Category: UW Experts in the News

VIDEO: UW Health Dermatologist Dr. Apple Bodemer gives information on how to avoid frostbite, and what to do if you get.

Alan D. Attie, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin Madison, described the study as “an exciting development in the diabetes field” with the big question of whether the new beta cells will “stimulate the immune attack of type 1 diabetes” and “whether or not there are ways to protect the new beta cells from immune attack.”

Quoted: “I think it’s a promising move. It makes a lot of sense in light of problems both with children being confined at Lincoln Hills,” said Cecilia Klingele, a UW-Madison associate law professor.

David Egan-Robertson, a demographer with UW-Madison’s Applied Population Laboratory, attributes the increase to fewer people leaving the state.

He said the census estimates Wisconsin lost about 2,000 people to domestic migration. The state has seen more people leaving than moving in since the Great Recession began in 2007.

When California had record-breaking warm temperatures last fall, Jonathan Martin, a professor of meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, suspected the conditions would be right for an extended cold snap in the east in early winter. “It’s colder than normal but not unusual. We’ve gotten used to milder winters,” Martin told me.

“The problem is that a lot of energy goes into growing those crops,” says Randall Jackson, professor of agronomy at UW-Madison and sustainability lead at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC). “If you actually calculate the amount of energy it takes to make the fertilizer, plant the crops, make the gasoline to plant the crops and the carbon that it takes to make pesticides and herbicides to keep those crops as monocultures, the net energy gain hovers right around zero. Often it is negative, often it is positive, but it’s always right around zero … It’s just a way to run our cars on natural gas and coal because that’s what goes into making all those products that make the grain that go into the gas tank.”

State judicial races are officially nonpartisan. Still, the primary is likely to center on Burns and Dallet courting Democratic and liberal voters, said Ryan Owens, a UW-Madison political science and law professor who studies the courts.

UW-Madison epidemiologist Dr. Agustina Marconi said “our findings and the standards we create will benefit other universities moving forward.”

In addition, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have identified a protein, present at high levels in cells from dogs with osteosarcoma, that formed tumors when injected into mice. Osteosarcoma affects more than 10,000 dogs a year, according to Bailey, with eight in 10 dogs surviving less than a year after diagnosis. Although what role, if any, this protein plays in tumor development is not yet known, future research could determine whether the protein is a marker of more aggressive disease or whether targeting the protein would improve outcome for dogs with osteosarcoma.

In a tweet, Jo Handelsman, a molecular biologist and director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, called Barres “a great scientist, leader, mentor, and friend.”“His impact on our understanding of glia was rivaled by his impact on diversity in science,” she wrote. “Ben … you leave a towering legacy of goodness.”

Noted: I searched my resources and the internet and found nothing on St. John’s wort susceptibility or resistance to verticillium wilt. So I consulted Brian Hudelson, director of diagnostic services for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Plant Disease Diagnostic Clinic. He did find one report of verticillium wilt on Hypericum from Poland. So he is assuming Hypericum is technically susceptible but feels it might be more like serviceberry (Amelanchier) that is technically susceptible but seems to be quite resistant.

Noted: “To say decimals are easier is superficially convincing,” said Jordan Ellenberg, a math professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “But they’re not so good if you’re talking about something like 1/3, which is 0.3333, repeating until infinity. All of a sudden, you’re in very deep mathematical waters that are not so easy to navigate.”

Noted: Christine Whelan, clinical professor in the School of Human Ecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s that accountability that helped Hebgen be resolute in his resolution.

Quoted: “If you want to live somewhere and work somewhere, it’s difficult at existing wages,” said UW-Madison public affairs and economics professor Tim Smeeding, who studies income inequality. “The bottom end of the of labor market has fallen out” and there’s been a “hollowing out of the middle class.”

