Category: UW Experts in the News

Noted: Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said at the meeting that openly debating the rule could “invite some unwanted attention” from the Trump administration and state legislators. “My overriding concern is that this discussion and any action in this area is going to trigger state legislation,” she told members of the National Academies’ committee on technology, policy, and law.

Noted: Ultimately, it’s likely that political or regulatory decisions will settle the matter before opposing parties agree, says Sainath Suryanarayanan, an entomologist and sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who has studied the bee-health issue. “It is a common pattern for highly contentious and polarized debates,” he says.

The UW-Milwaukee’s School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP) this month hosted an all-day symposium about Kiley’s work and its continuing relevance. It was held in conjunction with the opening of the traveling exhibition, “The Landscape Architecture Legacy of Dan Kiley” curated by The Cultural Landscape Foundation based in Washington, D.C. Speakers included landscape architects from around the country, including keynoter Peter Ker Walker of Burlington, Vermont, Kiley’s former longtime professional partner.

Noted: “The fundamental conclusion is that there are probably quite a few of these in the universe,” said Ed Churchwell, emeritus professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “They’re more common than we thought before.”

Noted: “I think one of Walker’s strengths in the past is that he was viewed as independent, separate from Washington, as a common sense guy,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The themes in his earlier campaigns were about the old Saturn he drove, eating a packed lunch, understanding an average Wisconsinite. It’s harder to sell that message if you’re visiting the White House a lot and allied with a controversial billionaire who’s now president.”

Noted: As drivers interact with semiautonomous vehicles in the long run-up to Level 5, driver education and licensing, far from becoming obsolete, may become more important, argues John D. Lee, a professor of engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Automation has a strong tendency to surprise people with unexpected behavior,” he says.

Noted: “If Michigan builds a cheese plant, it will have implications for Wisconsin because those cheese products will compete with Wisconsin cheese,” says Mark Stephenson, a dairy economist with the University of Wisconsin.

Noted: “There are no constitutional limits on what the convention could do, no matter what the states say going into it,” said David Schwartz, a University of Wisconsin Law School professor.

Noted: “It would have completely wiped out everything within 50 kilometers of the caldera,” said Brad Singer, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and the study’s co-author. “All the vegetation and biota in that area would have been extinguished.”

“That’s going to be a challenge for Walker to navigate,” said UW-Madison professor Barry Burden. “Whoever the Democratic opponent is will run ads showing Walker in the oval office standing next to Trump.”

Quoted: “Be looking for those pieces of equipment where you might not be expecting them,” said Cheryl Skjolaas, the agricultural safety and health specialist for UW-Extension.

Quoted: “As a scientist, I’m thrilled by this discovery,” says Graham Banes, a primatologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who was not involved in the rare find, described online this week in Current Biology. “As a human, I’m horrified that we might not have enough time to save the species.”

Noted: “There is quite a bit of discussion about mindfulness and mindfulness research these days,” Simon Goldberg told Newsweek. Goldberg is one of the authors of the PLoS One paper and conducted the study while a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin—Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds. (He’s since received his doctorate.) “Our hope ultimately is that the results from our study can help encourage researchers to implement some of these recommended practices in future studies.”

Quoted: “I would say that algorithms and mathematical modeling are fairly pervasive and ubiquitous, from the time someone wakes up in the morning until the end of the day,” said Anthony Gitter, an assistant professor in the department of biostatistics and medical informatics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Halloween makes some children anxious, and here with what parents can do to help make it a little less scary is Dr. Marcia Slattery, head of the UW Anxiety Disorder Program.

Noted: After taking a look, the lab asked her to freeze the birds and send them in. In conjunction with the University of Wisconsin–Madison wildlife laboratory, researchers identified the worms as the parasite nematode Splendidofilaria pectoralis, which is found in warmer-climate species. The researchers saw the appearance of the disease as an indicator of the rapidly changing climates in northern areas and published an article based on the findings in the Ecological Society of America Journal, all based on Kotongan’s original post on the LEO network.

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.