Category: UW Experts in the News

Noted: A dozen or so years later, when he arrived at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and fell in love with coding, he learned about the community of scientists who had been using computers to simulate storms since the 1970s. In the earliest renderings, most computers couldn’t re-create any features of a tornado that were less than a kilometer wide or tall, meaning they could re-create the broad contours of a storm but none of its important details. Over time, driven in part by advances in microprocessing power, scientists gradually sharpened the resolution from 1 kilometer to 500 meters and eventually to 100 meters, the storm and the tornado steadily coming into focus.

Noted: And plant reproduction, oy. The blends of sex and no-sex don’t fit into a tidy biological species concept. Consider a new variety of a western North American species that Ertter and botanist Alexa DiNicola of the University of Wisconsin–Madison named this year. Potentilla versicolor var. darrachii belongs to a genus that’s closely related to strawberries. Plants in the genus open little five-petaled flowers and readily form classic seeds that mix genes from pollen and ovule. On occasion, though, the genes in the seed’s embryo are only mom’s. “They basically use seeds as a form of cloning,” Ertter says. The male pollen in these cases merely jump-starts formation of the seed’s food supply.

Quoted: Jerry O’Brien, who heads UW-Madison’s Kohl’s Center for Retailing Excellence, said a lot of the growth in Halloween sales can be attributed to the holiday’s growing popularity among adults.

Another featured author, UW-Madison professor Jason Fletcher, has a different take on science’s role in today’s society as he looks through the lens of genetics. His book, “The Genome Factor,” examines the ways in which genetics advances are transforming the social sciences. He cites the recent rise in companies that offer cheap DNA testing like 23andMe and ancestry.com as factors in a genomic revolution.

Dr. Jerlando F.L. Jackson—an expert on workforce diversity and workplace discrimination in higher education—and a prolific researcher on issues relating to Black males, was awarded the Alumni Achievement Award from the College of Human Sciences at Iowa State University.

Noted: Now, students and researchers at Northland College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are working with the National Park Service, as well as state and tribal agencies, to solve that mystery on the Apostle Islands.

Quoted: Karen Oberhauser, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin, saw a monarch on Oct. 20 in Madison, and sees some hope — for the butterflies if not for the planet. If not for the heat, some of these butterflies would have died as caterpillars, she noted, and some will beat the odds and make it to Mexico.

Noted: Yi Fuxian, a long-term critic of China’s birth control policy and a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, caused a stir in May by saying that China’s population size had been overestimated by 90 million, and that China’s real population may be smaller than India’s.

Noted: There are numerous public health concerns related to flooding beyond the most obvious risks of drowning and trauma, said Jonathan Patz, a professor and director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the new study.

Noted: The new work is significant because it will allow scientists to use base editing to address many more single-letter mutations than was previously possible, said Krishanu Saha, a biomedical engineer at the University of Wisconsin Madison who was not involved with the research.

Noted: Research by Zack Cooper, Amanda Kowalski and Jennifer Wu at Yale and by Eleanor Powell at the University of Wisconsin-Madison analyzed a provision in the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 (M.M.A.), known as Section 508, that helped secure Republican votes for the law’s passage.

Noted: Without guidance, as observed on Twitter by Donald Moynihan, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, states and schools have “de-facto-discretion … to deny access to services.” Moreover, Moynihan added, given Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ long-stated hostility to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act as “the single most irritating problem for teachers,” we can’t look to the Department of Justice for help when the Department of Education fails to guide local districts.

Quoted: “Screens have changed bullying and I think in one way they changed is through a broader audience,” said Dr. Megan Moreno, division chief for general pediatrics and adolescent medicine for UW Health.

Noted: And while its name makes it a rarity, nowadays the Biotron complex at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, born of a union between a phytotron and a zootron in the 1960s, has a climate that’s so fine-tunable it’s helping to develop potatoes that can grow in space.

Noted: “With drug shortages, it is often a race to see who can find a supply of the drug on shortage and also any alternatives,” said Philip J. Trapskin, who is the program manager of medication use strategy and innovation at UW Health, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s health system. “We have been able to get what we need to avoid disruptions in patient care, but the mix of products is not ideal and there are no guarantees we will continue to get the supplies we need.”

