Quoted: The cold turned the water in the shoots cells to ice, killing the tissue, said Amaya Atucha, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant horticulture professor.
Wisconsin election laws on trial in federal court this week likely violate the federal Voting Rights Act by disproportionately affecting voting by minority, young and low-income voters, a report by a UW-Madison professor concludes.
Noted: Temperatures dipped below freezing in much of those areas late Saturday and early Sunday, wiping out grape shoots that had emerged early due to a warm spring. The cold turned the water in the shoots cells to ice, killing the tissue, said Amaya Atucha, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant horticulture professor.
“To some extent we know more about some genetically engineered food than we do about other food,” committee member Dominique Brossard of UW-Madison said. “There are limits to what can be known about any food. That’s something we’re not used to hearing as consumers.”
Quoted: “There are situations in dense urban areas where space is highly limited that growing food with artificial lights, stacked vertically, makes sense, especially highly perishable products like sprouts or salad greens where there is an immediate market for them,” said Stephen J. Ventura, a professor of environmental studies and soil science at the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: “To some extent we know more about some genetically engineered food than we do about other food,” said committee member Dominique Brossard of the University of Wisconsin [professor and chair of Life Sciences Communication]. “There are limits to what can be known about any food. That’s something we’re not used to hearing as consumers.”
Noted: Silatronix was founded by two UW-Madison chemistry professors, Robert Hamers and Robert West, after a hallway conversation in which the “two Bobs” sought to literally change the world.
“The safety issues are very real,” Hamers said recently in an interview in the company’s laboratory on the city’s east side, near the Madison College campus. “Our goal is to make lithium ion batteries perform better and be safer, and the way we did that is by inventing a new liquid called an electrolyte. It’s one of the three major components of the lithium ion battery.”
Noted: When Simon F. Haeder of the University of Wisconsin and his colleagues studied the plans sold on the California exchange, they found that they included 34 percent fewer hospitals than those sold on the open market and tended to exclude the priciest medical centers, like Cedars Sinai, a highly regarded hospital that runs the largest heart-transplant program in the country.
Noted: Uli Schamiloglu, Middle Eastern studies program chair at UW, raised concern that without a substantive understanding of a region’s cultures, religions and values, role play exercises that have cadets dress up and impersonate locals may reinforce problematic stereotypes for students and future officers who may not have had other exposure to Islamic cultures. “My concern here is to what extent do these students have any real factual, concrete, even basic information about those cultures?” Schamiloglu said. “My guess would be that most are not familiar enough with those cultures to enter into role playing.”
Quoted: “Madison has had African Americans in prominent leadership positions before — two police chiefs and I believe at least two school board presidents,” said UW Professor of Education Gloria Ladson-Billings. “However, none of that matters without the backing of other decision makers. The President of the United States is a Black man who has been stymied at every turn. More important than ONE person’s election or appointment is the mobilization of an electorate who will get behind the person and their agenda.”
A University of Wisconsin law professor will give a lecture at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Author William P. Jones is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and recently accepted a position at the University of Minnesota.
Quoted: More striking to Steven Deller, an economist at UW-Madison, was the decline in the threshold for middle-income status.
“We decided that the best thing for the community was that information be made available as widely as possible and freely available,” says David O’Connor, whose group at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is furthest along in studying Zika infection of pregnant monkeys.
Quoted: “If antibiotics are eliminated from animal feed and only used by veterinarians to treat infected animals, we can prevent development of additional resistance and hopefully regain the use of antibiotics,” said Carol Spiegel, professor emerita at University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.
According to Dan Schaefer, UW-Madison professor and department chair of Animal Sciences, the Federal Drug Administration is already accomplishing that mission through a new veterinary feed regulation that will take effect Jan. 1, 2017.
Noted: “I think those politicians always got some degree of backlash in the form of angry letters or even hateful letters, but the bar is a lot lower with social media — you can just post it up there,” said Chris Wells, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies the intersection of politics and social media. “The thing that makes it kind of complicated is politicians need to be in those social media spaces because that’s where so much of the tenor of the campaign takes place.”
Quoted: “It’s hard to imagine it’s just this particular person that it happened to,” said Kenneth Robbins, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If it happened twice to the same person in such a short time, it makes you wonder if there’s a significant problem in their system.”
When Susan Paskewitz searched the UW Arboretum two years ago for immature deer ticks, the kind most likely to infect people with Lyme disease, she found 32.Last year, during the same amount of sampling at the same 17 sites in the Arboretum, she found 592.“We’re really seeing them move into areas in Madison, in Milwaukee and in other parts of southeast Wisconsin,” said Paskewitz, a UW-Madison professor of entomology.
Quoted: “A relatively high willingness to pay for quality drinking water” among Madison residents made the lead-removal project easier for officials to sell, said Greg Harrington, a University of Wisconsin engineering professor who served on the Madison water utility’s board during the project.
