University of Wisconsin-Madison engineer Scott Sanders usually spends his time figuring out how gases and particles behave in combustion engines.
But Sanders has turned his expertise to determining how a different type of particle, one that has sickened millions around the world, moves from human mouths covered with masks.
Alta Charo, a University of Wisconsin lawyer and bioethicist, recalled the clamor in the 1990s to get insurers to cover bone marrow transplants for breast cancer until a solid study showed they “simply made people more miserable and sicker” without improving survival.
Bob Benjamin was observing the Milky Way when he noticed something odd.The professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s astronomy department, and co-author of a new study, saw a red, tilted structure that pierced through a hole in the dust at the dark center of the galaxy.
Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, worries there is so much pressure to produce positive results that conditions are ripe for cutting corners. She noted that in an emergency when people are suffering, there can be resistance to having control groups that don’t get an experimental treatment in a study.
Quoted: “A mask that is not covering the nose will not stop a person infected with SARS-CoV-2 from contaminating the air in front of them when they exhale. Similarly, a mask covering only the mouth will fail to prevent an uninfected person from inhaling contaminated air. Since it does not take a lot of virus particles to cause infection, a partially worn mask may not be effective enough. This reminds me of when I see people wearing a bicycle helmet without buckling the strap or wearing it so loosely that it doesn’t cover the front of their head. The intention might be there, but there is a higher risk of head injury following an accident if the helmet is unable to do what it is designed to do.”
— Ajay Sethi, PhD, MHS, associate professor, Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
With government and industry pumping billions into vaccine development, testing and manufacturing, a vaccine could be available in record time, say scientists — it just might not be completely effective. “We might have vaccines in the clinic that are useful in people within 12 or 18 months,” Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told Nature in May. “But we’re going to need to improve on them.”
The new “Civic Health in Wisconsin” study by the Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison represents the first time civic engagement data has been tracked statewide, said Mary Beth Collins, the center’s director and one of the study’s principal authors. It looks at data on Wisconsinites’ connectedness to their communities using a range of measures, from volunteerism and voting to the amount of time spent with neighbors and friends.
While many people are scrambling to combat flooding and damage to infrastructure, climate scientists are working to find out what has been causing the latest rise in lake levels. According to Jack Williams, a UW-Madison geography professor and climate-change expert, it’s the billion-dollar question.“We can’t yet definitively say,” Williams said. “What we know is that we are seeing increasing temperatures and variability of rainfall, which are both known to be caused by climate change.”
TIME asked 21 historians, including Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology Nan Estad, to weigh in with their picks for “worst moments” that hold a lesson—and what they think those experiences can teach us.
“Halfway through 2020, 786 people in Wisconsin died prematurely, unexpectedly, and separated from family,” said Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “COVID-19 will be a leading cause of death in Wisconsin for 2020. We have not had a new leading cause of death in Wisconsin or the U.S. since HIV/AIDS.”
Health scares always spawn scurrilous stories. But with covid-19, “there’s lots of opportunity for misinformation,” said Dhavan Shah, a professor of mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
At risk is University of Wisconsin-Madison’s plan to welcome students back to campus this fall. Jeff Pothof, University of Wisconsin Health chief quality and safety officer, said if local health officials don’t try to stop the spread of the virus in Dane County, in-person instruction could be called off. “If we’re unable to get on top of this current spike and it continues to accelerate, we may be in a position where it won’t make sense to be holding in-person classes,” he said. “It becomes a risk that most of us shouldn’t be taking with our children.”
Both the city and UW-Madison have similar orders in place to ensure people are distancing properly, which will be especially important come late August when the university’s 30,000 students return to campus. “We have been and will be working to ensure people are abiding by the campus order when they are on campus property,” Marc Lovicott of UW-Madison’s Police Department, said. “We have and will issue citations for blatant and/or multiple violations.”