You can tell by the way Carrie Coon confidently maneuvers around the tables of a crowded Tribeca restaurant that this is an actress who has hit her stride.

Noted: Yi Fuxian, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a long-standing opponent of China’s birth control policy, said more changes could be on the way next year.

Noted: While the movement long predates the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, it got new energy from the American religious right in the 1980s. Now, according to Daniel Hummel, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the movement is undergoing a transformation, both theologically and geographically.

Noted: After the election, registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County were surveyed about why they didn’t cast a ballot. Eleven percent cited the voter ID law and said they didn’t have an acceptable ID; of those, more than half said the law was the “main reason” they didn’t vote. According to the study’s author, University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Mayer, that finding implies that between 12,000 and 23,000 registered voters in Madison and Milwaukee—and as many as 45,000 statewide—were deterred from voting by the ID law. “We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law,” he says.

Noted: Despite assurances in its FCC filing that the company plans to invest millions in local news gathering and increased programming, Lewis Friedland, a University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism professor who previously managed a news station in Milwaukee, said that he expects Sinclair to make cuts to news operations.

Quoted: Barry Burden is a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He said people do not always change their opinions from an important personal experience. “Sometimes it actually causes them to change their position, but more often it leads them to put more focus on the issue, becoming a champion of the cause,” Burden said.

Quoted: “She was going to be referred to hospice; there was not much we could do,” said Dr. Nataliya Uboha, who took the case to a tumor board at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The panel gave several options, including off-label treatment, and Meffert chose a study that matches patients to gene-targeting therapies and started on an experimental one last October.

Quoted: Jason M. Fletcher, a professor of public affairs and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said some of the results from the new study suggest a “general weakness in the analysis.” Fletcher did not participate in the new study.

Noted: Jason M. Fletcher, a professor of public affairs and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said some of the results from the new study suggest a “general weakness in the analysis.” Fletcher did not participate in the new study.

Noted: “Giving voice to a problem is really important. What we don’t want to do is set up something where we got men versus women,” UW Madison’s Gender Studies expert, Christine Whelan said.

Noted: Collectively, the brain “samples them [to] assess their overall strength,” says Chiara Cirelli, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Then, it decides what’s vital and what’s not.

Noted: Prof Jenny Saffran, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, commented: “This is the first study to ask whether [mothers] also change the timbre of their voice, manipulating the kinds of features that differentiate musical instruments from one another.

Noted: Volker Radloff, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who works at Silvis Labs, describes some WUI areas as “like a medieval city, with an urban city next to a big dark forest.”

Noted: “This is fascinating because clearly speakers are not aware of changing their timbre, and this new study shows that it is a highly reliable feature of the way we speak to babies,” commented Jenny Saffran, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in this research.

Quoted: “There are no good ways to describe it, but using ‘flinch point’ sounds appropriate,” said Nancy Wong, a professor of consumer science and marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: Preparing children for the democratic society that they will inherit is an important role of schools, says Paula McAvoy, program director for the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of a book that explores how politics are taught in the classroom.

Noted: Development in wildland-urban interfaces increases frequency of fires and contributes to the ferocity of a fire, said Volker Radeloff, a forest and wildlife ecology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: “Most wildland firefighters are not trained in structural protection, but the urban fire departments are not trained to deal with dozens or hundreds of houses burning at the same time,” says Volker Radeloff, a forestry researcher at the University of Wisconsin. “When these areas with lots of houses burn, the fires become very unpredictable.”

Noted: Each week, the group learns new skills that range from painting to writing raps to cooking food. The kids meet partner instructors that include students and faculty from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and local artists, they learn that art isn’t limited to just visual art. Last month, they learned how to make pizza.

Noted: Manipulating a map to move around Wisconsin Democrats also means manipulating a map to move around Wisconsin voters who are not white, said Malia Jones, an applied demographer at The University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: There’s also the issue of false positives, which plague any prediction model aimed at identifying a minority group, said William T.L. Cox, a psychologist who studies stereotypes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

There’s also the issue of false positives, which plague any prediction model aimed at identifying a minority group, said William T.L. Cox, a psychologist who studies stereotypes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: “If it’s warm and there’s enough water and there’s plenty of sunshine, the plant continues to make food and remains green by keeping chlorophyll in the leaves,” said Dr. Ken Cameron, chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Botany Department.