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Category: UW Experts in the News

How AI revolution is creating ‘democratic legitimacy deficient’

Posted on
The Badger Herald

Ethical implications of AI have a wide-ranging scope, Annette Zimmermann — University of Wisconsin Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor of Statistics — said. One of the foremost concerns being the land and resource use, especially if the sites will be on or around native lands, she said.

“Even if this didn’t happen exactly on tribal lands, there could be a kind of cascading damaging environmental effect that affects like surrounding areas,” Zimmermann said. “And so, that would obviously be hard to contain.”

Are we heading into a recession? Here’s what the data shows

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NBC News

Consumer beliefs affect retail sales, said Menzie Chinn, a professor in the economics department at the University of Wisconsin. He notes that policy uncertainty can shake the economy.

“If enough people and enough companies put things off because of uncertainty, you can tip the economy into recession,” Chinn told NBC News. “It doesn’t happen overnight, but it multiplies out over time.”

Does eating grass-fed beef help the planet? Research says not so simple

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ABC News

Randy Jackson, a professor of grassland ecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study, said he has found similar results in his own research showing that grass-fed beef has higher emissions assuming the same demand. In fact, Eshel’s team cited his work. But he worries that the study is too focused on minimizing emissions “without concern for the environmental impacts beyond GHG load to the atmosphere,” like biodiversity and soil and water quality, he wrote in an email.

Study: Long-term use of pain relief medications may lower risk of Dementia for some people

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Health

“It wasn’t that they were taking higher or lower doses, but that they were taking it, which does speak to this idea of dampening inflammation,” said Nate Chin, MD, medical director for the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dark matter might lurk in its own shadow world

Posted on
Scientific American

At the first dark matter conference I attended after graduate school, I took a bet with a primary proponent of the “dark matter haze” idea, Dan Hooper of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Hooper thought we could confirm that these observations were caused by dark matter within the next five years. I took the skeptical position.

‘Endless series of contradictions’: Girls open up about complicated relationships with social media

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Kate Phelps thinks the way society talks about how young girls use the internet is too simplistic. A big part of that, she says, is because culture spends a lot of time scrutinizing pre-teen girls, but we rarely talk to them about their experiences. Phelps, a University of Wisconsin-Madison women and gender studies researcher, wanted to change that.

Her new book, “Digital Girlhoods,” is based on her conversations with 26 different girls between the ages of 10 and 13 — an age group often referred to as “tweens” — about their feelings about social media.

Trump administration cuts threaten UW-Madison ag studies, state farmers

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Isthmus

Wisconsin farmer Andy Diercks sits on a red Memorial Union Terrace chair in the middle of a farm field, holding a potato in his left hand. “It’s amazing all the work that goes into growing this little guy,” he says to Amanda Gevens, UW-Madison chair of plant pathology, who sits across from him. “The research you’ve done over the past decades is critical to grow a good quality crop.”

Two healthcare systems merged, then closed the only birthing center for miles.

Posted on
The Badger Project

Closures are common after mergers, and a particularly sticky problem in more rural communities, which have fewer people and thus make less financial sense for profit-driven organizations, said Peter Carstensen, a professor emeritus in the UW-Madison Law School who focuses on competition policy. When competitors merge, they look for areas to reduce cost.

“It almost always means eliminating some overlapping activities,” he said.

Doctors see influx of requests for long-acting reversible contraception

Posted on
WKOW - Channel 27

Dr. Laura Hanks is an OB-GYN with UW Health and an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in the department of OB-GYN. She says they have seen an uptick in people requesting both LARC and permanent sterilization since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

“We did a study at our hospital to looking at the increase in permanent sterilization rates, and we saw 106% increase in the year following the Dobbs decision,” Hanks says.

Will cicadas swarm Wisconsin again this year? What to expect with spring pests

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The cicadas will likely be most active in areas ranging from southern Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and parts of western North Carolina, according to P.J. Liesch, director of the UW-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab. However, people can expect to spot them as far east as Boston and as far west as southern Indiana, Liesch said.

“Based on historical records, we know there’s going to be a little bit of activity in a few counties in Indiana,” he added. “Those would be about the closest to us up in Wisconsin.”

 

$19? We might be at peak strawberry

Posted on
MarketPlace

“In Japan, fruits are not just food. Fruits really have a lot of symbolic meaning and cultural meaning,” said Soyeon Shim, a scholar of consumer and financial behavior who’s studied the country’s fruit market. “High-end fruits are used as a gift. And gifts are a very important practice in Japan.”

A $19 strawberry isn’t unusual there, said Shim, who’s the dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Human Ecology. The high-quality fruit is grown in controlled greenhouses and requires a lot of hand labor, she said.

“I wouldn’t ever buy a $19 strawberry to get my daily intake for vitamin C. So it isn’t designed for everyday consumption,” Shim said.

