Category: UW Experts in the News

Noted: Cortland Dahl, who studies the neuroscience of mind wandering and has been meditating for 25 years, told me that he was six months into daily meditation practice when he witnessed a change in the way he related to the present moment. “I noticed I just started to enjoy things I didn’t enjoy before,” like standing in line, or sitting in traffic, he says. “My own mind became interesting, and I had something to do—‘Okay, back to the breath.’” Killingsworth’s findings help explain this, said Dahl, a research scientist at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds.

Quoted: “You don’t have to take these extravagant vacations to foreign places. A lot of the value that we get from taking time off just doing something that breaks us out of routine,” said Dayana Kupisk, a PhD candidate, studying human development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: Some scientists have suggested that the problem is an educational one. Those who disregard science and scientific consensus as not for them simply don’t have the knowledge – the facts, according to this thinking. And, as Dietram Scheufele, a professor of science communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison pointed out in a talk at the AAAS meeting, in the current “fake news panic” that mentality can fuel an impression that “if they just had the correct facts, they could make better decisions.”

Quoted: “Conversely, anything big is bad right now,” said Thomas C. O’Guinn, a professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s business school. “Anything small is considered differently, since there’s no faceless behemoth.” Customers, he added, are also more apt to know store employees or even the owner.

Noted: “She sort of burst onto the scene,” says Paul Wilson, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Now there’s a circulated quote attributed to her: Students don’t know that things [in the nuclear field] are supposed to go slowly. Let’s not tell them.”

Quoted: “On net, the downsides seem greater than the upsides,” said Barry C. Burden, a political scientist and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: If a supplier steps out of line, the others “can eat your lunch if you don’t cooperate,” said Noted: Peter Carstensen, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin and a former Justice Department antitrust lawyer who has researched the industry.

Noted: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee chancellor Mark Mone and Mike Knetter, chief executive officer of the University of Wisconsin Foundation, both said recruitment of students is important at their schools as the number of high school graduates in Wisconsin declines.

Noted: Katherine Magnuson, a social work professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and associate director of the school’s Institute for Poverty Research, said the plan being worked on by state Democrats will help.

Noted: But now two new studies appear to move calorie restriction from the realm of wishful thinking to the brink of practical, and perhaps even tolerable, reality. Writing in Nature Communications, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the National Institute on Aging reported last month chronic calorie restriction produces significant health benefits in rhesus monkeys—a primate with humanlike aging patterns—indicating “that CR mechanisms are likely translatable to human health.” The researchers describe one monkey they started on a 30 percent calorie restriction diet when he was 16 years old, late middle age for this type of animal. He is now 43, a longevity record for the species, according to the study, and the equivalent of a human living to 130.

Quoted: “Better to err on the long end,” said Matthew Aliota, an assistant scientist who studies viruses at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Veterinary Medicine.

Noted: University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Chistine Whelan, who teaches consumer science in the university’s School of Human Ecology, said the change is part of a trend toward making toys more gender-neutral, which she said is welcome news.

Noted: “The data on stress reduction is pretty good,” said Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published hundreds of scientific papers about the impact of emotion on the brain and did some of the first MRIs of meditating Buddhist monks.

Noted: Just a bit of radio interference can throw off the calculations used to make accurate weather predictions that are “extremely sensitive” to even small temperature differences, said Jordan Gerth, a researcher at the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: “I think he probably prefers the most impressive-sounding version of his name, which is Donald J. Trump, as opposed to Don John Drumpf, which sounds I think a little less imperious,” mused another Donald—Donald Moynihan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

A top U.S. toxicologist is questioning Canada’s response to a tainted-cannabis problem in the medical-marijuana sector, saying patients aren’t being given accurate information on the risks associated with a banned pesticide thousands of people may have consumed. Warren Porter, a specialist in molecular and environmental toxicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says company phone calls and e-mails, approved by Health Canada, to patients after a series of recent product recalls are misleading, and appear to be based on faulty science.

Noted: Adding to the debate is a new study that claims to show that the state of Wisconsin is underreporting the number of wolves poached, undermining arguments by lawmakers and government agencies.Adrian Teves, an environmental studies professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and several co-authors studied 33 years of gray wolf mortality in Wisconsin. Their key finding, published Monday in the Journal of Mammalogy, is that the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources didn’t accurately track the number of wolves killed by poaching, and that the true number is significantly higher.

Noted: David Vanness, an associate professor of health population sciences at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who vocally opposed changes to tenure policies there, said he thought Iowa’s “version of Act 10” — as Wisconsin’s blow to collective bargaining was known — is that limiting bargaining to “small” increases in wages “would drastically limit faculty union power, and together with recertification could certainly harm membership.”

Noted: John Witte, UW-Madison professor emeritus of public affairs and political science, says while the post is meant to be nonpartisan, it has always toed the political line.

Noted: Sure enough, Goebel and her husband found what appears to be a piece of the meteor on their property. They sent it to UW-Madison to be examined further. “I always approach these things pretty cautiously, but the footage showing something striking the ground immediately after the flash of the fireball is very persuasive,” John Valley, geoscience professor at UW said.

Noted: Dietram Scheufele, a professor who studies science communication at the University of Wisconsin, says the concern is not unfounded. If the public gets the impression that scientists are liberal crusaders, it will be a hard mental image to break. “My mind as a social scientist tells me that [the march] won’t work, but my heart tells me hopefully it will,” he says.

Quoted: “The Iranian community of Madison recognizes the bravery and sacrifice of these 16 Iranian firefighters who lost their lives in the line of duty,” says Majid Sarmadi,  a representative of Madison’s Iranian-American community.

Quoted: Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, coined a name for what’s happened in her state’s rural pockets: the politics of resentment.

Quoted: “I think that Trump has been unusually aggressive in the scope of what he is trying to do and also I think remarkably casual in issuing orders and other actions that don’t appear to have gone through what would be a typical process of reviewing and vetting and consideration,” said Kenneth Mayer, a University of Wisconsin professor who has studied executive actions by presidents.

Noted: “In a number of cases, the very same genes from non-carnivorous ancestors have been recruited for carnivorous purposes,” says Thomas Givnish, who studies plant evolution at the University of Wisconsin.

Noted: “These are gene families that have other functions in non-carnivorous relatives or ancestors. In these carnivorous species, they’ve become recruited as part of the system of digestive enzymes and nutrient transporters,” says Tom Givnish of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: It’s also unclear how much of the lost continent actually lies beneath the island of Mauritius. “They’ve found ancient crystals surrounded by younger rocks,” explains John Valley, who studies geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison but didn’t participate in the recent study. “But they haven’t yet found any of the older rocks.” Although the crystals provide valuable evidence for the existence of this submerged land, how much of it lies down there remains a mystery. “It could be a massive buried continent, or just trace amounts of zircon crystals,” says Valley.

Noted: Of course, given all the grave potential flaws in Trump’s executive order, contravening Executive Order 11030 is the least of it. Kenneth Mayer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an academic expert on executive orders, says, “What’s the remedy for a violation? There probably isn’t one,” although he does believe “This could go into a claim that the government didn’t follow its own rules, and that makes it capricious.”

Quoted: Donald P. Moynihan, a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is one of many who think the violent protesters played into the hands of conservatives looking to make the case that colleges are bastions of liberal intolerance. “Their next argument is that they need to do something to fix this problem,” he said.

Noted: Mike Wagner, an associate professor with UW-Madison, said political venting on social media is a reality, but there are ways to go about it that are better than others, For example, asking a question rather than making a statement can help spark intelligent discussion, and avoid making generalized statements.