Widely used chemotherapy drugs don’t attack cancer the way doctors thought, according to a UW-Madison study that identifies a new mechanism that could improve the search for new drugs and help tailor treatments for patients,
“It’s a totally different mechanism than the field had been thinking about for the last several decades,” said Beth Weaver, a UW-Madison professor of cell and regenerative biology who is senior author of the study, published recently in the journal PLOS Biology.
A calorie is not just a calorie. That’s the lesson University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers said they demonstrated in a new study where mice lost weight while eating more.
“And they’re fitter throughout their lifespan, too,” said professor and metabolism researcher Dudley Lamming. “So they’re still able to run and climb, and they don’t grow as frail as normal animals do as they age.”
New research out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that pollution and biodiversity are factors that can change how vulnerable animals are to disease or parasites.
Jess Hua, an associate professor in the department of Forest Wildlife and Ecology at UW-Madison, said diseases affecting various animal species are “emerging at unprecedented rates” and biologists are trying to learn why.
“It’s an exciting time for hibernation biology,” said Hannah Carey, UW–Madison professor emerit of Comparative Biosciences. “People from outside of traditional hibernation world are wanting to come in and collaborate.”
In a commentary published alongside the study, Andrea Dutton, a professor in the department of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Robert M.
DeConto, a professor at the School of Earth and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, called the new research “pioneering.”
They noted that while geological evidence had been mounting that the icy expanse of the West Antarctic ice sheet may have collapsed during the Last Interglacial period, “each study’s findings have come with caveats.”
“Workers’ compensation really doesn’t work for anyone, not even the workers it’s supposed to work for. It really doesn’t,” said Lola Loustaunau, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School for Workers who is studying access to workers’ compensation for immigrant workers in high-risk industries. “That gets increasingly worse the more precarious workers are.”
Washing meat likely originated in cultures around the world as a way to get rid of the inedible material left on freshly slaughtered meat, says Kathleen Glass, associate director of the Food Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before industrialized food processing (and today in communities that still butcher their own meat), washing was an important line of defense against dirt, animal debris, and perhaps also the host of pathogens that live in raw meat.
“In some sense we’re seeing a continuation of this tendency that we see at the national level, that whatever slow down there is coming, it keeps on getting pushed further and further into the future,” University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor Menzie Chinn said.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the first lab-grown chicken meat for commercial sale. It’s the first cell-cultivated meat to be approved in the country, and it’s grown from stem cells in a bioreactor—no slaughter required. We talk to Jeff Sindelar, a professor and extension meat specialist in the department of Animal Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, about whether lab-grown meat could eventually compete with the factory-farmed meat that dominates the industry.
Over the last few decades, Wisconsin and the U.S. have seen divorces lead to a growing rate of equal joint custody of children, instead of one parent gaining sole custody. We talk to Quentin Riser, an assistant professor of human development & family studies at UW-Madison, about how this shift has affected families and the child support system.
Susan Ridgely is a professor of religious studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said Francis has wanted to portray the church as welcoming since early in his papacy. She pointed to his symbols of service, such as washing the feet of young inmates.
The declaration is a “natural extension” of Francis’s olive branches to a changing world, she said. “That’s a major step towards kind of an openness of the church and an acknowledgment that people reaching out for God should get that blessing through the church,” she said.
“It’s basically a place holder, because no one knows what the real number should be,” said Christian Franck, a professor of biomechanics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is part of a team that is modeling the effects of blasts on the brain for the Defense Department. He echoed the assessment of many other researchers.“If the right kind of wave hits brain tissue, the tissue just breaks — it literally gets torn apart,” Dr. Franck said. “We see that in the lab. But what kind of blast will do that in real life? It’s complex. The work takes time. There is a lot we don’t know.”
Kenneth Streit, a clinical professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Law School who has been involved with Wisconsin’s corrections programs for more than 40 years, said it would be extremely unlikely for the state to close one of its prisons without first addressing violent crimes.
“Closing prisons without first reducing gun-related homicide and injury will never happen in Wisconsin,” Streit said, noting that New York was able to release thousands of older incarcerated men when it eliminated its 1970s-era drug sentencing laws.