Layoffs gut Federal Education Research Agency

Posted on
Inside Higher Ed

“Some of these surveys allow us to know if people are being successful in college. It tells us where those students are enrolled in college and where they came from. For example, COVID impacted everyone, but it had a disproportionate impact on specific regions in the U.S. and specific social and socioeconomic groups in the U.S.,” said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

“Post-COVID, states and regions have implemented a lot of interventions to help mitigate learning loss and accelerate learning for specific individuals. We’ll be able to know by comparing region to region or school to school whether or not those gaps increased or reduced in certain areas.”

WI’s ‘nonpartisan’ Supreme Court race is anything but

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Public News Service

University of Wisconsin-Madison mass communications professor Michael Wagner said the state’s rule about justices making their own decisions about when to recuse themselves from cases makes the election outcome that much more consequential.

“It’s in a presidential swing state, it’s on a swing court,” said Wagner, “and the cases that are going to come before the court are going to be cases where the donors in the election, most notably Elon Musk, have a clear interest and a clear path they want the winning judge to take.”

Trees in art, as well as life, often follow simple mathematical rules, study finds

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CNN

The math concept hidden in this tree art — geometric shapes known as fractals — is apparent in branching patterns in nature and may be key to humans’ ability to recognize such artwork as trees, according to Mitchell Newberry, a mathematical biologist at the University of New Mexico, and his colleague Jingyi Gao, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin.

Deaths of 2 prisoners at Taycheedah occurred during uptick in flu cases

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Prisons, hospitals, nursing homes and other “congregate facilities” can accelerate the spread of respiratory illnesses due to overcrowding, said Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“People aren’t always able to control how much space they can have around others, and so that that is one of the ingredients for the spread of a respiratory virus,” Sethi said.

Texas court blocks execution of David Wood two days before scheduled killing

Posted on
The Guardian

Greg Wiercioch, Wood’s longtime lawyer and a University of Wisconsin law professor, said 150 pieces of evidence remained untested, telling the Guardian in an interview on Monday: “It’s incomprehensible why the state is opposing additional testing … They shut it down I think because they’re afraid of what they’ll find out. We have DNA testing, the most powerful crime-fighting tool ever developed, and we’re not using it.”

Drawing on Dutch masters, NY exhibit explores Christians painting themselves into Purim parable

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The Times of Israel

“It’s tempting to take these great figures of history, these creative and brilliant individuals, and see in them what we want to see,” said Steven Nadler, author of “Rembrandt’s Jews” and a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “With Rembrandt, it’s not just tempting, it’s also comforting, to see him as a friend of the Jews at a particular historical period when Jews did not have a lot of friends in many places.”

Hedge funds paying up to $1 million for weather modelers

Posted on
Bloomberg

“When it comes to predicting outcomes that could harm people, you have a moral obligation to share that information,” University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Andrea Lopez Lang said.

Lang — who formerly did consulting work for hedge funds and commodities traders — said she was recruited for at least one high-paying job since leaving the private sector, where she translated weather forecasts into actionable guidance ahead of cold weather outbreaks and other weather phenomena.

Fragments of a face more than a million years old found in Spanish cave

Posted on
The Washington Post

John Hawks, chairman of the department of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was not involved in the study, called it a “really cool paper.” He added, “It’s always great to see a new fossil, of course, but in this case the fossil helps add something to our knowledge of how some of the first human relatives in Europe were connected to other places.”

Is anyone coming out on top of Donald Trump’s tariff wars? Economists weigh in

Posted on
The Latin Times

While these duties may “relieve” struggling U.S. industries, it comes with a cost, Lydia Cox, an assistant economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and international trade expert, wrote in a 2022 paper. Tariffs create higher input costs for other industries, making them “vulnerable” to foreign competition, Cox wrote. These spillover effects hurt other sectors of the economy, ultimately costing jobs.

NIH cuts off more research funding, including for vaccine hesitancy. mRNA may be next

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NPR

“It appears that there are forces intent on destroying our existing vaccine enterprise,” says Dr. Jonathan Temte, a professor of family medicine at the University of Wisconsin who studies vaccine hesitancy. “Defunding research on vaccine hesitancy is the latest example of this effort.”

Federal research instability risks postdoc careers, American leadership

Posted on
STAT

Trey Wenger, a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin, is funded by the NSF and found himself financially stretched when the agency suddenly halted postdoc stipends, only to be restored by a court order. “I missed a paycheck when rent was due, and remain concerned that my paycheck could be turned off at any time,” wrote Wenger, whose work in astronomy helps us better understand how galaxies form and evolve.

Why the Trump administration is wrong about an energy crisis in the US

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ABC News

There isn’t even the slightest hint of a domestic energy crisis, especially when compared to actual crises that occurred in 1973, 1979 and 2022, Gregory Nemet, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin’s Energy Institute, told ABC News.

“Prices for gasoline are mid-range over the last, say, 20 years,” Nemet said. “There’s plenty of supply. We’re not having electricity outages. We’re not having lines of gas stations.”

Cuts to Medicaid would affect wide range of Wisconsin residents, researcher says

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Donna Friedsam is a researcher emerita who has been studying health care policy and reform for decades at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Friedsam told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that changes at the federal level could have significant ripple effects at home.

“Many people who are on Medicare, who are low-income, also duly rely on Medicaid to cover things that Medicare does not cover,” Friedsam said. “So, Medicaid is actually quite a wide-ranging program and reaches over a million Wisconsin residents who rely on it.”

