“What I thought would happen was that when the traffic came back to normal, we would see the speeds go back down to where they were before 2020,” said Andrea Bill, assistant director of the Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory at UW-Madison. “And we did not see that in 2021.”
Experts said America could see a potential for cyber attacks from the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
A UW Madison professor said though nation-state attacks don’t seem to be Putin’s goal at the moment, now is a good time to take stock and put added security in place.
“I think we have to be careful generally, but I think it wouldn’t be a bad time for companies and individuals to take security precautions seriously,” said Yoshiko Herrera, Professor for the Department of Political Science at UW Madison.
Herrera recommends backing up hard drives and making sure you have secure passwords in place.
Yoshiko Herrera, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on Russia and eastern Europe, and Jon Pevehouse, the chair of UW-Madison’s political science department, join Live at Four to explain what’s next following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Quoted: “Stock markets tend to react very quickly, but then unless there’s some real material damage, you’re gonna get a reversion.” said Mark Copelovitch, Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs at University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Yoshiko Herrera agreed with Keane.
“Taking control of the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, is key to [Putin’s] plan,” said Herrera, an expert on U.S.-Russian relations. Given the opposition of the Ukrainian government and people, she said “the prospect of an insurgency or protracted struggle, unfortunately, seems likely.”
Quoted: Putin “has been preparing economically for sanctions for years,” Yoshiko Herrera, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in Russia and U.S.-Russia relations, told this column. Herrera cited Russia’s expansion of its reserves of foreign currency in recent times as one example
Referring to the invasion of Ukraine, Herrera added, “He is willing to pay an economic cost for this. Saying we are making it economically costly? That is not going to do it. He has already factored that in.”
The new book “Battleground” is a deeply academic dive into how Wisconsin became such an unwelcoming place for civil discourse during the past dozen years … “The decay of the traditional political communication ecology in our state has accelerated over the past decade,” said Lewis Friedland, an emeritus journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of six co-authors, all professors. Besides Friedland, the authors are Dhavan Shah and Michael Wagner, who teach journalism at UW, Katherine Cramer and Jon Pevehouse, both UW political science professors, and Chris Wells, a former UW journalism professor now at Boston University.
Quoted: Andrea Bill, assistant director of the Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which analyzes state traffic data, said people in all regions of the state are speeding more.
Researchers first tracked an increase in speeding when the pandemic shutdowns in early 2020 caused dramatic reductions in the number of cars on the road. By mid-2021, Bill said, volume in Wisconsin was nearly back to pre-pandemic levels — but average speeds hadn’t come down.
“What I thought would happen was that when the traffic came back to normal, we would see the speeds go back down to where they were before 2020,” Bill said. “And we did not see that in 2021.”
Noted: Scientists say the last two decades have been the warmest on record in Wisconsin. Among them is Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist with the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“No season has been immune to the warming trend,” he said. “Winter has warmed the most. That has been true in the past, and it’s expected to be true in the future.”
Quoted: “This is a massive miscalculation,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Yoshiko Herrera, who is an expert on U.S-Russian relations. “This action yesterday was just another level of crazy. It’s a ruination of Russia for decades, so damaging for Ukraine and so costly all around.”
Quoted: Putin’s regime has increasingly been willing to use violence to maintain his power, the result of which has played out over the last week, said Yoshiko Herrera, an expert in Russian-U.S. relations and a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“He is very threatened by the fact that Ukraine has had two successful revolutions kicking out Russia in 2004 and 2014,” she said. “It’s an example to his regime of the people rising up and getting rid of a dictator.”
Despite longstanding disagreements over the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, that debate is a bit of a distraction now, she said.
“Everything changed last week,” she said. “States have disagreements with other states, (but) it’s a complete different matter to invade your neighbor. It takes the discussion of historical grievances and it puts that aside and says, ‘We’re dealing with a state now that is willing to invade another country.'”
Written by Andrew H. Kydd, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Co-authored by Theodore Gerber, Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Rittenhouse winning any libel suit would be “really, really hard,” said Robert E. Drechsel, professor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication.
