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Category: Research

Emerging Cancer Therapies Rely On Patient’s Immune System

Wisconsin Public Radio

University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison has treated two children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia using the recently approved therapy KYMRIAH. One child is very early in the process and another is in remission, said Dr. Mark Juckett, chief of bone marrow transplant at UW Carbone Cancer Center in Madison.

Here’s a sweet recipe for cheap, green plastic—sugar and corncobs

Science

Plastic has a huge carbon footprint: Producing the petroleum-based material accounts for at least 100 million tons of carbon emissions each year. Now, a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison has invented an inexpensive way to make plastic with a much lighter touch, from sugar and corncobs. If it can be made cheaply enough, the material could one day replace one of the world’s most common plastics—polyethylene terephthalate (PET)—found in food packaging, soda bottles, and even polyester fabric.

3.5 Billion-Year-Old Fossils Challenge Ideas About Earth’s Start

Wired

Last month, researchers lobbed another salvo in the decades-long debate about the nature of these forms. They are indeed fossil life, and they date to 3.465 billion years ago, according to John Valley, a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin. If Valley and his team are right, the fossils imply that life diversified remarkably early in the planet’s tumultuous youth.

States Getting the Most (and Least) Sleep

247 Wall Street

To determine the states where residents report getting the most and least sleep, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the share of adults in every state who get less than seven hours of sleep. These figures were obtained from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2014 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). The share of adults in each state reporting frequent mental distress was compiled by County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute joint program using 2014 CDC data.

The Lovely Tale of an Adorable Squid and Its Glowing Partner

The Atlantic

A few years ago, in a laboratory at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, I walked into a mostly dark room, with a single light illuminating a plastic cup. Within the cup were dozens of tiny white blobs, each smaller than a pea. They were baby Hawaiian bobtail squid, and they were adorable. Their diminutive arms trailed behind them as they bobbed in the water, and the pigment cells that would eventually allow their adult selves to change color gave their infant faces a freckled appearance.

Left behind: Who looks out for children when their parents go to prison?

Isthmus

Quoted: “The children of incarcerated parents have been invisible for a long time because of stigma,” says Julie Poehlmann-Tynan, UW-Madison professor of human development and family studies. Poehlmann-Tynan has researched this population since 1996. She’s done the first ever observational study of children visiting incarcerated parents. Her work focuses on what will help children cope and thrive while a parent is incarcerated.

GOP Rigs Elections: Gerrymandering, Voter-ID Laws, Dark Money

Rolling Stone

African-Americans, who voted for Clinton over Trump by an 88-to-8 margin, were three times more likely than whites to be kept from the polls. “Thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of otherwise eligible people were deterred from voting by the ID law,” said University of Wisconsin political scientist Kenneth Mayer.

New Developments in Eagle Protection

Wisconsin Public Radio

The bald eagle population is still rebounding in the United States. But a new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the National Park Service and the U.S. Geological Survey found that protecting eagle nests from humans can help aid in their reproduction. We talk with one of the researchers about what this means.

Fossil Discoveries Challenge Ideas About Earth’s Start

Quanta Magazine

Last month, researchers lobbed another salvo in the decades-long debate about the nature of these forms. They are indeed fossil life, and they date to 3.465 billion years ago, according to John Valley, a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin. If Valley and his team are right, the fossils imply that life diversified remarkably early in the planet’s tumultuous youth.

Wound monitoring app may keep patients out of hospitals

New Atlas

According to recent studies, surgical site infections (SSIs) are the leading cause of hospital readmission following an operation. In hopes of catching those SSIs before readmission is necessary, scientists from the University of Wisconsin, Madison have developed an experimental app known as WoundCare.

UW Botany Professor Grows Plants In Space

Wisconsin Public Radio

Since the 1960s, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been studying how plants will grow in space. We talk with a Professor of Botany at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who has been leading a research team to study the effects of growing plants in a zero gravity environment.

The Psychology of Child Torture

Psychology Today

This study, by authors based at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Eastern Virginia Medical School, University of Washington, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, University of Utah, and the National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse, found abusers demonstrated little or no remorse.

A California City’s Plan to Turn Indebted Millennials Into Local Doctors

Politico Magazine

Riverside’s death rates from cancer, liver disease, and heart disease are well above the state average, for example. In 2016, the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ranked each California county by overall health outcomes, and pegged Riverside at 40th out of 57. (Fellow Inland Empire counties San Bernardino and Imperial counties fared even worse.)

UW Botany Professor Grows Plants In Space

Wisconsin Public Radio

Since the 1960s, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been studying how plants will grow in space. We talk with a Professor of Botany at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who has been leading a research team to study the effects of growing plants in a zero gravity environment.

Why Lupita Nyong’o’s upcoming children’s book is a major step for kids, authors, book publishers and basically everyone

Moneyish

The push for more diverse characters in children’s book has been a slow climb. Only 14% of kids books published in the US had black, Latino, Asian or Native American main characters featured, according to a 2015 study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What’s more, around 80% of the people in editorial — authors, illustrators, editors — are white, according to industry data from publisher Lee and Low.

The Ad Industry Keeps Selling An American Dream That Most Aren’t Living

Fast Company

Would you consider yourself middle class? Chances are, whether you’re wealthy, lower income, or actually somewhere in the middle, you still identify as middle class. There are plenty of reasons why that is–“middle class” might be the most used word in modern politics–but a new University of Wisconsin study posits that it could also be because ads are telling us we’re middle class.

Case of 13 California kids allegedly tortured ‘fits this pattern we’ve been tracking for a long time’

The Washington Post

A 2014 study by University of Wisconsin pediatrician Barbara Knox and colleagues found that in 38 cases of severe child abuse, 47 percent of parents had never enrolled their children in school or pulled their youngsters out when abuse was suspected and told authorities they were home schooling.

