Category: UW Experts in the News

Quoted: Associate Professor of Political Science and Legal Studies Howard Schweber explains a high-profile Supreme Court case.

UW-Madison researchers have found a new way to potentially treat Friedreich’s ataxia, a rare, fatal and currently untreatable disorder.

Aseem Ansari, a professor of biochemistry and genomics at UW-Madison and leader of the research team that made this discovery, says this method represent a “new precision-tailored path to personalized medicine.”

Noted: “Each country has its own barriers,” said Dr. James F. Cleary, director of pain and policy studies at the University of Wisconsin’s medical school and a member of the commission that produced the Lancet study.

Thierry Cruvellier is the only journalist in the world who has attended and reported on all of the major post-Cold War International Criminal Court tribunals, including Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Bosnia and Cambodia, as well as national justice efforts in Colombia and the Balkans. He is a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this year, teaching a course on international criminal justice.

Noted: “The hope is that by providing a patch of tissue which already beats and contracts, instead of just individual cells, the body’s built-in programming will take over and assimilate it into the heart as if it was already there,” says Tim Kamp, professor of regenerative biology, who builds heart patches at the University of Wisconsin.

Noted: “The supermoon is a made-up term,” said James Lattis, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s not an astronomical term, there’s no technical definition of it.”

Noted: “There are not many techniques, even though we’ve been working on this for 3,000 years. So whenever anyone comes up with an authentically new way to do things it’s a big deal, and Minhyong did that,” said Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Noted: Kathleen Culver, the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the mistake would give fresh ammunition to Mr. Trump and other conservatives who have attacked the credibility of news organizations, especially those that have reported negatively on the administration.

Noted: The University of Wisconsin didn’t get rid of the drug entirely, says Karin Zuegge, an anesthesiologist and the University of Wisconsin Health medical director of sustainability, but like Kaiser Permanente, they saw a significant drop in desflurane use after starting an education campaign.

Noted: Barbara Wolfe, a professor of population-health sciences at the University of Wisconsin, explained to me that this is what economists call an income-inequality hypothesis: Your health is influenced not only by your own level of income, but by the level of inequality where you live. Sociologists have described a similar socioeconomic-inequality hypothesis: As socioeconomic disparities grow, overall health metrics decline.

Noted: It’s a stretch to compare donations directly from people facing accusations of wrongdoing and someone like Uihlein who is a contributor to them, said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor.

Noted: Robert Drechsel, a lecturer of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said comments by Victorian Supreme Court judge John Dixon suggest that punishing the publisher “may have been as much a factor as compensation for the actual harm” to the actress’s career.

Noted: Jonathan Gray, a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agreed that shows were shying away from Trump. “Classically, a lot of TV shows didn’t really talk about the presidency anyway,” he said. “You’ve now got a whole sort of ecosystem of satire, between [late night satire shows] and SNL and so forth. I wonder if some writers just feel like that’s being taken care of elsewhere. I’d imagine that some writers feel that you [shouldn’t] ‘feed the troll,’ because he’s everywhere, and when we find somewhere where he’s not, we wonder why he’s not there.”

Noted: Thomas O’Guinn, marketing professor and Thomas J. Falk distinguished chair in business at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, thinks the study is on point. Having studied sons who got into longstanding grudges over not picking the same brand of car as dad or not liking the same “family” brand of beer, he attests that the results are not surprising at all.

Noted: Some of the stress is unnecessarily self-inflicted, says Christine Whelan, a clinical professor in the Department of Consumer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Human Ecology.

Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said it’s impossible to say whether this incident is a result of a political climate in which some feel emboldened, and not being politically correct was part of a major candidate’s campaign.

Quoted: “Judge Blake has provided a foundation for a potentially far-reaching remedy that will over time enhance the institutional identities of the historically black institutions beyond race,” said Clifton F. Conrad, a professor of higher education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Equity is about more than just money.”

That fatality rate has risen over the last two decades, University of Wisconsin-Madison geriatrics professor Jane Mahoney tells Wisconsin Public Radio .

“Our fall-related emergency department visits have also increased over that time and there are many reasons for this but one is just the sheer numbers related to the aging of the population,” Mahoney said.

Quoted: “The agriculture industry is utilizing data more than ever before,” says Brian Luck, a biological systems engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Data is gathered on the soil within fields, the plants growing on fields, the weather occurring during growing season, and the machinery used in fields.”

Noted: Outside Texas, many found it hard to believe that men feel uncomfortable on campus. That was the initial reaction of Jerlando F. L. Jackson, director and chief research scientist at Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin Madison. But his thoughts changed as he considered the different populations of men and the ways young men might interpret the things they see unfolding on campus around them.

Quoted: Barry Orton, a University of Wisconsin professor emeritus, specializes in telecommunications policy, cable television and internet utilization.

Noted: “This is the largest in U.S. history, and it was somewhat surprising because Wisconsin does not generally play this game,” says Steven Deller, Professor of Applied Economics and an Economic Development Specialist with the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Wisconsin farmers working feverishly to get crops harvested before the snow flies may find themselves exposed to a variety of dust. Breathing grain dust can affect your comfort and is a health concern for all in the grain industry.

Noted: Since then, many other studies have come up with comparable results. A 2014 review of six different studies found an average holiday weight gain of 1 pound. A 2017 summary of the research found similar results. Just 1 pound — but a significant pound because research also suggests that it could account for most (if not all) of our average annual weight gain. “Yup, it’s small,” said Dale Schoeller, professor emeritus of nutritional sciences at University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the 2014 review paper. “But because it’s a large percentage, it’s not unimportant.” Schoeller calculates total annual weight gain by comparing the average weight of a 20-year-old in 1960 to the average weight of a 60-year-old in 2000. By his calculation, Americans gain about 0.8 pounds a year. Over the course of 20 years’ worth of Thanksgivings, he pointed out, it can start to add up.

Noted: According to Laura Hernandez, an animal lactation expert at the University of Wisconsin, heat stress, caused by the prolonged high summer temperatures associated with climate change, suppresses a cow’s appetite, causing it to eat less and give less milk.

Noted: A collaborative effort, led by psychiatrist Clemens Janssen at University of Wisconsin–Madison, piloted the first ever double blind clinical trial to try and show that hyperthermia can relieve symptoms of major depressive disorder better than SRRIs can – and that it can do so without any of the dreadful side effects like extreme weight gain, panic attacks, suicide attempts, insomnia, or sexual dysfunction that can accompany those drugs. At most, patients experiencing mild hyperthermia treatments experience dehydration, nausea, and headaches. The results sound too good to be true.

Noted: University of Wisconsin–Madison astronomer Ralf Kotulla and scientists from UCLA and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) used the WIYN Telescope on Kitt Peak, Arizona, to take some of the first pictures of ’Oumuamua. You can check them out below.

Quoted: “Consumer confidence is a big deal during the holidays, so Madison will probably do a little bit better than the national average,” said Jerry O’Brien, executive director of the Kohl’s Center for Retailing at UW-Madison. “It’s apparent that some people like shopping on Thanksgiving. We may have hit that balance, but the (stores) that are closing (on Thanksgiving) have had some good responses, too.”

Noted: Of course, this imagined world is our own. For Patricia G. Devine, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and director of its Prejudice and Intergroup Relations Lab, the repeated exposure to stereotypes is precisely how implicit bias is formed — and may hold the key to how it can be erased.

Quoted: “Part of the issue is, he’s a software engineer,” says Janet Hyde, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin. “He attached himself to what is actually a relatively small chunk of the psychological research literature and was unduly influenced by it.”