In Wisconsin, if someone is arrested for a crime and charges have been filed against them, they appear in front of a court commissioner for an initial appearance. At that hearing, the court commissioner considers the conditions, if any, that someone can be released while their criminal case is pending, said University of Wisconsin Law School professor Cecelia Klingele. Posting bail can be a condition of release. However, as the state’s bail laws currently exist, judges can impose “monetary conditions of release … only upon a finding that there is a reasonable basis to believe that the conditions are necessary to assure appearance in court.”
The report “is the equivalent of NOAA sending a red flag up” about accelerating the rise in sea levels, said University of Wisconsin-Madison geoscientist Andrea Dutton, a specialist in sea level rise who wasn’t part of the federal report. The coastal flooding the U.S. is seeing now “will get taken to a whole new level in just a couple of decades.”
Noted: Research from the National Institutes of Health and the University of Wisconsin-Madison indicates a proposed ban on abortion after six weeks could affect women who don’t know they’re pregnant yet, preventing them from getting an abortion later after pregnancy is confirmed through a test.
“I think it’s important for policymakers to know there may be essentially no time between when a person discovers they are pregnant, the missed period, and fetal cardiac activity,” said Jenna Nobles, professor of sociology at the UW-Madison. “It’s particularly true for people with unpredictable cycles, which is more common in young people, Hispanic people and people with common medical conditions.”
Quoted: But John Gross of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School told the Kenosha News this month that Wisconsin is moving in a different direction from other states eliminating or restricting the use of bail.
“They’re not seeing spikes in recidivism, their costs are down and public safety is at the same level, but more people are out on the street,” he said. “And so I feel like Wisconsin is bucking the trend here.”
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and other universities recently published the findings of a four-year study called Baby’s First Years, which looked at the impact of “poverty reduction on family life and infant and toddlers’ cognitive, emotional, and brain development.”
Quoted: UW-Madison Environmental Science expert Andrea Hicks says the news is fantastic.
“It’s really, really exciting, actually,” Hicks said. “We need to reduce the environmental impact of aviation.”
Aviation, Hicks explains, puts a considerable amount of carbon dioxide into air every year. “Biofuels” like the ones being produced at Virent are one solution.
“What’s really exciting is these are ‘drop in replacement’ biofuels,” Hicks said. “What that means is you can use them just the same way you use traditional aviation fuels, but they’re made from plants. And that has a lower carbon footprint. So there’s less environmental impact. It’s really, potentially the future of sustainable aviation.”
Noted: The sturgeon in Lake Winnebago and connecting waterways are unique; according to John Lyons, a fish biologist with the University of Wisconsin Madison, the lake sturgeon population within Lake Winnebago is the single largest population of lake sturgeon in the world.
Lyons estimates that, in total, there’s a very healthy adult fish population estimating numbers in the thousands. Which is good news for many reasons, he says.
The University of Wisconsin Traffic Operations and Safety Lab is studying autonomous vehicle technology using a new autonomous shuttle called the Badger.
For most of human history, we kept time by Earth’s place in space. The second was a subdivision of an Earth day, and, later, an Earth year: The timespan was defined by where Earth was. Then came the atomic clock.
Recently, physicists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison announced the discovery of one of the highest performance atomic clocks ever. They named their instrument an optical lattice atomic clock.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said while low-turnout elections like those held in the spring in Wisconsin often provide greater influence for groups that are organized and for more strident candidates, it can work on both ends of the political spectrum.
“Conservatives have long complained that school tax votes that take place in low-turnout elections are dominated by school employees and parents who disproportionately favor higher spending on education,” Burden said. “At other times, low turnout has favored evangelical Christian candidates who were able to mobilize members of their churches to support them around conservative causes.”
UW-Madison law professor Heinz Klug said opponents may be misreading the clause, which was designed to prevent feudal tenure, a system of servitude, rather than restricting a landowner’s ability to lease out land.
Video: UW Health’s chief quality officer Dr. Jeff Pothof joins Live at Four to talk about the latest COVID-19 headlines.
UW-Madison history professor David McDonald says several things led to this being the perfect time for Russia to stir the conflict that has simmered for decades.
It’s been more than a year since the Cap Times last sat down with our go-to pandemic explainer Malia Jones for her take on the ever-changing COVID situation. These days, Jones, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Applied Population Laboratory, homeschools her kids by day (her solution for protecting her kids and their grandparents), works her day job on the swing shift, and somehow squeezes in time to run a pandemic information site called Dear Pandemic.
UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden told the Cap Times last fall that the term “forensic audit” had never been used in the election administration world until 2021 — when unfounded claims about widespread electoral fraud began circulating.
Quoted: Matt Kures, a community development specialist with UW-Madison Extension, and Laura Dresser, a labor economist and associate director of UW-Madison think tank COWS.
John P. Gross is director of the Public Defender Project at the University of Wisconsin School of Law. Lanny Glinberg is director of the Prosecution Project at the law school.
Quoted: What’s not good is to be the town that’s only a short ways from a retail hub because people will easily go there instead of shopping locally, according to Steven Deller, a professor and community development specialist with University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension.
“You don’t try to compete head-on with a Walmart because they will chew you up and spit you out,” Deller said. However, businesses can gain customers from being in the same plaza as one of the big chains, or at least near it.
Quoted: Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts co-directors Dan Vimont, a professor of atmospheric science at UW-Madison, and Stephen Vavrus, a senior scientist at UW-Madison’s Center for Climatic Research.
“While the increase in inflation during the pandemic has been problematic for many reasons, it is perhaps a necessary side effect of economic aid that has helped keep Americans out of poverty and businesses solvent during an extraordinary crisis,” wrote Menzie Chinn, a professor of public affairs and economics.
“That is actually one of the key reasons for judicial review,” said Susan Yackee, director of UW-Madison’s LaFollette School of Public Affairs and an expert on the rule-making process. “We actually have a pretty clear process for doing this exact thing already.”
The Wisconsin bill also mimics what University of Wisconsin Law School professor David Schwartz deemed most “sly” about Texas’ law. Because private citizens rather than state officials would enforce the ban, “it would be challenging for courts to block the law before a bounty-hunter brings a case under it, yet the law would deter access to abortion even without a bounty-hunting case being brought,” he said in a statement.
Quoted: The rapid growth of the Hispanic population is part of a national trend that demographers cite as a natural increase, growth that’s driven by an established population rather than immigration, said David Egan-Robertson, demographer at the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In other words, it’s the result of families like the Villas, Guzmans and Castros deciding to stay in the region and raise the next generation of northeast Wisconsin’s children.
Still, Egan-Robertson acknowledged that one reason for the rise in numbers for the Hispanic population and for other groups is increased participation in the 10-year survey, because of the U.S. Census Bureau’s improved system of gathering the information.
“In some ways, maybe the diverse population was there in 2010, but the way the Census Bureau captured it then, it really wasn’t giving the full scope of the race and population,” Egan-Robertson said. “In 2020 they got their act together and expanded the amount of data they captured.”
A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies reproductive health said the findings of a recent news story highlighting potential fraud among Milwaukee’s prenatal care coordination companies were “really atrocious and really horrific.”
Tiffany Green, an assistant professor in the departments of Population Health Sciences and Obstetrics and Gynecology, specializes in racial disparities within reproductive health.
Today, about 30% of Wisconsinites live in rural areas and rural millennials are fleeing to population hubs, according to Malia Jones, a social epidemiologist at UW-Madison’s Applied Population Laboratory.
Quoted: Menzie Chinn, an economist with the Robert M. LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is skeptical of the idea that federal pandemic relief spending is the primary cause of recent inflation.
“It’s certainly part of the explanation – but other economies (UK, Euro Area) have also seen an acceleration of inflation,” Chinn says, with higher oil prices, continued supply disruptions and other factors being the main contributors. “One could argue that part of the inflation is due to too little spending, say, on childcare support, which would enable parents to work.”
Mark Copelovitch, a La Follette School political scientist whose work looks at the intersection of economics and politics, says that the ability of the U.S. to finance its debt at virtually no interest shows that the marketplace — essentially, the world’s lenders — isn’t worried about the sustainability of the economy.
On inflation, he considers shortages such as in semiconductors, a key component of cars, or the spike in energy prices, not pandemic relief aid, as leading culprits for rising prices. “Most of what’s driving the inflation is global supply chain issues during a pandemic,” Copelovitch says.
He credits pandemic relief, in the form of direct aid to households as well as other forms of support as well as directly to the state, for preserving incomes, keeping businesses going in the pandemic, and enabling the economy to recover much more quickly than it might have otherwise.