“This cropland expansion, driven in part by the ethanol mandate, has far-reaching impacts on the climate through its effects on the land and the carbon that it stores,” says Seth Spawn—lead author of the University of Wisconsin land use study and a graduate research assistant student at the Center for Sustainability and Global Environment at UW-Madison—adding that, “These impacts are significant and should be taken seriously.”

The 21st century has so far been a golden age of hominin discovery. New species like the 7-million-year-old Sahelanthropus tchadensis and the 300,000-year-old Homo naledi have added to our understanding of humanity’s past. And the finds will keep coming.“It doesn’t look like [we’re] sampling something that is running out,” says John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I think in part there’s a greater intensity of exploration right now.”

Noted: Richard Lankau, who teaches plant pathology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, co-authored a recent study on this in the journal Functional Ecology. “This weapon if you will, it’s not useful when you’re competing with other members of your own species,” he says.

Noted: The endangered species listing was first proposed to the Obama administration in 2016 by a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison ecologists and others who petitioned for the plant’s protection. Don Waller, the petition’s author and a professor of botany, told Science Daily that collectors snatching plants from their habitat was draining the population.

Noted: “There seems to be more momentum on the Democratic side this time around, than some of Ryan’s earlier elections,” Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me. “Ryan has an albatross around his neck as part of an unpopular government in an unpopular party under an unpopular president, and any reasonable Democratic opponent is going to get some mileage out of that.”

Quoted: “Right now, in machine learning, you take a lot of data, you see if it works, if it doesn’t work you tweak some parameters, you try again, and eventually, the network works great,” said Loris D’Antoni, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who is co-developing a tool for measuring and fixing bias called FairSquare. “Now even if there was a magic way to find that these programs were biased, how do you even fix it?”

“In keeping with the extraordinary track record of The Journals of Gerontology in multidisciplinary aging studies, the special issue features CR studies ranging from simple unicellular models to human clinical trials,” said Biological Sciences Co-Editor-in-Chief Rozalyn M. Anderson, PhD, FGSA, who leads the Metabolism of Aging Research Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “One of the things that people sometimes miss is the amazing fact that aging can be altered; CR research proves this.”

According to Bob Cropp, Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Cooperative Extension and Mark Stephenson, director of Dairy Policy Analysis from the University of Wisconsin, both the EU and New Zealand are having stronger milk production years.

These two will compete with the U.S. for dairy export markets.

Noted: Richard Lankau co-authored a recent study on this in the journal  Functional Ecology . “This weapon if you will, it’s not useful when you’re competing with other members of your own species,” says Lankau, who teaches plant pathology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: The scientists now leading the various components of NRMN are still trying to digest news of its possible deconstruction, and their response to the pending solicitations. “We have not even had a chance to talk as a group yet,” Christine Pfund, a cell biologist at the University of Wisconsin inMadison who leads NRMN’s mentor training core, wrote in an email. “Lots to discuss after the holidays.”

Noted: “All in all this makes sense to me, and it’s what I would predict,” says Nancy Keller, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who was not involved in the study. “It’s nice to have a solid piece of [research] out on this.”

Noted: “That crowds out older films,” says David Bordwell, a film historian at the University of Wisconsin. “They’re going to have less and less motive to highlight the classics in their catalogs.” That threatens the economics of film history. “How many restorations of old films will there be?” he asks. “How many foreign titles?”

Quoted: “The targeted user could be a decision-maker who has no programming experience,” says Jignesh Patel, one of DataChat’s co-founders and a computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Derek Kindle, director of the Office of Student Financial Aid at UW-Madison, said, “We know that having better informed students, makes for more responsible borrowers.

If the ordinance is passed, the Amish will leave Wood County, said Mark Louden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in Amish and Pennsylvania Dutch language and culture

The policy shift means internet providers will be able to create slow and fast lanes for online content. UW-Madison telecommunications professor emeritus Barry Orton says that will likely mean price hikes to get online and for many of the services you are using. “Ultimately the consumers pay for that,” he says.