Category: Experts Guide

Volker Radeloff, professor of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at UW-Madison, says while the fires are far from home, Wisconsin isn’t immune to these dry, hot conditions.

“This is an extreme year,” Radeloff said. “I’m not saying this is what every year will be like, but I think there will be more years like [this].”

UW Madison Sears Bascom Professor of Learning Analytics, David Williamson Shaffer, says teachers at all levels of education are having to adapt quickly to this new wave of technology.

“We know that students are going to use it whether or not teachers plan for it, which means that teachers have to plan for it. Unfortunately, when change comes this rapidly, teachers are sort of left on their own to figure it out, and I think that’s a big problem,” said Professor Shaffer.

“The regular lawmaking process in Wisconsin has basically broken down and become nonfunctional since Evers was elected in 2018 and has faced a really stalwart Republican majority,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at UW-Madison. “Aside from signing two budgets into law, both of which were acrimonious and left both sides somewhat dissatisfied, there hasn’t been any regular lawmaking to speak of.”

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum’s Wisconsin Native Plant Garden — home to hundreds of species native to the region — the turf grass on the ground is brown but the native plants are green, said Susan Carpenter, the garden’s curator.

“It’s a stark reminder that they are more resilient in the face of drought than turf grass, which has very short little roots,” Carpenter said.

“Buprenorphine is a first-line treatment for opioid use disorder, and offering it to anyone seen in the emergency department after an opioid overdose should be standard of care,” said Dr. Elizabeth Salisbury-Afshar, a UW Health addiction medicine physician and University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of family medicine and community health, who called the study results “promising.”

“Mosquitoes emerge from standing water – like what’s in our gutters and puddles or in more forested areas – but we haven’t had a lot of that,” said Lyric Bartholomay, a public health entomologist and professor of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “So without much rain, there just haven’t been good habitats for mosquitoes to grow.”

David Drake, a wildlife specialist and forest and wildlife ecology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison compared juvenile birds to 16-year-old drivers.

“They know how to drive but, they don’t know where they’re going or how everything works,” Drake said. “We refer to that as an accidental. I’m assuming that’s likely what happened.”

Quoted: Whether public employees’ speech is constitutionally protected depends on the context they are acting in, said Robert Dreschel, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus of journalism and mass communication.

“It doesn’t take long before things get complicated and difficult to sort out,” Dreschel said. “It’s certainly quite a clash of interests.”

We talk with the UW-Madison assistant professor Rebecca Myerson behind the study about the effects of price caps on insulin costs.

“The reason that setting new temperature records is a big deal is that we are now being challenged to find ways to survive through temperatures hotter than any of us have ever experienced before,” University of Wisconsin-Madison climate scientist Andrea Dutton said in an email. “Soaring temperatures place ever increasing strains not just on power grids and infrastructure, but on human bodies that are not equipped to survive some of the extreme we are already experiencing.”

Gavin Dehnert, emerging contaminants scientist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, helped write the Wisconsin Department of Health Services’ statewide PFAS standards in drinking water. He told the Cap Times the bill provides much-needed funding for testing and cleanup efforts in both public and private water sources.

“Before we can actually remediate it, we have to know where it is,” Dehnert said. “This does a pretty good job at saying, ‘OK, here is where the PFAS are. Let’s find out where the PFAS are so we can go about doing our best to remediate it.’”