“It is important for white children to see people of color as being knowledgeable and authoritative,” said Gloria Ladson-Billings, a teacher educator who most recently was on the faculty at UW-Madison. “The stuff we are seeing happening in our streets today is, I think, a direct result of young white people saying, ‘I was never really taught to value these people’s lives.’”
The decision could lead to severe efforts to change electoral rules for political gain, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
If you decide to use your anger, choose something you can control. “Anger is a very energizing emotion—think of it as the opposite of procrastination,” says Evan Polman, an associate professor in the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Remember that anger can give you courage. Use it to ask for a raise, get involved in a cause you care about or get up the nerve to have that difficult conversation you’ve been putting off.
Bron, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was on the hunt for a tiny threat: the black-legged tick. Also known as a deer tick, this arachnid is notorious for its ability to spread illnesses like Lyme disease to humans.
Not so fast. The Pioneer probe sent to Venus in 1978 detected traces of methane in that CO2-filled atmosphere. Methane is a rare chemical to produce without life acting as some kind of intermediary. “People tried to explain it away and they couldn’t,” says Sanjay Limaye, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a former chair of NASA’s Venus Exploration Analysis Group.
Gloria Ladson-Billings, a teacher educator who worked in school districts for years and most recently was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said her own experience bears that out.
Such narrow margins are indicative of how split Wisconsinites are politically, which should translate to the Legislature, said UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden.
“We were fortunate that the pandemic hit during the primaries rather than the general election,” said Barry C. Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It provided a sort of training ground for states to turn the corner on voting by mail.”
“Many of the protesters want to divert and reallocate funds away from the police into social services and the communities,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor Ralph Grunewald. “That makes a lot of sense.”
“(It’s) very difficult to take politics out. When we get new information we filter it through what we already believe,” says Dr. Dietram Scheufele, a science communication professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
B Corp certification isn’t particularly well known among consumers yet, said Neeraj Arora, executive director of the Nielsen Center for Marketing Research at UW-Madison, but he thinks awareness of the certification and its meaning will grow.
“I don’t see how that’s sustainable through the fall election,” professor Barry Burden, director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told AFP.”
There will come a point where Biden will need to be a physical presence on the campaign trail, if only to reassure voters he is a real person, in good health and ready to serve.”
University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Microbiology and Immunology Lindsay Kalan said that level of antimicrobial — a broad term for something that can kill bacteria and fungi — use might not have been required, but was part of an early learning curve of treating a new disease.
“Absent these kinds of conversations, the status quo wins,” said Patricia Devine, psychology professor and director of the Prejudice Lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And the status quo is being revealed to us to be unacceptable in terms of costing people their lives only because of the color of their skin. That can’t stand.
But Jonathan Kenoyer, an archaeologist and Indus expert at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, remains skeptical that the chicken arose in Southeast Asia. “They need to get ancient DNA” to back up their claims, he says, because genomes of modern birds may provide limited clues to early events in chicken evolution.
Scholars are brimming with ideas to construct a more generous safety net on a permanent basis, bolstering everything from Medicaid to child care support. Timothy Smeeding, a professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, suggests that the federal government pick up the entire tab for Medicaid, which it now shares with the states.
And this order in particular may have trouble standing up to scrutiny. Kenneth Mayer, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert in executive orders, called the language “complete gobbledygook.”
Today, wild garlic is found only in parts of Central Asia, but it may once have grown wild from China to India, Egypt and Ukraine, according to Philipp W. Simon, a research leader at the Agriculture Department’s Agricultural Research Service and a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s department of horticulture. From those ancient beginnings, garlic has traveled the globe to become one of the world’s most important vegetable crops.
Among other things, chronic stress contributes to inflammation and vascular disease, and can even directly damage the brain’s neurons. “This can lead to a slew of health issues, including atrophy in areas of the brain that are key for memory and cognition,” says Megan Zuelsdorff, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing investigating the mechanisms underlying cognitive health and dementia disparities.