Perris torture case shows need for homeschool oversight

The Sacramento Bee

The Coalition for Responsible Home Education, which advocates for tougher homeschool regulation, has a graphic database of homeschool abuses, from starved children to teenagers locked in cages. A 2014 study of extreme child abuse conducted by a University of Wisconsin pediatrician and five colleagues found that in nearly half of the school-age cases, the abusers had pulled their children out of classes to homeschool; another 29 percent had never even enrolled their children in school.

How Scientists Saved Bald Eagles From Destruction in Minnesota

Inverse

Over two-and-a-half decades later, it’s being hailed as an unqualified success. On Tuesday, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey announced in the Journal of Applied Ecology that bald eagle populations at Voyageurs have been tremendously rehabilitated to stable numbers thanks to nest protection. Collected data in reveals that the breeding population of these birds has risen from 10 pairs in 1991 to 48 pairs in 2016.

White Racism Class at FGCU Causes ‘Vile’ Backlash

Time

This is not the first time a professor has faced controversy because of their courses or lesson plans. In May, student protesters shut down a sociology class at Northwestern University after a professor invited both an Immigration and Customs Enforcement public relations officer and an undocumented immigrant to speak in back-to-back lessons. Last year, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison started teaching a course titled “The Problem of Whiteness,” prompting complaints from a Republican lawmaker in the state, who called on the university to discontinue the class. The school defended the course and is offering it again this semester.

Protecting eagle nests aids in reproduction

WI Farmer

Although the result is most relevant to large, undisturbed habitat like Voyageurs, “the model can be used for other raptors, in other places, regardless of the level of disturbance,” says Zuckerberg. “Long-term monitoring data is really hard to fund, but it’s critical for conservation. This is a perfect example of the benefits of collecting data in a standardized way over a long period of time.”

UW study questions effectiveness of killing wolves to protect livestock

Wisconsin Public Radio

Wisconsin researchers issued a paper Wednesday that questions whether governments should kill wolves that are attacking livestock. Scientists at the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies looked at 230 verified wolf attacks on livestock in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan from 1998 through 2014.

Medical experts predict worst flu season in history

CNBC

A different approach to the universal vaccine is under way at FluGen, a biotech firm in Madison, Wisconsin. Backed by both government and VC funding, the company is working with technology first discovered at the University of Wisconsin-Madison by Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka and Dr. Gabriele Neumann and exclusively licensed to FluGen. “Our vaccine, called RedeeFlu, is based on a premise that says what happens if you take a [naturally occurring] ’wild type’ of flu virus and modify it to infect the human body but don’t allow it to replicate and cause illness,” said Boyd Clarke, executive chairman of FluGen. (Coincidentally, his maternal grandfather died in the 1918 pandemic.)

Har Gobind Khorana: Nobel winning biochemist is honored in today’s Google Doodle

Quartz

In 1960, he move to the US for a role at the Institute for Enzyme Research in the University of Wisconsin. It was there that he made his Nobel-worthy discovery and became a naturalized American citizen. In 1970, Khorana joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Alfred P. Sloan professor of biology and chemistry, the position he held until he died on Nov. 9, 2011 at age 89.

Google Doodle Honors Indian American Scientist

Voice of America

Khorana went on to do research at universities around the world, including Canada and the United States. In 1968, he and two other researchers at the University of Wisconsin – Madison earned the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Joining the dots between Afghanistan’s opium trade and Washington’s failing struggle against the Taliban

The National

In the words of Alfred W McCoy, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of a new book, In the Shadows of the American Century, “Afghanistan is the world’s first true narco-state – a country where illicit drugs dominate the economy, define political choices and determine the fate of foreign interventions.”

Har Gobind Khorana: Why Google Is Celebrating Him Today

Time

Born in 1922 as the youngest of five children in a rural village that is now part of eastern Pakistan, Khorana learned to read and write with help from his father, according to the Nobel Prize’s biography of the biochemist. With a number of scholarships, Khorana went on to earn a doctorate in organic chemistry in 1948. He conducted his Nobel Prize-winning research on nucleotides at the University of Wisconsin, and he later became the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

How the heroin trade explains the US-UK failure in Afghanistan

The Guardian

After 16 years and more than $1 trillion, this Guardian piece argues western intervention has resulted in Afghanistan becoming the world’s first true narco-state. “Washington’s massive military juggernaut has been stopped in its steel tracks by a small pink flower – the opium poppy,” Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Alfred W McCoy, writes. “Throughout its three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium – and suffered when they failed to complement it.” In this piece, McCoy outlines how the heroin trade explains the US-UK failure in Afghanistan.

Experts concerned over kids posting ‘digital self-harm’ on social media

The Globe

It’s called “digital self-harm,” and its rates are similar to traditional means of self-harm, such as cutting or burning, researchers say.The study, led by Justin Patchin, professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, found that 6 percent of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 engage in digital self-harm.

Could Gene Therapy One Day Cure Diabetes?

Gizmodo Australia

Alan Attie, whose University of Wisconsin lab studies the genetic and biochemical processes underlying genetics, called it “beautiful and elegant work.””An exciting development in the diabetes field is the discovery of extraordinary plasticity in alpha and beta cells,” he told Gizmodo. “Work such as that from the Gittes Lab demonstrates the way in which this plasticity can be harnessed for therapeutic purposes.”

Wisconsin’s Population Boasts Modest Growth

Wisconsin Public Radio

Noted: “Wisconsin is part of the pattern of the Upper Midwest,” said Egan-Robertson. “The states in this area are generally growing quite slowly. A lot of that is due to migration in the country; its been a long-term pattern for decades. There tends to be more movement out of the Midwest and northeast states into the south and western states.”