A: Depending on the ingredients, sunscreen works like a mirror or by sacrificing itself to the marauding rays of the sun. According to Yaohui “Gloria” Xu, dermatology professor at UW?Madison, the compounds in sunscreen come in two types: physical and chemical.
Two independent teams of physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland made a surprising announcement early on the morning of July 4. The announcement: They had discovered a new particle, and it might help explain why things have mass….The University of Wisconsin-Madison played an important role as two Wisconsin scientists have been right on the front lines. Professors Sau Lan Wu and Wesley Smith, both in the UW-Madison physics department, played critical roles in designing the experiments and analyzing the data that led to the July 4 announcement.
Physicians Plus will save up to $30 million a year by shifting much of its UW Hospital outpatient services to Meriter Hospital, the health insurance company?s president said last week. About 9,000 health plan members who have primary care doctors at clinics owned by UW Hospital will have to switch to Meriter network doctors, Linda Hoff said. Some members who see UW Hospital specialists also will be told to go to Meriter, Hoff said.
Quoted: Mark Stephenson, a dairy policy analyst at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “Sports of all types, college and professional, play a larger role in American life,” says Harry Peterson, a retired president of Western State College of Colorado and a former chief of staff at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Is our hot, drought stricken summer due to climate change? A group of legislators and scientists are calling for policy actions, to reduce the risks associated with heat waves and drought ? events they maintain are likely to increase due to climate change. Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the UW-Madison Global Health Institute, said while scientists can?t conclusively show our hot spell is the result of climate change, trends are clear going forward.
Quoted: Dr. Ken Robbins, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: Tim Van Deelen, a University of Wisconsin-Madison wildlife ecologist.
Parents can play a key role in swelling the ranks of students pursuing careers in science, math, engineering and technology (STEM) fields, according to a new UW study published in Psychological Science. Increasing interest in STEM fields is crucial to developing a strong 21st century U.S. workforce, but interest in science and math begins to wane in high school when students choose not to take advanced courses in those subjects, according to the study.
Lead author and UW-Madison psychology professor Judith Harackiewicz said the study shows schools can encourage more participation in STEM courses by directly communicating options to parents.
The poll, conducted by UW-Madison professor Charles Franklin for Marquette University Law School, stands in stark contrast to a poll released Tuesday by Public Policy Polling, a North Carolina-based firm that frequently works with Democratic candidates, as well as a recent poll conducted for the campaign of Democratic candidate Tammy Baldwin, who will take on the GOP nominee in the general election. PPP showed Hovde ahead of Thompson by two points, 31 percent to 29 percent, whereas the Marquette poll has Thompson leading Hovde 35 to 23 percent. Franklin says he is puzzled by the gap between the two polls.
UW-Madison will host a corporate open house on Thursday to show how university-industry partnerships can strengthen corporate competitiveness.
With the assistance of Bill Buckingham, a health geographer with the Applied Population Laboratory at UW-Madison, food deserts (areas of Madison without access to a grocery store within one mile) and food swamps (areas with no grocery but one or more fast-food and convenience stores within a mile) were plotted. Some campus areas where few people live or where students may use meal plans in dormitories show up as deserts, as well as areas along the city boundaries where the plotting of grocery stores stopped, Buckingham notes. Future mapping may eventually include all of Dane County.
Meditation and exercise can reduce the incidence, duration and severity of colds and the flu by about 30 percent to 60 percent, according to a UW-Madison study. A larger version of the study will start at the university this fall. If the benefits of meditation and exercise are confirmed, “this could be more powerful than flu shots,” said Dr. Bruce Barrett, a UW Health family physician heading up the research.
Quoted: “This is a compelling study that adds to the existing research and leads us to one unequivocal conclusion, and that is that smoking in movies should result in an R rating,” says Dr. Michael C. Fiore, director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research, in Madison. Fiore was not involved in the study.
Gov. Scott Walker declared a drought emergency for 42 Wisconsin counties on Monday.
This declaration will speed up the permit process for farmers who want to use streams or lakes for irrigation. The Department of Natural Resources must inspect the stream or lake within three days of the request to ensure aquatic life will not be harmed.
James Danky, a faculty associate in journalism at UW-Madison and an expert on minority communities and the press, said Our Lives has several things going for it despite the sour publishing climate. It is a free-distribution, niche publication at a time when subscription-based, general-interest magazines such as Newsweek are foundering. Its target audience has considerable discretionary income, a draw for advertisers.