“The reason we have this big surplus now in Wisconsin and elsewhere is because all the other things basically prevented people’s incomes from going down — which meant tax revenue didn’t crater like we worried it was going to,” Copelovitch says.
There are plenty of indicators that farmers across the country are starting 2022 in a strong financial position, said Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We can’t use a crystal ball to see what COVID-19 will bring us next, but we do know the now approved vaccines for COVID-19 work against these variants when we are fully vaccinated,” Dr. Nasia Safdar, a UW Health infectious disease specialists, said in a statement. “We can do our parts to prevent prolonging this pandemic by getting vaccinated and getting our booster shots.”
UW-Madison Law School associate professor John Gross said Wisconsin’s proposed constitutional amendment sets it apart from states reducing or entirely eliminating cash bail’s use. “They’re not seeing spikes in recidivism, their costs are down and public safety is at the same level, but more people are out on the street,” he said. “And so I feel like Wisconsin is bucking the trend here.”
Quoted: Choosing day care doesn’t inherently harm a baby, but stress — whether related to the separation or worries about the quality or cost of care — can hinder their development, said Julie Poehlmann-Tynan, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of human development and family studies.
“Babies are often really sensitive to what’s going on,” she said.
Since babies require high-quality, lower-stress care, Poehlmann-Tynan said, policymakers should consider how best to support a child’s transition to family life.
Quoted: Those changes can already be seen clearly by examining lake ice, said Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Climatic Research.
Scientists studying Wisconsin’s inland lakes are able to collect a wealth of information on Madison’s lakes Mendota and Monona, whose ice records stretch back close to 170 years. Lakes have ice cover for about a month less now than they did when the records began, researchers estimate.
Out of Lake Mendota’s long ice record, the five years with the longest stretch of ice cover all occurred during the 1880s or earlier, and the five years with the shortest ice cover have all been since the 1980s, Vavrus said. It “really is a very different winter climate that we’re living in nowadays compared to over a century ago,” he said.
“I think what we’re seeing is people are pushing in at the limits of the edges of the season where it is potentially more dangerous,” said Titus Seilheimer, fisheries outreach specialist for the Wisconsin Sea Grant.
A new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison explains how hibernating animals use bacteria in their gut to maintain muscle density over the winter. The findings could lead to solutions for people with muscle-wasting disorders or astronauts headed on prolonged journeys into space.
Hannah Carey is a professor emeritus at UW-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine and an author of the study. She said scientists have known for years that ruminant animals, like cows and sheep, are able to recycle their own nitrogen as a way to build muscles while eating a low protein diet. Nitrogen is a vital building block of amino acids and proteins.
More than 13,000 Afghan refugees landed in Wisconsin at Fort McCoy near Tomah in August 2021 and are now being resettled across the state and nation. Not only did they face trauma in being airlifted suddenly from Kabul, but continue to face uncertainty about their futures, including the legal process for obtaining legal immigration status in the U.S. that’s described as complex.
“A lot of people specifically with this situation were hoping there would be something called an Afghan Adjustment Act,” says Erin Barbato, director of the University of Wisconsin Law School Immigrant Justice Clinic. “We’ve had before it with the Cuban Adjustment Act, which would allow everybody who came in this emergent situation to have an expedited manner to obtain their lawful permanent resident status and then have a pathway to citizenship. But so far, it doesn’t seem like there has been much movement in our Congress to make this happen.”
Quoted: UW politics professor Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center, says, “Really in modern times, we’ve seen nothing like what has happened in Wisconsin, and nationally, since the 2020 election.”
He continues, “The unwillingness of most of one party to accept the results and to continue pushing with audits and investigations and questions and subpoenas and other efforts to try to keep their concerns alive, is really new and doesn’t have any precedent. And I think it is not well supported by the facts of the election.”
Greg Nemet, a UW-Madison professor who specializes in energy policy, said utilities need to begin shutting down gas plants, and acquisitions like this cast doubt on ambitious decarbonization goals. “We want to see less demand for gas-fired electricity, not new purchases of it,” Nemet said. “If we are trying to reduce emissions by 80% in the next eight years, we should be investing rapidly and heavily in clean energy and energy efficiency.”
Quoted: “Everything we do alters the selective pressures on the virus,” said Tony Goldberg, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If you wear a mask, then it pays for the virus to sit and wait. If you go to big parties and don’t wear a mask, it will favor viruses that are more aggressive, and that make you sicker so that they can move into new people faster.”
