Category: UW Experts in the News

Noted: If you are thinking, “Wait, that’s just nuts,” think again about the nature of risk. We have learned to protect and restore rivers in our cities, says Adrian Treves at the University of Wisconsin, even though floods sometimes destroy homes and drown people. We cherish trees on urban streets and in parks even though branches sometimes fall on our heads. For that matter, we let cars dominate city streets, though they kill more than 4,700 pedestrians in the United States every year (and many times more in India).

Quoted: According to Dr. David Vail, a veterinary oncologist who’s also a professor at the University of Wisconsin, an initial cancer diagnosis can cost between $1,000 and $2,000. A standard course of chemotherapy costs between $3,000 and $5,000, and radiation treatments used for brain and nasal tumors run between $6,000 and $10,000. Costs vary by region and the type of cancer, among other factors.

Like other holiday traditions, the Newenhouse sisters — Sonya and Astrid — have compile a list of gift ideas for those who want the perfect present for someone who loves gardening and/or is conscious about sustainability. Astrid is a senior scientist in the Environmental Resources Center and the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The fact that the ground is wet — not frozen — is a bad thing for some people with seasonal allergies. Dr. Mark Moss is with the School of Medicine and Public Health at UW-Madison. He says people allergic to outdoor mold haven’t yet had relief.

Peter Timbie, a UW-Madison physics professor, isn’t quite sure what he’s stumbled upon. He only knows it comes from very far away.

Noted: David Cannon, University of Wisconsin-Madison political professor, told Schuster that Wisconsin’s politics over the past several years have increasingly been more aligned with states found below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Now is a moment in history when we get to do some hard thinking about what free speech means in a free society.

Quoted: “You have very vocal minorities on two sides of the spectrum,” says Dominique Brossard, who studies the way controversial scientific ideas are discussed on social media at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “and then the vast majority in the middle that are pretty silent about it.”

Quoted: In their book, The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education, Diana E. Hess and Paula McAvoy offer guidelines to these and other questions, using a study they conducted from 2005 to 2009. It involved 21 teachers in 35 schools and their 1,001 students. Hess is the dean of the school of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and McAvoy is the program director at UW-Madison’s Center for Ethics and Education.

Bob Turner, the UW-Madison’s Chief Information Security Officer, said the formation of the cyber protection team comes at a time when cyber threats continue to evolve.

Noted: In agriculture, Dupont sells about one-third of the corn and soybean seeds planted in the United States, while Dow has about five percent. “That strikes me as a just plain no,” said Peter Carstensen, who teaches antitrust law at University of Wisconsin Law School.

Noted: The University of Wisconsin’s Stanley Payne, author of Fascism: Comparison and Definition and A History of Fascism, 1914–1945, emphasizes that fascism is a “revolutionary nationalist project. Not just a nationalist project, but a nationalist project that is revolutionary and breaks down all the standards and the barriers.” Trump and other far-right populists don’t count.

The American Academy of Pediatrics latest youth tackling recommendations, which a University of Wisconsin physician [Gregory Landry] helped author, in part says a zero tolerance culture of illegal hits must be adopted. And while they would like to see no tackling, at the very least they want an expansion of no-contact leagues and to delay the age kids can tackle.

Quoted: Dr. Barbara Knox, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said research she and five other pediatricians conducted on the torture of children found that of the 28 young victims studied, nearly half were home-schooled and an additional 29 percent weren’t allowed to attend school at all.

Quoted: “Everything that could go wrong has already gone wrong,” says University of Wisconsin, Madison, senior scientist Sanjay Limaye, who is helping with the mission. “The rest has been tested and verified and tested again and again.”

Noted: Research released in 2014 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that “participants who engaged in cognitive activities like card games have higher brain volume, in specific regions, compared to peers who played fewer or no games,” said Ozioma C. Okonkwo, an assistant professor of medicine at the university and the study’s senior author.

Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the statement, finalized over the course of two days, should be regarded as “another milestone in the public discussion.” Among the recommendations of the group was to create an international forum to more widely discuss the technology.

De-extinction could also resurrect traits lost to commercial breeding, like the great natural taste of tomatoes, bioethicists, R. Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Henry Greely of Stanford, wrote in a paper published Wednesday.

Quoted: “The major risk that people are concerned about — there are different kinds of risk — but the most significant right now is ’off-target’ side effects,” said Pilar Ossorio, professor of law and bioethics at the Morgridge Institute for Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: “The lesson from New York is you can have a great plan, but you need to have the right people in charge,” said Peter Miller, a professor at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Some of the programs in New York have become fractured, and that is never good.

Noted: Dr. Christine Whelan, a thought leader for AARP’s Life Reimagined program and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says it’s a “good psychological trick” to mark a new beginning on a special date — say, your birthday, the new year or even just Monday morning. However, we’ve got to be careful that we’re not using this future date to justify delaying a life change.

Quoted: Even before Heinz bought Kraft, the small-town ways of Oscar Mayer were changing, says Mike Judge, former head of consumer insights and strategy there and now Director of the Center for Brand and Product Management Center at the University of Wisconsin Business School. “It was always part of the fabric of the community,” with a homegrown leader at the helm, he says. That changed about three years ago when Kraft, which had owned Oscar Mayer since 1988, began to feel its own financial pressures and installed corporate executives from the head offices in Illinois.

Noted: The actual “sport shopping” classification is new, Joann Peck, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who studies consumer shopping habits, tells Yahoo Health. But she says there has always been some element of sport shopping for some people — it’s just becoming more common.

Quoted: In recent weeks, scientists and researchers have been speaking up. Adrian Treves, a University of Wisconsin-Madison environmental studies professor, has co-authored a paper in the journal Biological Reviews that says by allowing hunters to shoot and trap wolves, Wisconsin legislators violated the Public Trust Doctrine that says governments must maintain natural resources for the use of current and future generations of the general public.

Noted: To be ostracized from your tribe was a death sentence, says Charles Raison, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who did not work on the study. “Literally they would die. There was no human way to live in isolation,” he says.

Noted: Innovation is not a silver bullet, however. “Neither better technology, nor changing to low-carbon behavior will be sufficient on its own; both will be necessary,” Gregory Nemet, a professor of public affairs and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the New Republic. “It’s hard to imagine that technology alone will enable people in the highest per capita emitting countries (e.g. the U.S.) to reduce their emissions by 90-95 percent without substantial changes to how they travel and what they consume.” But while politicians hash out the political framework by which to curb carbon emissions, scientists have been attacking climate change from all directions. Here’s a rundown of some of the innovative solutions researchers are pursuing.

Quoted: “This essay is, in essence, a plea — let’s not ignore the nonhuman part of the biosphere,” Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin and Henry T. Greely of Stanford University cautioned in an article titled “Crispr Critters and Crispr Cracks,” to be published in The American Journal of Bioethics next month. “Not only is it much larger than the human part, but it is much more susceptible to unobserved or unfettered — but not unimportant — changes.”