plasma Program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison.
UW-Madison economist Noah Williams said it would be inaccurate to blame government regulation for the economic slowdown that’s accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Economic activity started falling early in March, before there were any restrictions in place,” Williams said. “What the lockdowns essentially did was keep that activity at a very low level. Things deteriorated much more quickly than people expected.”
Noted: Around 6 p.m., Angela Rowe, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was running the day’s operations, radioed from the ops center that several storms were tracking on a northeast bearing toward the triangle. Soon those of us who were in the field watched as the skies before us transformed. Clouds along the leading edge of the northernmost storm flattened, sending down graying tendrils of haze that brushed along the ground. Far above, the blackening core of the storm started bubbling, roiling skyward like an overflowing pot of pasta.
The COVID-19 pandemic imposed significant new hardships on American workers — and it’s exposed just how much hardship many of them have been enduring for years.
That’s a central conclusion of a report published today, the 2020 edition of the State of Working Wisconsin. The report is published by COWS — formerly the Center on Wisconsin Strategy — a policy research and analysis organization at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Sue Robinson and Kathleen Bartzen Culver, journalism professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, use coverage of the proposed charter school as a case study to explore ethical obligations white reporters have when covering race. They conducted three focus groups and 39 in-depth interviews with 24 white reporters and 15 community leaders of color. They also analyzed more than 1,000 news stories and social media posts about racial disparities in educational achievement in Madison from 2011 to 2015.
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum, study of Asian jumping worms began after they were discovered on the grounds in 2013. “They may have a cascading, behind-the-scenes impact that might not happen tomorrow, but that will eventually affect other organisms at a higher trophic level,” said Bradley M. Herrick, a plant ecologist and the research program manager at the arboretum.
UW-Madison announced Tuesday that scientists from the university and the Morgridge Institute for Research have been able to capture “strikingly improved images” of a virus group, which could help aid in the creation of antiviral drugs and treatment for COVID-19.
Modern wearables like the Apple Watch use sensors like gyros and accelerometers to detect hand movements. Those components allow them to turn on their displays when you lift your wrist, as well as to ensure you’ve properly washed your hand. But thanks to the work of a joint team of researchers at Cornell Unversity and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, future wearables could offer more nuanced hand detection.
If this whole smart glasses thing is going to effectively free us from having our heads constantly down and staring at our phones, we’re going to need a reliable way to interact with a virtual screen. Thanks to new research from Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, we could still rely on our hands and fingers without actually having to touch a screen.
Quoted:
The call for hardening our internet infrastructure is especially salient to Paul Barford, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 2018, Barford and two colleagues published a study highlighting the vulnerability of America’s fiber cables to sea level rise, and he’s currently investigating how wildfires threaten mobile networks. In both cases, he says, it’s clear that the telecommunications infrastructure deployed today was designed with historical extreme conditions in mind — and that has to change.
“We’re living in a world of climate change,” he said. “And if the intention is to make this new infrastructure that will serve the population for many years to come, then it is simply not feasible to deploy it without considering the potential effects of climate change, which include, of course, rising seas, severe weather, floods, and wildfires.”
Patients with severe or life-threatening COVID-19 have fared well so far in two clinical trials underway at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to preliminary results.
The university also launched three new COVID-19 clinical trials and began considering offers to host another nine. Since the coronavirus clinical trials began, 80% of all UW Health patients with COVID-19 have been enrolled in one.
The team of researchers, including chemists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and their collaborators, have created a highly efficient and long-lasting solar flow battery. The device can generate, store, and redeliver renewable electricity from the sun in one device. The device consists of silicon solar cells combined with advanced solar materials.
Coroflu, a vaccine jointly developed and worked on by vaccine maker FluGen and the University of Wisconsin-Madison is India’s third prime vaccine candidate after COVAXIN and ZyCOV-D which uses a self-limiting version of existing influenza virus to stimulate immunity and spike up production of helpful antibodies in the system. The vaccine is expected to delve into human trials by the end of 2020.
A team of UW-Madison engineers and local manufacturers is working together again to improve PPE options for health care workers. But their new face shield is also in high demand with schools across the country as they get ready to reopen.
The school will use UW Health as a trial site to test an “antibody cocktail” developed by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, a company based in New York. Researchers are calling the treatment “REGN-COV2.”