New research by a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor suggests police in schools don’t reduce violence, diminish crime, or have any impact on the presence of weapons or drugs in a school.
If anything, having police in schools has an impact on young people’s mental health, according to Ben Fisher, a UW-Madison associate professor who reviewed 32 evaluations of school-based police programs, said he found that police in schools weren’t shown to diminish school violence, crime, or the presence of weapons or drugs.
He sent them photos and the coordinates. From there, the Wisconsin Historical Society and the state’s Department of Natural Resources began to investigate. They took their own sonar images of the wreck and compared the information with a shipwreck database the historical society runs with the University of Wisconsin’s Sea Grant Institute, said Tamara Thomsen, a Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archaeologist.
Julie Poehlmann at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studies families of incarcerated people. She says research has shown the value of in-person visits, both to the incarcerated person and family members. But she says a lot depends on the quality of the visit. In jails, she says, “in-person visit” often means the family is still separated by a glass partition or in-house video.
“But nobody has really dug into those effects in Greenland where we expected it might be happening,” said University of Wisconsin–Madison atmospheric scientist Kyle Mattingly.
“This should have more bipartisan support, because it is something that should, at least theoretically, help improve the voting process and be a better reflection of what voters’ true intentions are,” said David Canon, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In K-12 schools, the outlines of the battle are different because speech is more circumscribed, especially for teachers, said Suzanne Eckes, a University of Wisconsin at Madison professor who studies education law. Teachers do not have First Amendment rights in the classroom and must stick to teaching the curriculum their district mandates, she said.
“There’s really nothing like the efforts of the fake electors in 2020,” said UW-Madison Political Science Professor Barry Burden. “That was an orchestrated effort across multiple swing states, including Wisconsin, to present false electors on behalf of the party that had lost in every one of those states.”
“If oil prices are going to stay at the levels that they are, then we can continue to see at least not an upward movement in gasoline prices, and that’s gonna allow us to have inflation continue to fall,” said Menzie Chinn, a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
What’s currently being called atypical canine respiratory disease started showing up around the state in late October, according to Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at UW-Madison, with clinics seeing between six and a dozen cases each. It began showing up in Colorado, Massachusetts and other parts of the country earlier in the year.
Adam Stevenson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and an expert in criminal law and sentencing, said while this type of sentence is extremely rare, many states are banning the practice, including Texas, Arkansas, Minnesota and Iowa.
This bill “generally follows with both the Supreme Court’s commentary that kids are different — they change, they mature, both emotionally, but also, scientifically,” Stevenson said. “It also follows the greater trends across the country.”
Underage sales of nicotine products have more than doubled in Wisconsin since 2019, the year when the federal age for purchasing tobacco products was raised to 21. Wisconsin has kept the minimum age at 18 in spite of research showing that raising the smoking age reduces nicotine addiction. Dr. Michael Fiore, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, explains.
How farmers handle their cows can have a big impact on their health and safety. We talk to Jennifer Van Os, an animal welfare extension specialist at UW-Madison who developed a new tool to help farmer’s practice better methods.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who studies technology in education said artificial intelligence holds promise in schools. David Williamson Shaffer is the Sears Bascom Professor of Learning Analytics at UW-Madison. He got into this work after being a teacher in the 80s and 90s.
“Graphing calculators and computers were just starting to come to the place where they were impacting the classroom, were a kind of change agent,” Shaffer said. “They were a way in which the old system was disrupted just enough that we had a chance to rethink a little bit about what we were doing.”
Fitzgerald’s remarks misconstrue that process, according to former University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor David Canon, whose research focused in part on election administration.
“He has it exactly backwards,” Canon said. “They don’t vote individually to certify the results in all 50 states.”
Stanley Payne, a revisionist historian of Spanish fascism at the University of Wisconsin Madison until his retirement in 2004, has penned a string of recent articles in rightwing outlets like First Things which invite readers to compare the US with Spain in the 1930s. He has reiterated a line that Franco’s hand was forced by leftist violence and promoted the work of other revisionist historians like Pio Moa, who many professional historians dismiss as a “pseudo-historian”.
