“Air conditioning saves lives from heat waves,” said Jonathan Patz, a co-author on the study who directs the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute, to Earther. “But if the electricity to run air conditioners requires coal-fired power plants, then we have a problem.”
Noted: Author Ryan J. Owens, J.D., Ph.D., is a political science professor at UW-Madison, a faculty affiliate at the University of Wisconsin School of Law, and the Acting Director of the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership.
One way of tackling this problem is to roll out more air conditioning systems, but according to Professor Jonathan Patz at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this means trading one problem for another.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison forecast as many as a thousand additional deaths annually in the Eastern US alone due to elevated levels of air pollution driven by the increased use of fossil fuels to cool the buildings where humans live and work.
Dawn Dudley, scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, also lead author of the study, said the problem with studies of Zika in humans is they rely on symptomatic infections.
Now, a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has a disturbing new revelation: In a simulation of a three-month summer period, air pollution directly related to fossil fuel burning that powers air conditioning accounts for about 1,000 deaths.
There’s an app for everything — even ticks. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Columbia University are studying how and where Wisconsin residents interact with ticks. They created The Tick App with a two-sided purpose — for research and as a resource.
“We’re always interested in how temperatures behave,” says Matthew Lazzara, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the study’s authors. “In Antarctica, we still haven’t learned a lot of the basics.” His team found conditions need to be just so, in the right spot, to brew up the perfect freeze.
After the endangered species list was created and targeted conservation efforts began, eagle populations recovered. Researchers have found that one of the keys to recovery is protecting the nest of breeding pairs of eagles. Their results were published earlier this year in the Journal of Applied Ecology. Ecologist Benjamin Zuckerberg, an author on that study, explains what it means for the future conservation of eagles and endangered raptors.
Dawn Dudley, senior scientist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and the lead author of the study called the high rate “alarming.” While Dudly believes the true rate of human miscarriage in Zika-infected pregnancies is somewhat lower than what they found in monkeys, she said it’s also likely higher than the 8 percent figure.
But that, say scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is killing us, too.It may be more subtle than a heat wave, but the toll air-conditioning takes could have a much deeper, long-term impact.In a study published in PLOS Medicine this week, the researchers suggest our AC dependency could kill as many as 1,000 more people every year in the eastern U.S. alone. The trouble, they note, is the burden air-conditioning puts on fossil-fuel burning electricity plants.
As many as 1,000 additional people each year along the Eastern U.S. could die from complications due to higher levels of air pollution from increased air conditioning use, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison said in a new study published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Medicine.
Noted: Karen Strier knew something was wrong as soon as she entered the patch of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais where she has been studying primates for 35 years. Instead of the usual deafening roar of howler monkeys, some of the most common monkeys in the region, there was an “eerie silence, like when something is wrong,” says the University of Wisconsin–Madison anthropologist. “It was stunning.” The animals had been silenced by the yellow fever virus, which had wiped out most of the local population of 500 howler monkeys.
Noted: One way of tackling this problem is to roll out more air conditioning systems, but according to Professor Jonathan Patz at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this means trading one problem for another.
Scientists at the UW Department of Pathology and Medicine, along with the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, teamed up with six other primate research centers across the U.S. to collaborate data on how the Zika virus affects pregnancy.
Several hurricanes appear to be moving more slowly, according to new research. This means they are spending increased time over land. This means more local rainfall and dangerous flooding.According to James Kossin, who works at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Center for Weather and Climate (University of Wisconsin–Madison), the speed at which hurricanes track along a paths is slower.
Ophelia Venturelli, a professor of of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her colleagues have been trying to find ways to disentangle the complex relationships between bacteria by investigating how they interact.
A recent study lists South Carolina among a growing number of states where white deaths outpace births. Discrepancies aren’t unusual, and can be based on labeling. The Applied Population Lab study, done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, deals specifically with “non-Hispanic whites.” The state data lists births by mother’s race alone, and only as “white.”
A 2018 report by graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s LaFollette School of Public Affairs found that absent significant investments by the state, such an evaluation would be very difficult.
Noted: The work on McDermott, led by researchers from the University of Wisconsin and UW-Stevens Point and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, is looking at such questions.
Noted: The mosquitoes were gathered and tested by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Entomology.
A team of researchers from Florida International University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Miami, the Syrian Centre for Tobacco Studies, and the University of Pittsburgh selected 279 posts from 11,517 posts tagged hookah or shisha within a four-day period.
Luke Odell is a PhD student researching tornado dynamics at UW-Madison. He pinpointed Montana days in advance based on detailed analysis, during what was otherwise a quiet weather pattern.
In a partnership with UW-Madison’s transportation engineering department, testing has already started for a new technology that would show roadway notifications on the driver’s dashboard.
Noted: Once indoors, I contacted Stanley Temple, the famed UW-Madison ornithologist, for his insights into nesting robins. Temple suggested a better idea: “Let’s discuss how birds defend their nests,” he said. “It’s something I’ve researched and written about.”
“The restlessness expressed today is pretty astonishing,” said Bradley Singer, a geology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the lead author of the study, referring to the rising ground. But “we do not believe that this current astonishing state of unrest is something new.”
Noted: The University of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison is taking things further. Press releases about animal research at other universities usually skate over sensitive information, but UW’s describe injecting monkeys with Ebola virus and performing heart surgery on pigs, for example, and its web pages detail its animal research program. UW also posts its USDA inspection reports online, even after the agency began scrubbing them from its own website in a controversial move last year.
To mark Wisconsin Cheese Day, Gov. Scott Walker had a big announcement in Madison that will help dairy research.
Quoted: Chelsea Nestel, a PhD student specializing in cartography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks of modern map-making in similar terms.