El historiador Richard Keller ha escrito Aislamiento letal, una investigación sobre la ola de calor de París de 2003. Le he preguntado por aquella tragedia porque anticipa los dramas climáticos que desgraciadamente están por venir.
“The basis of the deep pelagic food web is actually detritus raining down from the surface waters and filtering down through the water and being scavenged up by all of these different organisms, [including] zooplankton that are living down there scavenging phytoplankton and then being consumed in turn by different larger organisms than that,” said Dr. Harold J. Tobin, Professor of Geoscience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “We also have many organisms called amphipods. They’re in the same family as krill, and they’re a very, very common zooplankton.”
“We think of masking as this seemingly simple intervention, but it’s rather complex,” said Dr. Nasia Safdar, associate professor of infectious diseases at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Malia Jones of the Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studies how the places we spend time affect our health and how diseases spread in those places.
Linn Posey-Maddox, an associate professor of educational policy studies at UW-Madison, said the pandemic exacerbates existing racial inequities in education.
Quoted: It’s not unusual for men to struggle after the birth of a child, says Tova Walsh, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied fathers and parent-child relationships. There are financial pressures, expectations to try to meet and lifestyle adjustments to make.
In the history of family services, fathers have been overlooked and neglected, Walsh says, with sometimes clinical consequences. “Paternal depression is underrecognized,” she says.
Quoted: For the time being, researchers say cats should be a focus, because studies have found they are highly susceptible to the coronavirus and because they are common pets and roam freely in many places. In a study published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, scientists infected cats with the virus and found that those cats could infect other cats. No felines showed symptoms, but the amount of virus they shed in nasal swabs was similar to that shed by some humans, said co-author Peter Halfmann, a University of Wisconsin virologist.
“If a human can transmit to a human with this amount of virus being shed, it’s definitely possible for a cat to transmit to a human,” Halfmann said.
Noted: A new study published in PLoS ONE by David Lovelace and team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used a series of climate models and predictions of body temperature to investigate the biology of some Late Triassic dinosaurs. They investigated the small theropod Coelophysis bauri and large prosauropod Plateosaurus engelhardti during the hot, dry global greenhouse conditions that prevailed at that time.
Quoted: Robert Yablon, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who specializes in election law, called the case “a true outlier.”
“Seventh Circuit cases rarely sit for even one year after oral argument, much less three,” he said by email.
“The judges’ internal deliberations are confidential, so it’s impossible to know for sure what’s happening behind the scenes. The judges may have disagreements that they’re truly struggling to resolve. It’s also conceivable that they’re waiting to see if Wisconsin law changes in ways that moot the appeal or hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court eventually decides another voting-related case that offers further guidance on the relevant legal standards.”
Quoted: “Wisconsin has the most roundabouts of any state on its state highway system,” said Andrea Bill, a traffic safety engineer and researcher at the University of Wisconsin’s Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory.
Quoted: “This is just a sliver of the nearly 6 million people in Wisconsin,” said Patrick Remington, an epidemiologist and a professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “These were highly visible and they could be high risk, but in reality, these were isolated events.”
“It is really hard to isolate one thing when so many things are going,” said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We cannot deny such an impact because of people on the street in public, standing close and shouting out and not wearing masks. That is ideal to spread the virus,” said Song Gao, assistant professor at the UW-Madison Geospatial Data Science Lab.
Oguzhan Alagoz, a professor of industrial engineering and infectious disease modeling expert at the UW-Madison, said his work shows social distancing adherence plays a major factor in the spread of coronavirus.
“Me and my family are also tired of being careful,” Alagoz said. “But unfortunately we cannot get super comfortable. … People should still be careful. Wearing masks, I think, is important, especially indoors.”
Quoted: UW-Health Doctor Tiffany Green studies the causes and consequences of racial disparities in health.
“We see across the country that Black Americans are dying disproportionately relative to our share of our population, and that is especially true here in Wisconsin unfortunately,” Green said.
