Canada is citing nearly 200 cases of alleged trade violations against the United States in a complaint the country brought to the World Trade Organization. Central Time speaks with Mark Copelovitch of the University of Wisconsin-Madison about the case and what it could mean for U.S. international trade moving forward.
A new plan proposed by the Department of Interior would open some federally protected waters to off-shore oil drilling. We speak Steph Tai of the University of Wisconsin Law School about the news and what the law says.
A different approach to the universal vaccine is under way at FluGen, a biotech firm in Madison, Wisconsin. Backed by both government and VC funding, the company is working with technology first discovered at the University of Wisconsin-Madison by Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka and Dr. Gabriele Neumann and exclusively licensed to FluGen. “Our vaccine, called RedeeFlu, is based on a premise that says what happens if you take a [naturally occurring] ’wild type’ of flu virus and modify it to infect the human body but don’t allow it to replicate and cause illness,” said Boyd Clarke, executive chairman of FluGen. (Coincidentally, his maternal grandfather died in the 1918 pandemic.)
Quoted: “I don’t think the Trump administration has really done anything related to agriculture at all,” said Steven Deller, a rural development economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Steven Deller is a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Deller says it’s difficult for small-scale dairy farms to be profitable, so the number of commercial farms will probably continue to decrease.
Noted: Cliff Robb, an associate professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studies how people make financial decisions and facilitates efforts on campus to talk to students about how they handle money.
“It’s difficult for small-scale dairy farms to be profitable, so the number of commercial farms will probably continue to decrease,” Deller said. “Farms that aren’t profitable don’t contribute to the local economy,” he said.
“When we’re throwing down road salt, we might be thinking about the fact that we’re putting salt into the water, but we’re not thinking that it may also mobilize lead,” says Hilary Dugan, a limnologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was not involved in the study. Dugan has studied lakes in North America, which she also found to be increasing in salinity.
Lastly, purpose. Longitudinal research tracking people for years shows that purpose in life in the latter decades of life can predict whether a person will be alive 10 years later. Identifying your purpose, your larger aspirations in life, and aligning your everyday behaviour and experiences with that core purpose, is something we know can promote well-being and motivate you to do things that are meaningful to you.Take time daily to think about what you care about most in life. Create reminders to connect to your larger purpose, and question whether your actions that day contribute or are in conflict with your purpose. And ask yourself how your activities can be reframed to support your larger purpose. Richard J. Davidson is the director and founder of the Centre for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry
Khorana did stints in research institutions in Switzerland and Canada before landing at the Institute for Enzyme Research and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. There, he decoded how cells read the language of RNA written in structures represented by the letters A, C, U, and G. He did this by using enzymes to create sequences of these letters. Arranging them into distinct patterns, he and other scientists found that the genetic code comprised 64 three-letter “words,” known as codons.
Researchers at UW-Madison (Natalie Guyette) are looking at how stress affects the symptoms of asthma in a four year study looking at how the mind and body communicate in stressful situations. We talk with one of the key professors about their findings.
YouTube star Logan Paul has been weathering a barrage of controversy following his video depicting an alleged suicide victim in Aokigahara, a forest in Japan. The video–coupled with others posted on his YouTube channel–highlights a growing concern over what is being produced on social media platforms. We speak with Kathleen Culver, assistant professor and Director of UW-Madison’s Center for Journalism Ethics, about the news and what these videos say about internet culture.
Noted: “He was coming to Madison because there was an enthusiastic — more than enthusiastic — response from white listeners to what Otis was offering,” said cultural historian, author and UW-Madison professor of Afro-American studies Craig Werner, whose living room overlooks the lake where Redding died. “And that was just opening up at this period of his life.”
“The growth is really in the medium- to large-size dairy operations,” said Steven Deller, professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The growth in those sectors and the increase in productivity of being a bigger operation, the volume of milk is actually not being affected by this.”
Neuroscientist Chiara Cirelli of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Sleep and Consciousness, who conducted the study, explained at the time, ‘I don’t think we know of any cognition function that isn’t affected by sleep deprivation.’
’What’s fair to say right now is that scientists estimate the population is at a pretty serious risk of getting so low that it might not be able to recover, said Karen Oberhauser, director of the University of Wisconsin, Madison Arboretum and co-chair of Monarch Joint Venture, an organisation that co-ordinates monarch conservation efforts in the US.
“They’re going to get through this. They are going to make it because they have experienced these kinds of conditions before, and they don’t get wiped out. Maybe we’ll get a little suppression of ticks, but we’ll see,” Susan Paskewitz, chair of the University of Wisconsin Madison Department of Entomology told Popular Science.
“It’s just inconclusive at this stage,” said the University of Wisconsin’s Martin. “I think the jet is getting wavier, I’m not sure it’s connected to the Arctic,” he added.
Quoted: UW-Madison professor of economics Noah Williams said this has been happening for years. “Since the recession, since 2008, it’s been net out-migration, so more people moving out than moving in,” said Williams.
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.
“They’re going to get through this. They are going to make it because they have experienced these kinds of conditions before, and they don’t get wiped out. Maybe we’ll get a little suppression of the ticks, but we’ll see,” says Susan Paskewitz, the chair of the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Paskewitz’s research focuses on disease-carrying arthropods like mosquitoes and ticks, which tend to be the ones that we worry about most in the summer.