Quoted: “It’s interesting that parents are upset about their kids playing football but won’t be upset or worried about their daughter playing soccer,” says University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health senior scientist Tim McGuine. “We should be concerned about everything.”
That concern prompted McGuine and his colleagues to launch a new study into the effectiveness of soccer headgear.
Quoted: UW-Madison political communication professor Mike Wagner believes unity is something Ryan wants, but currently he’s is in a difficult position. He says Ryan is being pressured to both support the presidential candidate and to also keep members of the republican establishment happy by protecting their majority in the house and senate.
“I think there’s a real question about what happens after this race if Trump loses,” Wagner says. “Paul Ryan has to be thinking about the future of the party.”
Noted: The two species known to carry Zika do not currently live in Wisconsin because they can’t handle the cold, University of Wisconsin-Madison entomology professor Susan Paskewitz said.
But the species have been found in neighboring states, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recently released a map of their potential range, which includes parts of lower Wisconsin.
Noted: SmartUQ was founded by Peter Qian, a statistics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, after he was contacted by several large companies looking for a tool to help them accelerate simulations.
Noted: Timothy M. Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, said he’s willing to take the job-loss trade-off that might follow an increase to $10.10. “But $15 is too high,” he said. “Job losses would be much higher and employment would fall for the lowest-skill workers.”
Interviewed: In a May 6 interview on Wisconsin Public Television’s “Here and Now,” University of Wisconsin-Madison agricultural and applied economics professor Brian Gould pointed to several factors driving the slumping prices. Most importantly, Wisconsin’s dairy production has increased about 30 percent since 2004, and dairy producers in the state have kept on increasing that after having a very good year in 2014. So, when supply outstrips demand, a lot of milk ends up sitting around in the form of cheese, butter, and in powdered form. More specifically, most of Wisconsin’s milk goes straight to cheese production, so as goes the price of cheese, so does the fortune of the state’s dairy industry as a whole.
Mark Stephenson, the director of the Center for Dairy Profitability at UW-Madison, told WPR’s “Central Time” in August 2015, when milk prices were already falling, that Australia and New Zealand also are increasing production, contributing to “a worldwide oversupply of milk.” The UW-Extension Dairy Team has also been tracking the falling prices, among other developments in the state’s dairy industry.
Quoted: Julie F. Mead, a law professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at UW-Madison, said the leading case on the issue of school districts being held liable for the sexual misconduct of an employee is from 1998.
Noted: “The two best studies we have on this right now actually show that the effect of increasing female judges is relatively muted,” said UW-Madison political science professor Ryan Owens, who studies judicial topics.
Noted: The specifics, though, vary by state because each state makes its own election laws. So if there are problems with ineligible voters using same-day registration, it likely has more to do with how the state implements the program, rather than a problem inherent to the general concept of same-day registration, said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.
Noted: William Cronon, a prominent environmental historian at the University of Wisconsin, writes of a “dangerous dualism” leading society to focus its environmental attention solely on iconic wildernesses rather than the far more common, albeit mundane landscapes humans typically inhabit. After all, national parks make up just 4 percent of the land in the United States, according to the Bureau of Land Management.
Interviewed: Shawn Francis Peters, author of “The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era”
Quoted: “We know living kidney transplant donation has the best outcome in terms of functioning immediately, less complication,” Dr. Maha Mohamed said. “As well as long term kidney transplant function,” she added. Dr. Mohamed says in the years to come, simpler chains and universal donors will be a real thing. “I don’t see a reason why not, honestly, it’s called desensitization where we can transplant patients across immunotechnology barriers to give them an opportunity at life,” she said.
Noted: They met with Dr. Kara Hoppe, a UW Health specialist at the Center for Perinatal Care, a collaborative program between UW Health and UnityPoint Health-Meriter.
Noted: “The Democrats are in the driver’s seat in Wisconsin,” said UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden. “Trump does not have a constituency here — not enough to put him over the top. In a general election he’s not going to have a lot of appeal with the broad Wisconsin electorate.”
(Video) Dr. Luke Funk, a bariatric surgeon and obesity researcher at UW Health (and assistant professor of surgery), talks about a new study that shows keeping the pounds off after losing weight is harder than actually losing the weight.
(Video) UW Health Sports Performance Specialist Sean Casey talks to News 3 This Morning about hot to make sure your diet isn’t undercutting your athletic performance.
Quoted: But Robert Golden, dean at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said during a Wisconsin Health News event in Madison on Tuesday, that seeing patients face-to-face lends a personal touch.
(Video) Live at Four has some tips and tricks on how to get the best looking lawn on the block from the UW Turfgrass Diagnostics Lab. Interviewed: Bruce Schweiger, associate researcher in plant pathology.
