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Category: UW Experts in the News

New UW research reveals how male sex traits evolved

Capital Times

Few things seem so silly as a peacock preening its gaudy tail or an elk clanking through the trees with its cumbersome antlers or even a male human displaying its hairy chest, but now we know that these secondary sexual characteristics have evolved because they attract mates, and in the animal kingdom, procreation leads to better odds of survival.

These days, the study of evolution has shifted from the question of why such male traits exist to what makes them work and where they came from. In Thursday’s edition of the science journal Cell, a team lead by world-renowned University of Wisconsin-Madison molecular biologist Sean B. Carroll has published the first study to come up with some of the genetic nuts and bolts behind this ornamentation.

Video Games Learning Tools? (AP)

Quoted: The forums show that gamers are “creating an environment in which informal scientific reasoning practices are being learned” by playing the online games, said Sean Duncan, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The healing power of forgiveness (San Diego Union-Tribune)

Quoted: But those who have toiled in this field the longest â?? psychologists such as Worthington in Virginia and Robert Enright of the University of Wisconsin Madison â?? are bullish.

In an e-mail from Northern Ireland, where he spent much of the summer working on a forgiveness curriculum for schoolchildren, Enright says he now is more impressed with the power of forgiveness to heal than when he began his research two decades ago.

Obama campaign spends over $2M on N.C. TV ads

USA Today

Obama’s campaign has identified North Carolina as one of 18 battleground states where it’s spending money on TV advertising early in the general election campaign. North Carolina ranked in the middle of the pack in Obama TV spending during June and July, led by Florida with $5 million, according to an analysis by the University of Wisconsin’s Advertising Project.

Cold War rhetoric seen as not helpful in Georgian crisis

Wisconsin Radio Network

As the crisis over Georgia grinds on, a UW expert says he doesn’t think Cold War rhetoric will ease tensions with Russia. Professor David McDonald, who chairs the History Department at UW Madison, says Georgia’s leaders probably miscalculated when they decided to reoccupy their breakaway province of South Ossetia.

N.O. could see homes values rise

New Orleans Times-Picayune

Quoted: Morris Davis, a professor in the real estate and urban land economics department at the University of Wisconsin, disagreed that increases in home prices should always track increases in rents. Houses in desirable locations can be expected to appreciate, and he said the buyer has to pay upfront for the right to partake of that appreciation.

Curiosities: Electromagnets propel hovering maglev trains

Wisconsin State Journal

Q. How do maglev trains work?
A. Maglev is short for magnetic levitation, which means maglev trains hover centimeters above a guide rail under the force of powerful electromagnets.

“It’s almost like being on an airplane. You’re just floating above the track,” says Giri Venkataramanan, an electrical engineering professor at UW-Madison.

Tree-killing beetle found in state (AP)

Appleton Post-Crescent

Quoted: “This is a big deal. This is bad,” said Phil Townsend, an associate professor of forest ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We’re not just talking about forests, out in the woods. We’re talking about trees in neighborhoods and suburbs along streets.”

New Book Studies Human Impact on the Environment

Wisconsin Public Radio

The state is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the land-buying stewardship program, which will be applied towards land purchases and other preservation efforts. But a new book co-edited by a University of Wisconsin professor says humans will continue to reshape the environment.

Don Waller of the U-W Madisonâ??s Botany and Environmental Studies department says he hopes The Vanishing Present: Wisconsin’s Changing Lands, Waters and Wildlife catches the publicâ??s eye. (Final item.)

Downs: Change we can believe in

Wisconsin State Journal

Column by law Professor Donald A. Downs:

The fall campaigns are heating up, and citizens are gripped by conflicting feelings of hope and deep concern for the country’s domestic and global condition — a tension that only seems to heighten the excitement.

Every sperm is sacred: Draft rules from feds stir birth control controversy

Capital Times

It’s no secret that opponents of abortion have also been waging a war against birth control in recent years. Socially conservative lawmakers in Wisconsin and elsewhere have complied with proposals aimed at allowing pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control and prohibiting university health systems from distributing emergency contraception.

So it was perhaps of little surprise that the Bush administration has been quietly working on draft regulations that would further restrict the contraceptive options family planning clinics are able to offer their low-income clients, if the clinics receive federal funds.

Quoted: UW-Madison Law School professor and bioethicist Alta Charo

After trailing McCain in Fla., Obama makes up ground

USA Today

Quoted: Still, McCain is not on TV to counter Obama’s barrage â?? and the Democrat is running as many ads in North Florida and the heavily Republican panhandle as in the southern part of the state that usually favors Democrats, points out Ken Goldstein of the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project, which tracks political ad spending.