If you live in the eastern US, from northern Florida all the way to New England, you’re in for some nasty weather: a massive winter storm called a “bomb cyclone” is hammering the coast, bringing snow, ice, flooding, and strong winds. That’s not a made-up click-bait term; it’s actually used by meteorologists to indicate a mid-latitude cyclone that intensifies rapidly — or as meteorologist Jon Martin at the University of Wisconsin-Madison says, they “just kind of explode.”
Federal regulations affect everything from how much mercury dentists can pour down the sink to who’s allowed to drill on federal lands. There are thousands and thousands of regulations governing our lives, but since they’re not front and center in Congress, we rarely hear about them, even though regulations are really where the rubber hits the road. This hour, we’ll talk to Susan Yackee, professor of public policy and political science at the UW-Madison La Folette School of Public Affairs, about the mysterious world of federal regulations.
In a report published in 2012 by the American Geophysical Union, atmospheric scientists Jennifer A. Francis of Rutgers University and Stephen J. Vavrus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered evidence that the jet stream’s weaker winds and bigger wave amplitudes “may lead to an increased probability of extreme weather events that result from prolonged conditions.”
“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.
Providing farmers with unbiased performance comparisons of hybrid seed corn for both grain and silage available in Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin-Extension and the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agriculture and Life Sciences recently released the 2017 hybrid performance trials.
Quoted: “Risk of heart disease, heart attack or stroke goes down after six to 12 months after quitting smoking, we see the blood vessels relax as quickly as two weeks after quitting smoking, risk of lung disease, which there’s a whole range of lung disease that smoking effects improves within two to four weeks as well,” UW cardiologist Dr. James Stein said.
But there are some really interesting things afoot. Usona is a medical research organization that is exploring the potential of psychedelic medication — psilocybin — in depression treatment. My hope in the coming year is that we continue to see exploration of the therapeutic use of psilocybin.
UW-Madison epidemiologist Dr. Agustina Marconi said “our findings and the standards we create will benefit other universities moving forward.”
Maureen Durkin, one of the authors of that study and a population health researcher at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, told Spectrum that differences in socio-economic status may be one reason why children who are black and Hispanic are less likely to get screened for autism spectrum disorders—leading to relatively lower diagnosis rates.
Sleep-inducing substances may come from the process of making new connections between neurons. Chiara Cirelli and Giulio Tononi, sleep researchers at the University of Wisconsin, suggest that since making these connections, or synapses, is what our brains do when we are awake, maybe what they do during sleep is scale back the unimportant ones, removing the memories or images that don’t fit with the others, or don’t need to be used to make sense of the world.
Alisa Sunness, a nutritionist at University of Wisconsin Health, who was not involved in the ranking, said that highest rated diets encourage the same types of eating habits.“They all support a higher intake of fruits and vegetables, lean protein and heart healthy fats and whole grains,” she said. “The diets are using foods with minimal added fats and sugars and using foods in the natural form, and naturally those foods are going to be nutrient dense.”
Noted: Sarah Van Riet, a dietician at UW Health, sees no long-term benefits to doing a juice cleanse. Neither she nor Kohls would recommend it to patients, though they understand the appeal of a quick fix.
“Sleep is the price we pay for learning,” Giulio Tononi, a psychiatry professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison tells New Scientist. Tononi and his team conducted experiments on sleeping mice and found that, after sleep, synapses were significantly smaller than those before sleep.
Noted: 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.
But Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the up-tick in slaughter numbers doesn’t mean herds are growing smaller.”If we see cow slaughter numbers being up a little bit, I don’t think you can necessarily read anything into that because we’ve got plenty of animals to replace them,” Stephenson said.
“There are a lot of people who really want to argue the science with me, and I feel like the science has been settled a long time ago,” says Noelle LoConte, M.D., an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the lead author of the statement, recalling the influx of emails she has received.
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.
Quoted: The long-term gains will come from what businesses spend on equipment and technology, said Noah Williams, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “And that’s been true for many years,” said Brad Chandler, director of the Nicholas Center for Corporate Finance and Investment Banking at UW-Madison.
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.”
Jordan Ellenberg, a University of Wisconsin-Madison math professor, co-organized one of Duchin’s conferences in Madison in October 2017, and has written a New York Times op-edon the science of gerrymandering. He sees a high efficiency gap as a “red flag.” But he doesn’t see the test as a basis for a constitutional standard that guides when courts can send state legislators back to the drawing board.
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?”
So what does a Data Scientist actually do? According to the University of Wisconsin, “a data scientist’s job is to analyze data for actionable insights”, sounds straightforward enough but this is no small task. The University of Wisconsin goes on to list some of the tasks a Data Scientist is likely to perform in their day-to-day duties.
Noted: In fact, poverty rates accelerate as people reach their early 80s, says Pamela Herd, Professor of Public Affairs & Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Some of what’s going on is that people are losing other sources of income,” Herd explains. “So when you hit 85, you may have run through private savings at that point. Social Security becomes your financial lifeline.”
“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.