Noted: “When you live your life out loud on social media, it can come back to haunt you,” says Katy Culver, an associate professor in University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism. “Also, it is not just what you choose to put on social media, but every time someone captures a video of you, every time there’s an exchange on Snapchat that can live on forever.”
Noted: Research assessing whether sports specialization leads to more injuries is not common, but this year, Timothy McGuine and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation published research suggesting there is a link.
A group of researchers and students at UW-Madison have developed a technology that attaches to drones to detect explosive devices.
Dr. Gerald Kulcinski, Director of the Fusion Technology Institute at UW-Madison, along with his team of researchers, have found a way to take existing fusion technology and turn it in to a device that can detect materials from the air.
(Video) UW Health obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. Makeba Williams talks about the negative perception of menopause and how that thinking is old school. An upcoming talk will focus on menopause.
Noted: Author Jonathan Patz, M.D., M.P.H., is director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “There’s a necessary but not sufficient step to providing care for people with low English proficiency . . . having a good interpreter or health care provider who can speak to them in their language,” said Dr. Elizabeth Jacobs of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not part of the new study.
Quoted: Mark Sidel, the Doyle-Bascom Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a consultant with the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, said via email that “the new law indicates that certain academic exchanges and cooperation will be regulated by existing rules, not by this new law.
The emerald ash borer continues to ravage ash trees in southern Wisconsin. If you have a healthy ash tree on your property, the question is should you treat it. Dr. Chris Williamson, UW-Madison entomology department, answers that question.
But even with the latest draft of the law China is going further than others, according to Mark Sidel, a professor of law and civil-society researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: The outbreak comes couldn’t have come at a worse time for vaccine makers: Only four places make the yellow fever vaccine, and the government-run facility in Dakar, Senegal is shutting down soon for renovations. “That is incredibly bad timing,” says Thomas Yuill, an emerging viruses researcher at University of Wisconsin-Madison. And ramping up production elsewhere will be slow due to the intensive egg-based process for making the vaccine.
Noted: John Magnuson, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was introduced to the Japanese and Finnish data in the 1990s, when he convened an international group of scientists to compare ice records from across the Northern Hemisphere.
Noted: Timothy Smeeding, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin, has explored how the top quintile is pulling away from the rest of society. In an essay published earlier this year, “Gates, Gaps, and Intergenerational Mobility: The Importance of an Even Start,” Smeeding finds that the gap between the average income of households with children in the top quintile and households with children in the middle quintile has grown, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $68,600 to $169,300 — that’s 147 percent.
Noted: Other plant scientists whom Nature contacted consider this idea to be extremely speculative. But, “it would be really cool to find that prion-like behaviour is playing a role in some normal aspect of plant development”, says Richard Amasino, a plant biochemist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Noted: Increasingly, anthropologists say that the key to understanding the rise of civilization is to study political and religious institutions. Many now believe that societies took up farming not out of necessity but for cultural reasons — to please a king or to satisfy their religion. T. Douglas Price, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the origins of agriculture, argues that farming was a conscious choice made by societies with pre-existing levels of political sophistication.
Quoted: But that hypothesis still needs to be tested, says paleoanthropologist Caroline VanSickle at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Quoted: Linda S. Greene, the Evjue-Bascom law professor at the University of Wisconsin, draws a sharp distinction between how Goodell successfully handled the Brady case and how he mishandled the Ray Rice investigation, protecting a star player and his team in a clear case of domestic abuse.
Noted: Currently the treatments for patients diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer do not offer an encouraging long-term prognosis.
“The goals of that treatment are to help patients live longer and live better but we wouldn’t be curing patients with that cure,” said Dr. Noelle LoConte, and oncologist with the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Wolff lost her battle with cancer on April 22, 2013, but three years to the day after her passing UW Health announced a phase I clinical trial of a treatment developed at the Carbone Cancer Center.
However, Dr. Scott Hebbring, an associate research scientist at Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation and a clinical adjunct Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, points out that the study findings are limited.
Quoted: Robert E. Drechsel, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he hopes POLITICO discloses receipt of the tax credits.
So are the soaring costs of college keeping millennials from starting households of their own? Not according to a new paper from Jason Houle of Dartmouth and Lawrence Berger of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Using longitudinal data on college-going Americans who were aged between 12 and 17 in 1997, the authors found that student-loan debtors were in fact more likely than non-debtors to own a house by the age of 30. But this was mostly because debtors tended to be older, employed, married and with children, and the debt was largely irrelevant.
Noted: Doug Soldat, turfgrass extension specialist in the Soil Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, said chemicals were applied haphazardly and wastefully.
Noted: People’s perceptions on money often dip during presidential election years as candidates downplay the current economy and promise to make it better.Nancy Wong, a professor with the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agrees.
Quoted: “They pivoted in Wisconsin and then pivoted right back,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden. “This was the state where the frontrunners were upset and New York was the state where the frontrunners reestablished their leads.”
