Category: UW Experts in the News

“In the short run, I think it trips up the Republicans, who have had a really wonderful week (with the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee),” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.”(Biden’s) age, his feebleness, his mental capacity, those were the things that the public had major concerns about. … that’s now gone as an issue.”

UW Madison Cybersecurity Expert Dave Schroeder says this was not a security or cyberattack, but it left many vulnerable.

“You don’t have to be a CrowdStrike user or customer to be impacted by this.”

“When I first learned of this, my initial reaction was, here we go again, another major IT incident,” said Dave Shroeder, a cybersecurity expert at UW-Madison. “You wouldn’t expect a routine software update to cause such a severe issue.”

“It does seem like we have an awful lot of them out and about this year,” said P.J. Liesch, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab.

Known on social media as “The Wisconsin Bug Guy,” Liesch grew up in Wisconsin and has worked at the lab for about 10 years.

“The suddenness with which this announcement was made, the lack of preparation or ceremony and the lack of institution that is there aren’t senior Democratic Party leaders making this announcement or gathering with him somewhere. It wasn’t a press conference. The almost casual way it was done feels very personal, very much like he woke up this morning and said,  that’s it,” said Howard Schweber, political science professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Wisconsin had become a national outlier in the authority that it gives to legislative committees, according to Miriam Seifter, a UW-Madison law professor and co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative.

Steph Tai is also a UW-Madison law professor and associate dean for education and faculty affairs at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. They said the ruling gives more free rein to agencies.

Cheese consumption is one of several lifestyle choices and circumstances that improves the mental health of aging Europeans, concluded a recent study out of China. Unsurprised is John Lucy, director of UW-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research, who joins us.

“Even in water bodies that had relatively low PFAS concentration in the water, we still found concentrations in the foam that could be potentially concerning,” said UW-Madison civil and environmental engineering professor Christina Remucal, who co-authored the study.

Anna Pidgeon, an avian ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said cross-fostering is used in many different ways among domestic and wild species. In this case, a common species chick — a sandhill crane — is raised by a vulnerable species — blue cranes — to help them gain parenting skills.

“Figuring out how to work as a pair, as coparents, is something that just like in humans or other species where it takes two, they get better with time and with practice,” Pidgeon said.

All that rain will “certainly” affect how many mosquitoes are buzzing around, said Lyric Bartholomay, a medical entomologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“People are saying to me, ‘Seems like the mosquitoes are a lot worse this year. What’s going on?’” Bartholomay said.

“When people talk about crime and the proliferation of crime among some communities rather than others, there often is an attempt to explain it very simplistic,” said Alvin Thomas, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s more than just that. There’s racism. There’s the historical impact of racism and race, and how that affects policy, how policy impacts access to resources, impacts access to social mobility, impacts where people live, what kind of schools people go to, the perception of any kind of personal agency, the ability to rise beyond where you’re born.”

In the last week of June, back-to-back U.S. Supreme Court rulings curtailed the power of federal agencies and restricted the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations of air and water pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s the view of Steph Tai, an environmental law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who says Wisconsin will feel the rulings’ effects on issues like drinking water quality differently than other states because some policies make Wisconsin an “unusual state.”

For Allison Prasch, a scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies political communication and presidential rhetoric, the crafting and publication of a platform tells a lot about the direction a political party will go in.

“There’s a shift of power from the (governor’s) administration to the Legislature,” said Andrew Reschovsky, professor emeritus of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on public finance. “And is that good or bad? It depends on one’s politics. But in a very fractured political environment, the consequences could be substantial.”