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.
UW-Madison researchers used tiny balls of minerals to deliver protein-making instructions to cells surrounding wounds in diabetic mice, healing the wounds faster than other methods and showing promise for developing better protein-based drugs for a variety of diseases, according to a new study.
In a 2014 study of 155 physicians by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health, close to half said that pressure to please patients led to inappropriate care including unnecessary tests and procedures, hospital admissions, and opioid or antibiotic prescriptions.
Could your significant other help you lose the weight you’ve gained during the pandemic? That’s the question a UW School of Medicine and Public Health study is looking to answer.
While many people are scrambling to combat flooding and damage to infrastructure, climate scientists are working to find out what has been causing the latest rise in lake levels. According to Jack Williams, a UW-Madison geography professor and climate-change expert, it’s the billion-dollar question.“We can’t yet definitively say,” Williams said. “What we know is that we are seeing increasing temperatures and variability of rainfall, which are both known to be caused by climate change.”
Steve Ackerman’s job overseeing UW-Madison’s behemoth research enterprise officially began March 9. Two days later, his job description changed dramatically when the university announced unprecedented measures it would take to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Instead of finding ways to expand research on campus, Ackerman was now tasked with ramping down most research labs and helping scientists continue their research remotely.
Having secured an approval for human trials, Covaxin has reached a more advanced phase. Not only is BBIL in close contact with locally developed institutes, but they are also in a global collaboration with Thomas Jefferson University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and vaccine maker FluGen.
Over half of the characters depicted in children’s books are white, according to the statistics compiled in 2018 by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Bron, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was on the hunt for a tiny threat: the black-legged tick. Also known as a deer tick, this arachnid is notorious for its ability to spread illnesses like Lyme disease to humans.
How does Covaxin compare to other vaccine candidates around the world? Where does it figure in the global race for a Covid-19 vaccine?
Covaxin has reached a more advanced stage of testing than two other vaccine candidates that Bharat Biotech is developing through global collaborations–the first is in collaboration with Thomas Jefferson University, while the second is with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and vaccine maker FluGen. Both these candidates are currently in the pre-clinical stage, according to the World Health Organisation’s draft landscape of Covid-19 candidate vaccines.
In 2018, according to the Children’s Cooperative Book Center at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Education, fewer than a third of all children’s and young adult books in the United States featured a person of color as a main character. Only around one fifth were written or illustrated by a person of color, despite the fact that now most young children in this country are nonwhite.
In a new study, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that children with an incarcerated parent whose family used resources from the education nonprofit behind “Sesame Street” experienced more positive social-emotional development.
He may be in the seat for only a year or so, but former Gov. Tommy Thompson brings a solid record of supporting academic research to the job of interim president of the University of Wisconsin System.
Large majorities of Wisconsinites support the protests against racial injustice and police brutality that have swept across the state in the last month, a new poll from the Marquette University Law School found.
UW Health is part of a new clinical trial working to combat COVID-19 among patients.
The majority of people who die from COVID-19 are killed by a dangerous immune system overreaction called a cytokine storm, but researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and dozens of other sites around the world are now testing a potential weapon against it.
Researchers, including Yoshihiro Kawaoka from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, demonstrated that both low and high doses of the novel corovirus, SARS-COV-2 replicate well in the airways of juvenile as well as adult hamsters.
But getting an accurate count isn’t an easy feat — it’s time and resource intensive and only occurs on roughly 5 percent of Wisconsin’s more than 900 walleye lakes, said Mike Spear, a Ph.D student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Limnology.
“Putting tissue samples into socioeconomic context will allow us to better understand the socioeconomic mechanisms that may drive disease,” said the senior author, Dr. Amy J.H. Kind, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin.
All experiments with SARS-CoV-2 were performed in enhanced biosafety level 3 (BSL3) containment laboratories at the University of Tokyo, which are approved for such use by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, Japan, or in enhanced BSL3 containment laboratories at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which are approved for such use by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and by the US Department of Agriculture.
Quoted: It’s not unusual for men to struggle after the birth of a child, says Tova Walsh, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied fathers and parent-child relationships. There are financial pressures, expectations to try to meet and lifestyle adjustments to make.
In the history of family services, fathers have been overlooked and neglected, Walsh says, with sometimes clinical consequences. “Paternal depression is underrecognized,” she says.
Quoted: For the time being, researchers say cats should be a focus, because studies have found they are highly susceptible to the coronavirus and because they are common pets and roam freely in many places. In a study published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, scientists infected cats with the virus and found that those cats could infect other cats. No felines showed symptoms, but the amount of virus they shed in nasal swabs was similar to that shed by some humans, said co-author Peter Halfmann, a University of Wisconsin virologist.
“If a human can transmit to a human with this amount of virus being shed, it’s definitely possible for a cat to transmit to a human,” Halfmann said.