A study of UW-Madison students found no link between Facebook use and depression, calling into question a warning by a national doctor group last year that the popular social media site could cause depression. “We?re not really sure ?Facebook depression? is something parents or patients really need to be advised about yet,” said Lauren Jelenchick, a UW School of Medicine and Public Health researcher who led the study.
A: A derecho (pronounced deh-RAY-cho, a Spanish word meaning “straight ahead”) is an hours-long windstorm associated with a line of severe thunderstorms. It is a result of straight-line winds, not the rotary winds of a tornado ? hence its name. Derechos in the United States are most common in the late spring and summer (May through August). The extreme winds of a derecho ? up to 150 mph in the strongest storms ? are often associated with a quasi-stationary front in mid-summer.
A: There are many similarities, said Douglas DeBoer, a professor at the School of Veterinary Medicine at UW-Madison. “The most common environmental allergen in dogs is house dust, especially dust mites. Next comes grass, weed and tree pollens, followed by mold spores. “Cats have about the same list of allergens, said DeBoer, a specialist in dermatology and allergy.
Noted: Mark Browne, a professor of risk management and insurance at the University of Wisconsin School of Business, says people with middle-class incomes or better should chip in more against the risk that they?ll require long-term care someday. ?If something doesn?t change it?s going to be a huge issue for the states and federal government,? says Browne.
Quoted: Jerome Dempsey, who studies breathing problems at the University of Wisconsin and wasn?t involved in the study, said it makes sense that airway infections and weather could have an effect on sleep apnea, but that the changes across the seasons were small.
Quoted: Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist in the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that while more research needs to be done, unusual conditions — including last winter?s ranking as the fourth-warmest in the U.S.; spring turning out to be the warmest since record-keeping began in 1895; and April marking the end of the warmest 12-month period in U.S. history — are harbingers of what?s to come if greenhouse warming persists.
Quoted: “It is a dangerous plant for several reasons, and probably human health is at the top of the list,” says Mark Renz, an authority on invasive plants at the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: ?This is always the million-dollar question, but unfortunately, there?s no definitive way to answer it,? says Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist in the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ?We?ve experienced extreme heat, drought, floods, wildfires and windstorms throughout history, so in a sense this is nothing unusual. We need time to assess whether this year?s set of extreme weather events falls outside of normal variations.?
Quoted: Still, Robert Cropp, a dairy marketing specialist and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, doubted most people would pay more for milk or other products to support family farms.
Quoted: Charles H. Franklin, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and co-founder of Pollster.com
Wisconsin?s application for flexibility under the federal No Child Left Behind law has been approved, the U.S. Education Department is set to announce Friday.
The hot, humid weather has been taking its toll across the area this week, with one death attributable to the record-breaking temperatures. Dozens of others have been seeking medical treatment for heat-related health problems.
At a moment in science history that many are hailing as one of the most important in a century, UW-Madison researchers were front and center, playing lead roles in a discovery that takes modern physics to the very edge of human understanding. Scientists from UW-Madison were deeply involved in figuring out the physics and building and operating the $10 billion machine used to discover a particle believed to be the so-called ?God particle,? responsible for giving matter mass and shaping the very early universe.
Quoted: Still, Robert Cropp, a dairy marketing specialist and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, doubted most people would pay more for milk or other products to support family farms.
Quoted: “Especially at high risk is an infant wrapped up in a blanket,” who is unable to tend to himself or tell an adult how he feels, said Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
When you get all choked up watching Fourth of July fireworks, save a little of that ooh-ahh emotion for chemistry and other scientific disciplines. Bassam Z. Shakhashiri knows all about this: He?s a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin and is the president of the American Chemical Society. Shakhashiri is also an entertainer by choice, giving lectures and programs around the world that help better connect people with the often obtuse world of science.
The summer after Paul Rowe joined the faculty at UW-Madison?s School of Music, something felt amiss. ?In July, the building was totally lit, the air conditioning was on, and nothing was going on,? he said. For a building meant for music-making, the whole place was eerily silent. Why not fill it, he thought, with musicians who shared his passion for early music? Rowe?s wife, singer Cheryl Bensman-Rowe, and music professor Chelcy Bowles, UW-Madison?s director of continuing education in music, agreed. By 2000, the three had founded the Madison Early Music Festival, filling early July with sound.