The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and UW Health will conduct three clinical trials to test a new treatment and preventative for COVID-19, in collaboration with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
Some of the most critical COVID-19 research is being done right here in Wisconsin as there is still much to learn about the virus. New clinical trials are testing treatment and preventative measures. Researchers say it could be groundbreaking in the ongoing effort to get a handle of the virus.
That is 40% more efficient than the previous record for solar-flow batteries, which also were developed by Song Jin and colleagues in his lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US.
The solar-flow battery has a 20 percent efficiency rate of converting energy from the sun, setting a new record of efficiency — a 40 percent improvement over the previous solar-flow battery record — according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Chemists from the Song Jin lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said on Tuesday that the new device was made of silicon solar cells combined with advanced solar materials and integrated with optimally designed chemical storage components.
Capturing energy from the Sun with solar panels is only half the story – that energy needs to be stored somewhere for later use. In the case of flow batteries, storage is relegated to vats of liquid. Now, an international team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists has created a new version of these solar flow batteries that’s efficient and long-lasting.
The groundwork for Baby’s First Years started in 2013 with prize money from the Jacobs Foundation to Greg Duncan, a professor of education at the University of California at Irvine. Its funding snowballed, thanks to philanthropic institutions, including the Bill and Melinda Gates and Ford foundations, and a grant from the National Institutes of Health. It recruited as lead investigators Katherine Magnuson, professor of social work at University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Kimberly Noble, a neuroscientist at Columbia University.
As colleges and universities announce plans to invite students back to campus this fall, American higher education is, according to the New York Times, “about to embark on a highly uncertain experiment.”
A team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin- Madison conducted a study on a group of 25 healthy employees, who practised meditation for eight weeks.
Quoted: Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, worries there is so much pressure to produce positive results that conditions are ripe for cutting corners. She notes, for example, that in an emergency where people are suffering, there can be resistance to having control groups that don’t get an experimental treatment in a study.
“But it doesn’t work scientifically,” Ossorio said. “It doesn’t produce good enough data that you can actually have any confidence that the test intervention is safe or effective.”
“We have this real brick and mortar view of how clinical research had to happen, and I think COVID has really challenged that,” said Betsy Nugent, the director of clinical trials development for the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and UW Health.
Song Gao, an assistant professor of geographic information science at UW-Madison, was among the first to study and map how people’s mobility changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In March, Buttenheim and Malia Jones, an epidemiologist at UW-Madison, launched “Dear Pandemic,” a social media group that communicates the latest COVID-19 research.
“The world is just going to be different,” Jones said, “Getting to the point where there’s hopefully a vaccine that’s effective is going to take enough time that I think science will change.”
University of Wisconsin-Madison engineer Scott Sanders usually spends his time figuring out how gases and particles behave in combustion engines.
But Sanders has turned his expertise to determining how a different type of particle, one that has sickened millions around the world, moves from human mouths covered with masks.
The additional $70,000 brings total pandemic-related aid to $705,000 for the year, including assistance to front-line health care workers and vaccine-related endeavors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The homemade face covering that best contains respiratory droplets like those from COVID-19 is a neck-gaiter-style mask combining a nose piece with an elastic cord wearers can toggle to snug the mask to their face, according to a UW-Madison engineer.
In a cool video posted online this week, UW–Madison mechanical engineering professor Scott Sanders uses a mannequin to illustrate how droplets escape or stay contained inside a variety of masks now being worn.
For covaxin, Bharat Biotech has joined with the National Institute of Virology, which is part of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). (The company is separately developing COVID-19 vaccine candidates in collaboration with Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.)
It should also be noted that the company is simultaneously also engaged in the development of another vaccine called ’Coroflu’ which is being developed in a collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and vaccine maker FluGen.
The CDC previously awarded more than $10 million to help aid state and local efforts to stem the spread of the disease. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been deeply involved in the search for a vaccine, and hundreds of Wisconsin families are part of a federal study on the role children play in spreading the virus.
New video shows a deep dive into mask protection using a simulated cough test. UW Madison’s Engine Research Center is demonstrating how droplets from a cough travel from inside different styles and materials of masks.
The homemade face covering that best contains respiratory droplets like those from COVID-19 is a neck-gaiter-style mask combining a nose piece with an elastic cord wearers can toggle to snug the mask to their face, according to a UW-Madison engineer.