Tariffs are ‘lose-lose’ for U.S. jobs and industry, economist says: ‘There are no winners here’

Posted on
CNBC

While tariffs’ protection may “relieve” struggling U.S. industries, it comes with a cost, Lydia Cox, an assistant economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and international trade expert, wrote in a 2022 paper.

Tariffs create higher input costs for other industries, making them “vulnerable” to foreign competition, Cox wrote.

COVID-19’s fifth anniversary: 5 areas where life changed in U.S.

Posted on
Deseret News

As the Journal Sentinel reported, quoting Sedona Chinn, an assistant professor and researcher in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at University of Wisconsin-Madison, folks who were frustrated started doing their own research, but it also “led to more misinformation and more anti-expert bias, making it all the much harder for solid science to break through.”

Fennimore farmers work to reduce dairy intolerance through products

Posted on
WMTV - Channel 15

Researchers explain that some people have a reduced ability to chop up and absorb lactose. UW Madison’s Center for Dairy Research is hoping to continue to learn more about the future of dairy digestion.

“There is weak evidence at the moment that this change in the moving from what is typically A1 to A2, that there’s a difference in potential difference in how the body digestive,” Dr. John Lucey, the center’s director said.

Wisconsin farmers protect potatoes with weather forecasting tool, help from UW researchers

Posted on
The Badger Herald

Farmers may prevent blight by spraying their fields with fungicides, but if overdone, this practice has its drawbacks, University of Wisconsin professor of plant pathology Andrew Bent said. To prevent blight and overspraying, professor and Department of Plant Pathology Chair Amanda Gevens uses a tool called Blitecast to communicate to farmers the appropriate time to spray fungicides.

Don’t overdo it, but light exercise can help with minor illness

Posted on
CNN

“If you have a mild to moderate illness, you can continue to exercise, but you should do less than you normally do,” said family physician Dr. Bruce Barrett, a professor and vice chair for research in the department of family medicine and community health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If you normally run 10 miles per week, maybe run 5 if you have a mild cold. Just tamp it down.”

How to fix an overactive bladder

Posted on
Consumer Reports

Many fruits and vegetables, for example, are a key part of a healthy diet. They’re also high in fiber, which helps prevent constipation, says Chris Manakas, MD, a urologist at UW Health and an assistant professor of urology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

How to protect your pets from bird flu

Posted on
Popular Science

As of March 6, more than 100 domestic cats have been infected since 2022. Wild cats like lynx and captive tigers have also fallen ill. Considering the tens of millions of pet and stray cats in the U.S., confirmed cases remain exceedingly rare. “Just like in humans, the risk of pets contracting H5N1 is relatively low” outside of farm settings, says Peter Halfmann, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of Veterinary Medicine.

Changing US law keeps victims’ families – and people on death row – waiting decades for closure

Posted on
The Guardian

The lead attorney, Greg Wiercioch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, told her that during his 16 years on the case, he’d come to believe Wood hadn’t killed her daughter or anyone else. He pointed out that DNA testing of a bloodstain on one of the other victim’s clothes had matched a different, unknown male, who could have also killed Fulton’s daughter.

Is ‘Severance’ making your dog freak out?

Posted on
The Washington Post

Freya Mowat, a veterinary ophthalmologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s school of veterinary medicine, has done research on visual perception for dogs. She said a show displayed on older televisions would appear like “old movie screens” to dogs with individual flickers and a low refresh rate. Modern televisions, though, offer more flow and smooth projection.

UW-Madison young scientists’ careers in upheaval as Trump slows research funding

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Randy Kimple, a professor of human oncology at UW-Madison, has two Ph.D. students in his lab supported by grants, called “supplements,” meant to promote diversity among researchers. The supplements fund not only students of color, but also first-generation college students and those from rural areas or low-income neighborhoods.

Kimple expects to lose that funding — roughly $150,000 — in the summer, given the Trump administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

New fossil discovery reveals surprising insights into prehistoric human behavior

Posted on
Discover Magazine

In a press release, Professor Pickering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison estimates that “this individual, probably a female, was only about a meter tall and 27 kg (60 lbs) when it died, making it even smaller than adults from other diminutive early human species, including those represented by the famous ‘Lucy.’” 

How attack ads in elections for judges can affect sentencing

Posted on
PBS Wisconsin

“There is a lot of evidence that when judges are approaching an election, they sentence people more harshly than they do in other points in their term, said Zoe Engberg, an assistant clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

“And there’s also a lot of evidence that shows that negative campaign ads, in particular, have a large impact on how judges make decisions in cases,” she added.

Trigger warnings in the classroom: Helping or hindering students? UW professor weighs in

Posted on
The Badger Herald

Halverson-Bascom and Douglas Kelly professor of French Jan Miernowski said he began placing trigger warnings in his course syllabi for two reasons.

For one, Miernowski observed his students placing content warnings in their assigned essays when there is explicit content present. The second reason is that his students reached out saying they were extremely affected by the content of his course books.