Wesley Smith, a UW-Madison physicist, has spent much of his career doing the physics and helping design the machinery that went into the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, the giant European particle smasher that will make headlines around the world this week. Very early Wednesday morning, scientists from the collider are expected to announce that they have confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle that physicists say will fill a crucial and mystifying gap in our understanding of how the world is put together.
Leave it to Wisconsin’s controversial governor to turn one of the least sexy topics in government ? public pensions ? into a nail-biter. There are plenty of things in state government in need of reforming, but Wisconsin?s pension system ain?t one of them. But even if you?re not particularly concerned about getting the best returns for WRS beneficiaries, you should know that the system?s administrative costs are low, according to UW-Madison public affairs and consumer science professor emerita Karen Holden.
Quoted: ?Chinese pottery appeared long before animal domestication and has no obvious connection to the origins of agriculture or sedentary living,? remarks archaeologist T. Douglas Price of the University of Wisconsin ? Madison.
Noted: Madison has not seen a June this dry since 1988, says Chris Kucharik, associate professor of agronomy and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That year, he explains, “people would categorize as the last real catastrophic drought that happened in the Midwest, but it was much more widespread than what we?re seeing this year.”
Quoted: Stephen Ward, former head of the University of B.C. journalism pro-gram, is trying to help us figure out an answer. He?s doing so for the sake of democracy, truth and maybe planetary survival.Much depends upon how we resolve the mind-boggling issues that people like Ward, a veteran war correspondent who is now director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are trying to wrestle into some semblance of coherence.
Noted: Which is why policy makers should flag a recent study that found more than three-quarters of patents from America?s top ten patent-producing universities, including MIT, Stanford, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, were the result of breakthroughs by immigrants. Those universities produced 1,466 patents?a fraction of the total awarded?but many were in such cutting-edge fields as information technology and molecular biology.
Quoted: Lin Yu-sheng, an academician and professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the current university assessment mechanism in Taiwan is disorderly and going in the wrong direction, leading to universities expending an excessive amount of effort and resources in striving to meet the assessment?s requirements.
Quoted: Todd Szymkowski, deputy director of the Wisconsin Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said there are various ways to enforce speed limits in work zones. Illinois, for example, uses photo enforcement in which cameras automatically capture the image of a speeding motorist?s license plate.
On a Wednesday in May in a courtroom in San Francisco, Jim Gray, a legendary figure in the technology industry, was declared legally dead. Few in Madison likely noticed, but maybe they should have, for part of Gray?s considerable legacy exists here. It was in 2004 that Gray, a Microsoft scientist and world-renowned database expert ? recipient of the Turing Award, his field?s highest honor ? first suggested to his friend David DeWitt, a celebrated UW-Madison computer science professor, that Microsoft and UW should collaborate on a Microsoft lab in Madison that DeWitt would run.
A: The answer to the first part of the question is yes and no, according to Scott Craven, UW-Madison professor emeritus of forest and wildlife ecology. “Crows are territorial during the nesting season from March into May. During nesting they are much less conspicuous than during the rest of the year. “For most of the year crows are gregarious. They spend the night in large communal roosts consisting of hundreds to sometimes thousands of birds. Roosts are usually located in woodlots, parks or quiet places with large trees.
A: Recently, the Duluth-Superior metro area had devastating flooding a result of rainfall totals of 10 inches or more in some locations. You may have seen photographs of the damage wrought by the flood waters ? washed-out roads, flooded homes, ruined crops, etc. Even in the face of such dramatic damage it is easy to overlook the enormous amount of energy that is involved in simply processing the water involved in such enormous amounts of precipitation.
Sangtae ?Sang? Kim, the first executive director of the Morgridge Institute for Research, is leaving the organization at the end of the month ?to pursue new career interests and opportunities,? according to this UW-Madison news release posted Thursday. Nobody seems keen to elaborate beyond that, though. The main focus of the UW-Madison news release put out Thursday was to announce that James Dahlberg, emeritus professor of biomolecular chemistry at UW?Madison and a co-founder of Third Wave Technologies, has been named interim executive director of the Morgridge Institute by its board of trustees.