“Currently we’re talking about what can we do about the police, but the police are not the only issue, every other social system was built on the same inequities,” Alvin Thomas, UW-Madison Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Human Development and Family Studies, said.
Quoted: NBC15 also reached out to Nasia Safdar, the Director of Infection Prevention at UW-Heath, and asked if a second wave of COVID-19 is likely to happen this fall. “I think with a new virus, it’s difficult to predict if it’s going to behave exactly like other viruses that are in the same family,” Safdar said.
In fact, having parents who worry excessively about what their kids are missing out on is likely more damaging than missing out on experiences, said Dr. Seth Pollack, Ph.D, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“If all viruses suddenly disappeared, the world would be a wonderful place for about a day and a half, and then we’d all die – that’s the bottom line,” says Tony Goldberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “All the essential things they do in the world far outweigh the bad things.”
“They think a lot about, well, what happens if this mosquito larva is in cold water or if it’s in really hot water? Or what happens if this adult female mosquito can’t find a shady spot to rest in?” says Lyric Bartholomay, an entomologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It’s awesome what kinds of questions emerge.”
Somewhere in America, a 14-year-old Black boy is playing video games in his room, and his parents are satisfied that they are keeping him safe from COVID-19. But then, in Minneapolis, George Floyd is killed by a police officer, and his parents are reminded that their son’s life could just as easily be snuffed out.
Author Alvin Thomas is an assistant professor in the Human Development and Family Studies Department in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “Because of what we know of this study, I think for me, I think we’ve reached a point where the evidence of benefit seems significant,” said Dr. Ehlenbach.
Rebecca Larson, an associate professor of biological systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin, has studied the climate effects of agriculture and the biological processes that take place when microorganisms break apart manure.
Rebecca Larson, an associate professor of biological systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin, has studied the climate effects of agriculture and the biological processes that take place when microorganisms break apart manure.
“Cost of doing trade have also increased a great deal. Not much international air traffic anymore and much less shipping as well,” said Ian Coxhead, an economist at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
“The presence of a mask there isn’t going to do anything until somebody actually puts it on and keeps it on,” said Dr. Nasia Safdar, the medical director of infection control and prevention at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“This thesis brings us new knowledge about why people do engage themselves, it brings nuances to our understanding of the anti-immigrant sentiment, and none the less shows how storytelling can be a mobilizing force for this type of protest movements”, first opponent professor Katherine Cramer (University of Wisconsin-Madison) said during the disputation.
“If this isn’t the wake-up call, nothing is going to be,” says Tony Goldberg, an infectious-disease ecologist and professor of epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Dr. Noelle LoConte is an oncologist at the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center. She said for some of the sickest cancer patients, the idea of contracting coronavirus is too much to take, and they decide it’s time to stop fighting.
“There has been increasing evidence that mindfulness meditation – or the ability to pay attention to one’s body, thoughts and emotions in a nonjudgmental way – can have an antidepressant effect,” says Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “The idea is that just like physical exercise builds muscle, we can build our mental muscles to become more aware and calm in the faces of challenges and stress.”
Some companies, including Midwest Prototyping, that already provide shields to hospitals are also starting to sell to consumers. Additionally, the University of Wisconsin-Madison offers open-source shield design for its Badger Shield, which is being used both in hospitals and nonmedical settings, says Lennon Rodgers, director of the university’s Grainger Engineering Design Innovation Lab.
Quoted: As a professor of Black history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Christy Clark-Pujara said she sees the disparities told in history from the students in her classes. “They come in with a lot of fairy-tale,” Clark-Pujara said. “The vast majority of them have no idea how central and important race-based slavery was to the economic stability of the colonies, nor do they have an understanding of the centrality of slavery and the founding of the nation.”
UW-Madison law professor Keith Findley said both the monitor and civilian board would only have the power to make recommendations. The ultimate decision-making authority on hiring and discipline would still lie with the PFC.