“The virus is like a horror movie villain,” said Thomas Friedrich, a professor of pathobiological sciences at the UW School of Veterinary Medicine. “Every time you think it is dead, it comes back.”
Noted: “The pandemic exacerbated a long-term trend,” said Patrick Remington, an emeritus professor with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Population Health Sciences, on WPR’s “Central Time.”
Alcohol is pervasive in Wisconsin culture. A 2019 report called “The Burden of Binge Drinking in Wisconsin” from the UW-Madison Population Health Institute found the state’s rate of binge drinking to be higher than the U.S. overall.
Noted: Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the National Institutes of Health published their study late last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, in which they analyzed a total of 1.6 million menstrual cycles, using anonymized data self-reported through a smartphone app by 267,000 people.
They found 22% of the people in their study had menstrual cycles that vary by a week or more, a finding that is consistent with other research on the topic, said Jenna Nobles, a UW-Madison demographer who led the study. Nearly all the study’s subjects identified as women, she said.
“Less than 1% of cycles are 28-day cycles with day 14 ovulation, even though that is the stylized version of menstruation that we all learn about,” she said.
Nobles conducted the research with UW-Madison graduate student Lindsay Cannon and NIH emeritus investigator Allen Wilcox, who is a physician and a renowned scholar of reproductive epidemiology. Wilcox’s previous research has served as the foundation of knowledge around topics including when in the menstrual cycle people get pregnant and how likely it is that people will have miscarriages.
Quoted: “He’s been I would say argumentative and somewhat belligerent,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It’s a little bit of a sort of bull in the china shop analogy, that he’s just throwing elbows and feels, it seems, quite confident about what he’s doing. … I can’t diagnose him psychologically from a distance. I wouldn’t want to do that. But there is a pattern of him being brazen I would say and aggressive in his actions without maybe thinking about all the consequences of what he’s doing.”
Quoted: Dr. Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer for UW Health, said that helps eliminate a lot of the bias that may otherwise be present.
“To have folks studying medications, really any medications, within the confines and safety of a well-conducted clinical trial, that’s how we learn things in science,” said Pothof. “Those kinds of studies are welcome, although hard to do and time-consuming and resource-consuming.”
Quoted: While other states brag big dairy and crop industries, Wisconsin’s insulation from fertilizer price spikes is thanks to having more cows per acre than corn per acre, according to Paul Mitchell, a professor in the UW-Madison department for Agriculture and Applied Economics.
“About a third of our nitrogen for corn comes from dairy manure,” Mitchell said. “And we have more cows per acre of cropland.”
However, manure isn’t easily accessible. It’s difficult to transport due to its high water content and therefore large volume, so it can’t usually go beyond it’s own farmland or crop farms neighboring dairy farms.
But it’s lack of transport ability shouldn’t dissuade you from seeking it out, according to Matt Ruark, a professor of soil science at UW-Madison and soil nutrient expert.
“We think of [manure] as a waste stream, but it is has relatively high nutrient value in terms of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Those are big three nutrient inputs into our corn production systems,” Ruark said.
Over the years, Sanjay Limaye said the discovery of certain gasses — ammonia, methane and most recently, phosphine — in the planet Venus’ atmosphere has caught scientists by surprise.
Those are among several gasses that can be produced by life, as well as through other means.
Here’s what guests on the Jan. 21, 2022 episode had to say about returning UW-Madison students in the midst of the Omicron surge, whether it has yet to peak in Wisconsin, medical ethics involved in treating COVID-19 patients and why the state figures so prominently in the national politics of election practices.
Cancer researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are getting help from a unique partner on campus – sharks.
Dr. Aaron LeBeau, an associate professor of pathology and lab medicine, and radiology, at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, will be leading the shark-based cancer research. It is currently the only research of its kind in the world.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomy professor James Lattis said the southwest direction of the object means it was likely a meteoroid and not a piece of space junk, which generally travels east.
He said it’s common to see meteors in the early morning hours in the Midwest because the region is facing forward in the earth’s obit around the sun.
“It’s like looking out the windshield of your car,” he said. “You get more bugs on your windshield because that’s the direction you’re moving.”
