Category: UW Experts in the News

With their water-rich interiors, baobabs are part of the park’s attraction to elephants. The natural process of elephants digging into these trees doesn’t usually cause lasting damage. Baobabs have a unique ability among trees to recover their bark and tissue, says David Baum from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has studied the trees for more than 30 years. “Baobabs have coexisted with elephants for millions of years, which probably explains why they have evolved such a remarkable ability for regrowth,” he says.

Financial education can reduce use of alternative financial services, particularly payday lenders, says Melody Harvey, a national poverty fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: “It looks really similar,” Pamela Oliver UW-Madison Professor Emerita of Sociology said. “Racism is an issue and structural racism is still an issue, but how it works is still changing, moving and evolving.”

Germany’s demand for solar power “not only installed a lot of solar, but it catalyzed the learning curve,” said Gregory Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has written a book on how solar energy became cheap. In China, where most of the world’s solar panels are now made, production processes were refined further to bring prices down to levels that compete with coal.

But Judith Leavitt, professor emerita in the department of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says Mary Mallon may have only been directly linked to about 50 cases over a 12-year period when she wasn’t forcibly quarantined and may have been mislabeled due to fear and prejudice.

Interviewed: NBC15 News spoke with UW Health Doctor David Plante. He’s medical director for the Wisconsin Institute for Sleep.

“Every state has empowered some sort of executive official to do the evolving, interpreting, real-time work of adapting to a public health crisis,” explains University of Wisconsin Law School professor Miriam Seifter, an expert in administrative law. But Wisconsin’s GOP-controlled legislature, which holds power thanks to one of the most gerrymandered maps in the country, has been trying to seize even more power from Governor Evers ever since he was elected.

“There will be positive cases and there will be transmission between players,” says Laura Albert, an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose research includes the optimization of emergency and public health systems. “And I anticipate it happening on airplanes and buses, in the locker rooms or bathrooms. It’s not totally clear how we can change those spaces to be safe if there’s a bunch of people using them.”

Quoted: To straighten it all out, we spoke with two experts: Dr. Nasia Safdar, an infectious disease physician at UW Health, and Dr. Ajay Sethi, an infectious disease epidemiologist at UW-Madison.

Quoted: Health officials say if there is widespread disregard for safety guidelines, we will likely see many more cases causing the need for restrictions to return. “I don’t think that something anyone wants to see,” said Dr. Jeff Pothof, UW Health Chief Quality Officer.

The answer turned out to be more complex and rich than many might have thought. A pair of University of Wisconsin-Madison professors shared some helpful ways to think about these place names and talked about the value of indigenous languages today.

One of them is Monica Macaulay, a professor of language sciences, who is affiliated faculty with the university’s American Indian Studies Program, and also works with the Menominee and their language revitalization and reclamation programs. The other is Brian McInnes, an associate professor of civil society and community studies in the UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology.

Quoted: Asked if there is any precedent for two parties holding such very different modes of convention, political scientist Byron Shafer paused before reaching back to the year 1872, when the much-weakened post-Civil War Democratic Party simply endorsed another party’s presidential candidate at its six-hour convention (the shortest ever) without even adopting its own platform.

“There is no sensible prior analog” to the contrasting conventions that may be held in 2020, said Shafer, a retired University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who writes about conventions. “If the Democrats are all virtual and the Republicans are all live (and in person), we really don’t have anything to compare that to.”

He (Ibrahim Safa) is also quoted as saying that while it has been an exciting time for physicists trying to explain these events, “it looks like we’ll have to wait for the next generation of experiments, which will increase exposure and sensitivity, to get a clear understanding of this anomaly.”

The researchers’ current method of creating individual ultrasmall pixels is impractical, says Hongrui Jiang, an electrical engineer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose commentary on the study appears in the same issue of Nature. “For a few hundred nanowires, okay, fine, but how about millions?” Engineers will need a much more efficient way to manufacture vast arrays of tiny wires on the back of the artificial eyeball to give it superhuman sight, he says.

“This is a community consensus report,” said Andrea Dutton, a professor of geology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “We are representing the community, and this is their voice in the report.”

However, Hongrui Jiang, an Electrical Engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that the method the researchers are using in creating individual ultrasmall pixels is impractical.

“I think in about 10 years, we should see some very tangible practical applications of these bionic eyes,” Hongrui Jiang, an electrical engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the research, told Scientific American.

“Autistic people have very specific routines they like to follow,” says Lauren Bishop, assistant professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “When those things are taken away as a result of a national crisis, it can make the crisis that’s already stressful even more stressful.”

Judith Walzer Leavitt, an American historian and professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in medical history and women’s studies, says Mallon’s story illustrates a unique and unprecedented period in medical history. “It’s a wrenching personal story. She was the first healthy carrier of typhoid fever to be discovered, so people had never seen it before and didn’t know what to do,” she told CTVNews.ca during a phone interview on Sunday from Madison, Wis. “It was completely unheard of. People in the medical community thought, ‘How could this be?’ There were a lot of skeptics,’ Leavitt added.

Quoted: “We dream for a variety of reasons,” explained Dr. Shilagh Mirgain, a UW Health Psychologist. “We dream to process information, to integrate experiences, to work through distressing emotions, and there’s learning and growth that occurs. We’re being asked to live in unprecedented ways and as a result because there is heightened anxiety and stress that can show up in our dreams.”