Noted: To determine what that “something” was, Serido and her research partner, professor Soyeon Shim of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, continued to study the same subjects as they advanced through their 20s.
A professor from electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has found an ultra-thin stealth sheet which can hide objects with your warm including human bodies or from infrared light or cameras.
News of the Nassar case prompted leaders at the University of Wisconsin to launch a wide review of their own practices, including safety measures guiding team doctors. Officials declined to share details, saying the study has yet to wrap up.
Metamaterials that cloak people and objects from radar, visible light or infrared are usually thick and heavy, but now engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed an ultrathin, lightweight sheet that absorbs heat signatures and can even present false ones.
Noted: At the University of Wisconsin, a CRISPR antibiotic is being developed to selectively target super-resistant bugs. In the UK, researchers used CRISR gene editing to eliminate malaria in new mosquito strains. And last year Chinese scientists corrected lethal mutations in 3 human embryos.
If there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done, help may be at hand — the days are actually getting longer. For hundreds of millions of years days have been growing longer and if you could travel back in time 1.4 billion years, a day on Earth would be just over 18 hours. That is largely because the moon was a lot closer to Earth and changed the planet’s spin on its axis.
Stem cell pioneer and onetime UW–Madison scientist James “Jamie” Thomson changed history by deriving the first human embryonic stem cell line in 1998.
As the summer solstice draws closer, Stephen Meyers has been welcoming the few extra minutes of sunlight each day that light up his walk home. He knows that after the year’s longest stretch of sunlight on June 21, the days will get shorter as the seasons shift and winter approaches.
It’s made out of bendable silicon and can hide about 94% of the infrared light it encounters, according to the study, which was authored by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Oregon School District will have three longer weekend breaks next school year after a UW-Madison study in the district showed time off curbs the spread of flu.
Quoted: Paul Mitchell, professor of agricultural and applied economics, extension state specialist and director of the Renk AgriBusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agreed. This research “doesn’t talk about the social adjustments at all. Farmers don’t care about variability of yields, they care about the variability of income. Crop insurance is already heavily subsidized, and there are mechanisms in place to mitigate the financial impacts. If yields go down, fine, we’ll plant more corn.”
In partnership with Public Health Madison and Dane County, the city of Madison, Dane County and the UW-Madison Center for Limnology, the Clean Lakes Alliance has provided data for other local sustainability efforts as well.
There’s a reason for renewed interest in the field, not only at UW but around the country: CRISPR, a gene-editing tool discovered in 2012. The “molecular scissor” allows researchers to remove genes that can cause immune rejection or transmit potentially dangerous viruses from animals.
Noted: According to a Wisconsin School of Business study, people who learn how to use credit cards early in life are less likely to have “a serious default in the future” and more likely to have a high credit score.
Noted: Lewis Friedland, professor of journalism and mass communication and the principal investigator on the project, told me in an interview that the effort began years back when he and other journalism faculty started studying links between media changes and political contention, which escalated with the 2011 fight over labor rights for public employees.
Named for late Milwaukee attorney James Shaw, the Shaw Scientist Award award is given to a scientist rather than a specific research project. Ari Rosenberg is one of the 2018 recipients. He’s an assistant professor for the department of neuroscience at UW-Madison, and his current research is dealing with the neurological basis for autism. With a PhD in computational neuroscience, Rosenberg says his approach to studying autism is a bit different from most other labs.
Noted: Another study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers indicates this may be especially true in Wisconsin, where nearly three out of four gun deaths are suicides. Compared to the national rate of 60 percent, this number is above-average.
Kelly-Van Domelen entered the crystal growing and the art design contest for the UW-Madison’s Wisconsin Crystal Growing Competition in 2017 and won. She was then asked to be part of a team to develop crystal experiments to grow aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
Studies of bees, climate change and Amish children are among the eight projects out of 70 receiving grants from one of UW-Madison’s largest endowments.
A new study by NOAA’s James Kossin takes a look at one portion of it—whether hurricanes are moving more slowly than they did in the past. (Does not mention UW–Madison but links to his SSEC page.)
The study was conducted using various types of diets. The goal is to figure out which diet for specific cows will produce the lowest impact on the environment.
A study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that heavy rain and manure levels have been causing more algae blooms.
Days on Earth lasted just 18 hours a million years ago and have been getting longer over the course of time thanks, in part, to the influence of the moon, researchers say.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A new study shows that Wisconsin’s poverty rate increased in 2016 and children were especially impacted despite the state’s job growth during that span.
Noted: Timothy Smeeding, a UW-Madison professor who led the study, said the findings reflect that while more Wisconsinites are working, their earnings may not be increasing as quickly as costs such as housing, health and child care.
The Walsh family continues to raise money for vision research at UW-Madison, including work by researcher David Gamm.
The UW Madison Obesity Prevention Initiative developed Wisconsin’s first obesity map broken down by zip code rather than by county.
The results of a study released Friday shows that Wisconsin’s poverty rate increased in 2016 and children were especially impacted despite the state’s job growth during that span.
If you’ve ever felt like there just aren’t enough hours in the day just be glad that you didn’t live on Earth 1.4 billion years ago. A new study led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin – Madison reveals that ancient Earth had much shorter days, and the 24-hour days that we experience in modern times come courtesy of the Moon.
Three sites—Colorado State University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of California, Davis—plan to inoculate 800 middle-aged dogs for Johnston’s new study. For several years afterward each dog will each receive a booster dose and a physical exam.
t’s not just you – the days really are getting longer. More than a billion years ago, the moon used to be about 40,000 kilometres closer, which made Earth spin faster. Back then, the days were less than 19 hours long. (Paywall)
