Category: Top Stories

Seidenberg is a cognitive scientist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In his latest book, Language at the Speed of Sight, he points out that the “science of reading” can be a difficult concept for educators to grasp. He says it requires some basic understanding of brain research and the “mechanics” of reading, or what is often referred to as phonics.

Their finding that the intensity of Arctic cold is easing in a warming world is supported by many other studies. For example, Jonathan Martin, a meteorology researcher at the University of Wisconsin, has documented considerable shrinkage of the pool of frigid air surrounding the Arctic in recent decades.

“We’re monkeying with the very chemical foundation of these ecosystems,” said Emily H. Stanley, a limnologist (freshwater ecologist) at the University of Wisconsin — Madison. “But right now we don’t know enough yet to know where we’re going. To me, scientifically that’s really interesting, and as a human a little bit frightening.”

A new plan proposed by the Department of Interior would open some federally protected waters to off-shore oil drilling. We speak Steph Tai of the University of Wisconsin Law School about the news and what the law says.

“When we’re throwing down road salt, we might be thinking about the fact that we’re putting salt into the water, but we’re not thinking that it may also mobilize lead,” says Hilary Dugan, a limnologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was not involved in the study. Dugan has studied lakes in North America, which she also found to be increasing in salinity.

Researchers at UW-Madison (Natalie Guyette) are looking at how stress affects the symptoms of asthma in a four year study looking at how the mind and body communicate in stressful situations. We talk with one of the key professors about their findings.

YouTube star Logan Paul has been weathering a barrage of controversy following his video depicting an alleged suicide victim in Aokigahara, a forest in Japan. The video–coupled with others posted on his YouTube channel–highlights a growing concern over what is being produced on social media platforms. We speak with Kathleen Culver, assistant professor and Director of UW-Madison’s Center for Journalism Ethics, about the news and what these videos say about internet culture.

Neuroscientist Chiara Cirelli of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Sleep and Consciousness, who conducted the study, explained at the time, ‘I don’t think we know of any cognition function that isn’t affected by sleep deprivation.’

“It’s just inconclusive at this stage,” said the University of Wisconsin’s Martin. “I think the jet is getting wavier, I’m not sure it’s connected to the Arctic,” he added.

“They’re going to get through this. They are going to make it because they have experienced these kinds of conditions before, and they don’t get wiped out. Maybe we’ll get a little suppression of the ticks, but we’ll see,” says Susan Paskewitz, the chair of the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Paskewitz’s research focuses on disease-carrying arthropods like mosquitoes and ticks, which tend to be the ones that we worry about most in the summer.

If you live in the eastern US, from northern Florida all the way to New England, you’re in for some nasty weather: a massive winter storm called a “bomb cyclone” is hammering the coast, bringing snow, ice, flooding, and strong winds. That’s not a made-up click-bait term; it’s actually used by meteorologists to indicate a mid-latitude cyclone that intensifies rapidly — or as meteorologist Jon Martin at the University of Wisconsin-Madison says, they “just kind of explode.”

Federal regulations affect everything from how much mercury dentists can pour down the sink to who’s allowed to drill on federal lands. There are thousands and thousands of regulations governing our lives, but since they’re not front and center in Congress, we rarely hear about them, even though regulations are really where the rubber hits the road. This hour, we’ll talk to Susan Yackee, professor of public policy and political science at the UW-Madison La Folette School of Public Affairs, about the mysterious world of federal regulations.

In a report published in 2012 by the American Geophysical Union, atmospheric scientists Jennifer A. Francis of Rutgers University and Stephen J. Vavrus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered evidence that the jet stream’s weaker winds and bigger wave amplitudes “may lead to an increased probability of extreme weather events that result from prolonged conditions.”

But there are some really interesting things afoot. Usona is a medical research organization that is exploring the potential of psychedelic medication — psilocybin — in depression treatment. My hope in the coming year is that we continue to see exploration of the therapeutic use of psilocybin.

Maureen Durkin, one of the authors of that study and a population health researcher at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, told Spectrum that differences in socio-economic status may be one reason why children who are black and Hispanic are less likely to get screened for autism spectrum disorders—leading to relatively lower diagnosis rates.

Sleep-inducing substances may come from the process of making new connections between neurons. Chiara Cirelli and Giulio Tononi, sleep researchers at the University of Wisconsin, suggest that since making these connections, or synapses, is what our brains do when we are awake, maybe what they do during sleep is scale back the unimportant ones, removing the memories or images that don’t fit with the others, or don’t need to be used to make sense of the world.