Category: UW Experts in the News

Quoted: “You’ve got genes and then you’ve got environment and then you’ve got lifestyle and then the interactions between them,” said Dr. Steven Barczi, a geriatric specialist with UW Health.

Noted: Not everyone is ready to accept the claim that the Jebel Irhoud fossils necessarily belong to H. sapiens, however. Paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison says their modern-looking traits might not actually reflect a connection to our species.

Quoted: “Those schools must provide reasonable accommodations” for students with disabilities, says Julie Mead, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But they do not have to alter their existing programs or add anything to them. What that means is, if their existing program does not provide any special education or related services, then they don’t have to provide any.”

Noted: For instance, John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is concerned about the study authors’ claims that the Moroccan fossils belong to the Homo sapiens clade.

Noted: Cara Moravec is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and she uses CRISPR in her research all the time. She found a few anomalies in the study that raised some concerns for her in regards to the interpretations of the findings. She says off-target effects are a known issue with CRISPR but that this study isn’t the best representation of those problems.

Noted: John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved in the new study, said that it was a plausible idea, but that recent discoveries of fossils from the same era raise the possibility that they were used by other hominins.

Quoted: “The license holder is held accountable to certain standards of food handling, food sourcing, food holding,” said Monica Theis, senior lecturer for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Food Science. “If those steps to enforce that are no longer part of the process, then there’s a risk there that people could get sick.”

Quoted: “It’s a great idea,” said Alan Sorensen, an economist at the University of Wisconsin who has studied drug prices. Referring to doctors, he added that “even a small moving of the needle on their prescribing behavior can have a pretty big impact on costs.”

Quoted: If this activation is prolonged, it could “trigger a chain of events” that leads to cellular degeneration, which is related to cognitive impairment, say neuroscientist Chiara Cirelli, who led the research. Sleep is “very, very important” to normalize the functions of the brain’s synapses, she said. “I don’t think we know of any cognition function that isn’t affected by sleep deprivation,” added Cirelli, a physician who directs the Wisconsin Center for Sleep and Consciousness and is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s medical school.

In a controversial decision that sparked national protests, President Donald Trump officially withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord Wednesday. The decision comes months after working to dismantle multiple Obama administration climate change efforts including the Clean Power Plan and other EPA regulations on coal and oil.

“It’s a huge mistake for the United States to pull out of the Paris agreement for lots of reasons,” says Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For 15 years, Patz served as a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and has been leading research on the links between health and climate change for more than two decades.

Noted; “I don’t think anonymization will work, but it’s the first thing that people think of,” says Molly Carnes, a professor of geriatrics and director of the Center for Women’s Health Research at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Carnes leads a team that has poked at the dynamics of peer review by recreating study sections. Among their findings is that ambiguous standards for reviewing grant proposals and comments from other reviewers can influence the panel’s assessment of the proposed research. Those variations could also lead to bias, she says, although the group has not specifically examined racial factors.

Noted: Keeping the system as it is, however, comes with its own set of issues and leaves the problem of student-loan defaults unfixed. Some policy wonks have suggested that a complete switch to automatic enrollment in income-driven repayment plans could lessen defaults, but that is not enough, said Nicholas Hillman, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison

Noted: If this activation is prolonged, it could “trigger a chain of events” that leads to cellular degeneration, which is related to cognitive impairment, say neuroscientist Chiara Cirelli, who led the research. Sleep is “very, very important” to normalize the functions of the brain’s synapses, she said.

Noted: Daniel Young has observed insect decline firsthand. The UW-Madison entomologist has been studying a rare lake trout beetle for years. He calls the insect hotel project a marriage between art and science that nature needs right now.

Noted: “Fear of the unknown affects everyone, and this may be particularly true for pregnant women,” said Larissa Duncan, lead researcher in the study and an associate professor of human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: On Earth, that amount of time is somewhere between thousands and millions of years, according to anthropologist John Hawks, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: About the same time Machado was watching the monkeys die in Itapina, University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Karen Strier was discovering that a similar tragedy had already played out on a reserve 140 miles to the west.