Noted: And your milk was not spoiled this morning because of work done at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant law professor Andrew Coan said that, based on the initial reporting of the decision, he believes the high court may have made significant decisions regarding some of the key constitutional questions in the case.
The Morgridge Institute for Research at UW-Madison has a new executive director. James Dahlberg, emeritus professor of biomolecular chemistry has been named the interim executive director, taking over for Sangtae “Sang” Kim, the institute?s first executive director, who is leaving the position at the end of June.
Have you ever walked past Camp Randall?s Memorial Park on the way to a Badgers football game and wondered what really took place on the historic grounds during the Civil War era?
On a warm Tuesday afternoon, Weston Weber sat on a shaded bench next to Middleton?s Splash Pad while his daughter ran through the fountains that brought scores of kids, parents and day camp counselors to Lakeview Park.
For decades, the nation?s highest court has shied away from making any sweeping changes to the interstate commerce clause, a section of the U.S. Constitution that gives Congress the power to regulate commerce and has been used to help define a broad collection of laws, from civil rights to criminal and drug enforcement laws.
A new grant will help researchers at UW-Madison test a new class of diesel biofuels for nautical use. The Engine Research Center in UW?s College of Engineering received a $2 million grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research to help develop a method of testing hydro-treated vegetable oil for ship and submarine engines. Rolf Reitz, director of the Engine Research Center, said the center?s six professors and a group of graduate students will work to develop a computer model that can accurately predict how certain blends of these fuels will perform in maritime engines.
Those within the Big Ten Conference and Ivy League are pooling their significant research and athletic resources in an effort to better understand head injuries. The two conferences ? which represent 20 institutions that are home to nearly 18,000 student-athletes ? announced last week a collaborative effort that?s designed to produce a broad set of data for researchers, athletic trainers and team doctors on the incidence and health impacts of concussions and other head trauma.
Dennis Helwig, UW-Madison?s assistant athletic director for sports medicine, notes that getting the various institutions to agree to a single protocol for the project will be the key to the initiative. ?If you can do that, instead of 20-some institutions gathering different data on concussions, you can now have all of them collecting the same information in the same way,? says Helwig, who has worked at UW-Madison since 1975.
Quoted: “I tell people to go ahead and balance on one leg, then the other for two to three minutes,” said Timothy McGuine, a sports medicine specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who added that two to three times a week is a good start.
Interviewed: And paleoanthropologist John Hawks at the University of Wisonsin, Madison, agrees: “We definitely evolved to eat meat.”
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule perhaps this week on the health care law President Barack Obama signed in 2010. Assistant law professor at University of Wisconsin Madison Andrew Coan says it could go either way, rather, many different ways.
UW?Madison paleoanthropologist John Hawks says we definitely evolved to eat meat, but ? in context with our modern diets and lifestyles ? that doesn’t mean it’s entirely good for us.
The announcement isn?t going to silence all of the NCAA?s many critics. But after years of tough talk without meaningful action, it appears college sports? governing body is gradually getting more intentional about ensuring athletic programs take academics seriously. The NCAA announced earlier this week it has barred 15 teams — including the perennially powerful University of Connecticut men?s basketball program — from postseason play due to poor academic performance.
?When a university as prominent as Connecticut is sanctioned due to low rates of academic progress, it?s a signal to all universities that the NCAA is serious about this and that colleges need to ensure that their students are making academic progress,? says Adam Gamoran, co-chair of the UW Athletic Board’s academics and compliance committee, and the director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.
Starting a business is not the usual course of action for a budding doctor, pharmacist or scientist. But a UW-Madison program is trying to change that. Nearly 70 graduate students attended the weeklong Wisconsin Entrepreneurship Bootcamp at Grainger Hall last week, setting aside academics to learn the basics of the business world. “We?re trying to teach creativity, generating ideas, and different applications for their research,” said Dan Olszewski, director of the UW School of Business? Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship.
In 1957, after years of dwindling membership, the church was closed, with the exception of the occasional funeral, according to church history. Nine years later, Robert McCabe and Clay Schoenfeld, two UW-Madison professors with ties to Hyde, helped form the Hyde Community Association and bring the shuttered chapel back to life. McCabe and Schoenfeld each studied wildlife ecology and purchased land near the chapel. McCabe bought his in 1963 for hunting and fell in love with the area. “He wanted to become part of a community,” said Maureen McCabe, his widow.