Karen Oberhauser, the director of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum and the founder of the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, advises against rearing monarchs in captivity on a large scale or for more than a single generation, since captivity may disrupt the development of their navigational abilities and, over time, can alter their genetic makeup.
Author Beth Nguyen is a Madisonian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in creative writing. “Owner of a Lonely Heart” isn’t her first published book, but it’s different because of the way it’s written as a memoir in essays.
That story tells of a woman who, as a child, escaped Vietnam with her father. He didn’t tell the young girl’s mother where they were going, leaving her behind. The mother eventually escaped to the Boston area, and 20 years later, mother and daughter reconnected.
Ben Fisher, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor who reviewed 32 evaluations of school-based police programs, said he found that police in schools weren’t shown to diminish school violence, crime or the presence of weapons or drugs.
“The metallic traces are interesting, but I’ll caution that this was only a single event,” said Chris Vagasky, a lightning researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the new work. To see if all ghosts are iron-fueled spooks, he added, “it would be nice to see the results from multiple ghosts.”
“The challenge that insurance companies face is that since they do not have the same information as drivers, they must set higher insurance premiums that consider the average risk of drivers,” says Jordan Van Reign, assistant teaching professor and MSPO Associate Director, Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics (AAE), University of Wisconsin–Madison. “If insurance companies could have the same information about risk as drivers, they could set individual insurance premiums that better match the risk of each individual. This would improve overall market efficiency by reducing overall rates and better matching rates to the risk of individuals.”
Dr. Gerald Pankratz, an associate professor and geriatrician at UW Health, said the most common injuries from falls are innocuous and might include a few bruises or cuts.
“On the more serious side, we’re definitely concerned about fractures of the big bones, the hip, most predominantly — there’s a marked increased risk in mortality and institutionalization in the months after having a hip fracture,” he said.
Nations were divided over whether to create a timetable for eliminating fossil fuels at the latest United Nations’ conference on climate change. We learn what happened from Sumudu Atapattu, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor attending the conference.
Krishanu Saha leads the CRISPR Vision Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is member of National Institute of Health’s Somatic Cell Genome Editing Consortium. His lab is specifically studying how to cure Best disease as well as Leber congenital amaurosis, one of the most common causes of blindness in children.
“All of the testing that we’ve done thus far shows a lot of promise that it can actually correct the defects in these cells. And so the task for us over the next five years is to formulate a medicine that could be used here in trials enrolling patients,” Saha said in a recent interview with WPR’s “The Morning Show.”
The marten has been the focus of several reintroduction efforts over the last 75 years. Ten Pacific marten were introduced to the Apostle Islands from Montana and British Columbia in the 1950’s but didn’t survive; the last was detected in 1969, according to Jonathan Pauli, marten researcher and professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin.
Patrick Remington, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said the rate of underage tobacco sales is going in the wrong direction.
“It’s more than just a minimal change,” Remington said. “To me, that would be cause to certainly redouble the efforts to vendors and sellers to comply with federal law.”
I set long deadlines, knowing that I was working on what disability scholars have called “crip time.” (Term used by UW–Madison scholar Ellen Samuels.)
Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said most Republicans in the state legislature and GOP leaders opposed any kind of independent redistricting commission or process “until Tuesday, September 12, when Speaker Vos led a press conference to announce support for a freshly crafted bill that would implement a system similar but not identical to the Iowa model.”
Burden said it was a surprising turn of events given Republicans’ history of standing by the existing system and resisting reforms.
Dr. Julie Stamm, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the summit, says it’s exciting to see a lineup of experts coming together to discuss not just CTE but other conditions related to traumatic brain injury.
“For a retailer, they’re primarily a tool to incentivize people to make a purchase,” said Laura Hensen, executive director of the Kohl’s Center for Retailing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
If the incident in question causes you continued distress and negatively impacts your life, that’s where the f-word — forgiveness — may have a role to play, said psychologist Robert Enright, a pioneer in the field of forgiveness science and professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
And installing technologies to capture greenhouse gasses on fossil fuel power plants would further raise prices for a sector already struggling to compete with renewables, as Gregory Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies the public policy of technology change, told The Hill.
Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin, calls the way our society relies on families to independently support social reproduction a “D.I.Y. society.”
“Farmers would welcome warm and dry (conditions) to get out and have things planted in a timely fashion, but they need moisture in the soil for germination and early growth,” said Chris Kucharik, a plant and agrosystem sciences professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I think that there are a small group of people out there that just love it,” said Dr. Mark Johnson, a scientist at the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s almost like an ‘I dare you to eat it’ kind of thing, like hot peppers.”
“Nearly all protected areas are becoming much more accessible and much more vulnerable,” said Lisa Naughton, a researcher who studies protected areas at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Not just to local subsistence hunting and illicit timber extraction, but to things like artisanal mining and road penetration.”
Although the increase is steepest among high-income couples, it’s happening across the socioeconomic spectrum, Daniel Meyer, a social-work professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies child custody, told me.
During the holiday season, we’re often encouraged to make amends and forgive people, but what does it take to really forgive someone? And what happens to your brain and body when you do… or don’t? In this episode, Dr. Sanjay Gupta talks with forgiveness science pioneer, Robert Enright. He’s been studying and writing about forgiveness for decades at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and he says forgiveness is a choice, and that your ability to do it can be strengthened like a muscle. Enright walks us through a range of scenarios, from forgiving small things like being late for a meeting to larg
Several companies say they’re close to achieving nuclear fusion that could be used as clean energy. Cary Forest, a physics professor at UW-Madison, explains why fusion is so difficult to achieve and whether commercial fusion is realistic.
How does late adolescence impact you in your 80s? A decades-long study aims to answer that question after following thousands of students who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. We hear from Michal Engleman, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and current director of the study, on takeaways from one of the longest longitudinal studies in the country.
“There are many restrictions, where Wisconsin goes is back to where it was in June 2022, before the Dobbs decision,” said Amy Williamson, associate director of the Collaborative for Reproductive Equity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“All evidence indicates that the vaccine is very safe and effective,” said Jenna Nobles, a demographer and professor of sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison and study co-author. “In addition, it shows that avoiding the vaccine is what is potentially harmful for the pregnancy. This is an important piece of information for patients to have.”
People are generally staying in their homes longer, says Mark Eppli, director of the Graaskamp Center for Real Estate at the University of Wisconsin. In 1988, for example, “your average time in a house was 10 or 11 years.” Today, he says, it’s 20 years.
“That’s really long; inventory’s going to stay low,” Eppli says. “With high interest rates making housing all the less affordable…it’s going to keep people in their houses even more.”
“It’s a big deal to have that many logical qubits. A very remarkable result for any quantum computing platform,” says Mark Saffman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He says the new quantum computer greatly benefits from being made of atoms that are controlled by light because this kind of control is very efficient.
Barry Burden, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that “just about any process is going to result in more competitive maps,” but he suggested that Democrats still face challenges in their effort to gain more control of the state Legislature.
“Although it’s a 50-50 state and Democrats do win lots of statewide races, especially in the last few years, because of the way Democratic voters are concentrated in more urban communities around the state, it’s difficult, I think, even for a neutral process, to produce a map that’s going to result in a 50-50 Legislature,” he said.
The map is meant for horticulture, not agriculture, said Chris Kucharik, a plant and agrosystem sciences professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, because farmers in the Midwest have largely been planting the same crops for decades.
Since the last map was released in 2012, all of Wisconsin’s hardiness zones have shifted about half a zone warmer, said Laura Jull, associate professor in the plant and agrosystem sciences department at UW-Madison.
The eight-day December celebration is one that UW-Madison Classical Judaism Professor Jordan Rosenblum says always leaves a good taste in his mouth, blending history with modern culinary indulgence.
“There’s a nice connection. (The food) also happens to be delicious,” Rosenblum said.
Howard Schweber, a professor of American politics and political theory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that “Trump has what, in my experience of observing politics, seems like a nearly unique ability to maintain cognitive dissonance in ways that his supporters find untroubling.