BEIJING — Chinese people cheering on their country’s ascent sometimes comfort themselves with the idea that Asia’s other behemoth, India, is years from surpassing China’s population and decades from emerging as a potential economic peer.

Chinese people cheering on their country’s ascent sometimes comfort themselves with the idea that Asia’s other behemoth, India, is years from surpassing China’s population and decades from emerging as a potential economic peer. But Yi Fuxiang, a Chinese scientist based in Wisconsin, boldly challenged that assumption this week in Beijing. He laid out arguments that India may already be more populous than China, a view that has created a controversy about whose numbers to believe in forecasting China’s demographic and economic destiny.

[Spontaneous speech] “is too hard to score,” said neuropsychologist Sterling Johnson, of the University of Wisconsin, who studies brain function in Alzheimer’s disease. “But everyday speech is definitely a way of measuring cognitive decline. If people are noticing [a change in Trump’s language agility], that’s meaningful.”

Quoted: Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the state’s dairy industry has made impressive strides in expanding output since the early 2000s.

Quoted: John Hawks, a visiting professor at Wits University and an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the US, questioned the find on his blog: “Is it going too far to say that this fossil jaw is the earliest hominin?”

Claims that India may already have overtaken China as the world’s most populous nation have sparked consternation among demographers. The claims were made on Monday by Yi Fuxian, a University of Wisconsin-Madison academic who has spent years campaigning against Beijing ’s draconian family-planning laws, and picked up by newspapers in both China and India.

Quoted: “The key to a high-quality [program] is not the activities, but the way the teacher can engage with the children during all the activities and also manage behavior,” says Katherine Magnuson, a professor at the school of social work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: Tests ask, for instance, how many words beginning with W a patient can think of, and how many breeds of dogs he can name, rather than have patients speak spontaneously. The latter “is too hard to score,” said neuropsychologist Sterling Johnson, of the University of Wisconsin, who studies brain function in Alzheimer’s disease. “But everyday speech is definitely a way of measuring cognitive decline. If people are noticing [a change in Trump’s language agility], that’s meaningful.”

Noted: China’s real population may have been about 1.29 billion last year, 90 million fewer people than the official figure released by the National Bureau of Statistics, Yi Fuxian, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said at a symposium at Peking University on Monday.

Quoted: “The biggest challenge is reducing phosphorus input, and so far there has been no reduction in phosphorus input to Lake Mendota,” says Stephen Carpenter, director of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Center for Limnology, adding that improving Mendota, the top of the Yahara chain, is the key to improving all of the lakes.

Noted: Splurging can of course be imprudent—but that’s true for everyone. Dan Hausman, philosophy professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that we could all question advertisers’ message that consumption leads to satisfaction.

Noted: This is a common feeling among oncologists, said Dr. Lisa Cadmus-Bertram from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

All hospitals and doctors who were Medicaid-certified could be used by high-risk pool recipients. That included all hospitals in the state and the vast majority of doctors, said Sam Austin, a health policy analyst at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Population Health Institute and the author of a 2013 Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau report on the state’s high-risk pool.

Expensive specialty drugs — such as Sovaldi, a drug for hepatitis C, which can cost $84,000 for a 12-week course of treatment — account for a growing share of pharmacy revenue, UW Health pharmacist Joe Cesarz said at a forum in Madison last month.

Noted: “To put that in context, that’s more than three milkweed plants for every man, woman and child in the United States,” said Karen Oberhauser, professor and conservation biologist in the University of Minnesota Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology.

As the first monarchs of the year begin to arrive in Wisconsin, there’s renewed attention on the fate of the species, which has seen a significant population drop in recent decades.”What they’re looking for is good habitat,” said Oberhauser, who is also the incoming director the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. The Milkweed plant is an important part of that habitat, as it’s where monarchs will lay their eggs.

Noted: This is a common feeling among oncologists, said Dr. Lisa Cadmus-Bertram from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Most of them would like their patients to be more active, however they are not physical activity coaches,” said Cadmus-Bertram, who studies the role of physical activity in cancer incidence and survivorship. “They don’t have the training or the expertise to provide that type of support to patients nor do they have the time.”