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Category: UW Experts in the News

The Battle Over Refrigerating Butter: ‘Enough Is Enough’

Wall Street Journal

“This is a quality issue, not a safety issue,” said Gina Mode, a butter researcher at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Dairy Research. Butter will eventually go rancid but that won’t make people sick, she said. Ms. Mode in an informal survey of her colleagues found that 24 of 31 keep butter out, a telling data point among experts.

Gene-edited cells move science closer to repairing damaged hearts

The Washington Post

One of the genes edited out in MEDUSA cells ― SLC8A1 ― “can impact the ability of heart cells to contract,” said Timothy Kamp, director of the Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Still, he added, “I think the concept of editing these genes is powerful. Perhaps a simpler combination [of edits] may work.”

Bill would let advanced practice nurses work independently in Wisconsin

Wisconsin State Journal

As a clinical professor at the UW-Madison School of Nursing, (Gina) Bryan said she also sees many parts of the state struggle to attract psychiatric advanced practice nurse graduates, who go instead to Minnesota or Iowa where they can work independently. “Why would our students stay here and practice?” she said.

Bunmi Kumapayi, a UW Health nurse practitioner who has treated urologic conditions for more than 20 years, said the doctor she collaborates with allows her to work very independently. But for many newer advanced practice nurses around the state, that is not the case, she said.

‘Free college’ programs are surging – but do they help neediest students?

The Guardian

What low-income students really need is help with other expenses, such as housing, books and transportation – things free college programs don’t often cover. Those essentials account for about 80% of the cost of attending community college, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Free college often is “a false promise,” Del Pilar said. “I don’t think equity is at the heart of these programs, because if it was, they would be designed a bit differently than what we see.”

Long COVID: What We Know Now

CNET

Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at the University of Wisconsin, told CNET in 2021, when scientists were first getting a grip on long COVID, that the key to discerning the condition is to pay attention to new symptoms that develop or ones that never go away, starting about 30 days post-infection. This separates long COVID from the initial viral infection itself.

Vaccine mandate extended for Madison School District staff

Wisconsin State Journal

Dr. Greg DeMuri, a pediatric infectious disease doctor at UW Health, also spoke in favor of eliminating the mandate, saying that “almost the entire population has some form of immunity to COVID, whether it’s the vaccine or natural infection.” The number of hospitalizations due to COVID-19 are now “very, very low,” he said, adding that complications are “very rare.”

Biden goes to war with McCarthy over the debt ceiling

Washington Examiner

The White House unleashed on House Republicans this week after Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced his conditions for raising the debt ceiling. But as he tries to coalesce his conference, a very narrow majority, around his proposal before putting it to a vote on the House floor next week, the country’s borrowing authority “is not of much concern to the public, at this point,” according to Director Barry Burden of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center.

8 Books Experts Would Recommend About Meditation

The New York Times

“Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain and Body” by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson‌. This 2017 title was written by Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and science journalist, and Richard Davidson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds.

Leave your grass long to help bees, butterflies

The Washington Post

“If you have a traditional lawn, letting the grass grow to a foot tall or whatever it would be at the end of May is no value whatsoever,” says Susan Carpenter, native plant garden curator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. Grass that long could be harmful to lawn health and become a mowing nightmare.

Scientists Are Fighting To Save Ancient Human History From a Rising Threat

John Hawks

Our story begins in Africa, where our species and its close relatives evolved; even the Flores hominins are descended from a species called Homo erectus that arose in Africa before spreading across most of the world. Most of the hominin sites in southern Africa tend to be in caves, like the Rising Star Cave System, where University of Wisconsin anthropologist John Hawks and University of Witwatersrand anthropologist Lee Berger have studied the remains of a species called Homo naledi, first discovered in 2013.

Opinion | Could Peer Influence Be a Cause of the Global Baby Bust?

New York Times

I read several papers on peer effects on fertility with Angrist’s caveats in mind. One, by Jason Fletcher and Olga Yakusheva, looked at American teenagers and found that a 10 percentage point increase in pregnancies of classmates is associated with a 2 to 5 percentage point greater likelihood of a teenager herself becoming pregnant. Disentangling causality is “a really hard problem,” Fletcher, an economist at the University of Wisconsin’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, told me.

Cheeses that are totally fine to throw in the freezer

Mediafeed

To find out which cheeses freeze well, I spoke with Luis A. Jiménez-Maroto, assistant coordinator of cheese and dairy applications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research. It turns out that the answer isn’t quite that simple. “A hundred years of research have been put into freezing cheese, and it really is very granular,” he said. “It depends on the cheese that you’re talking about and what is important about it.”

Wisconsin kids could see a curfew for social media use under proposed legislation

Wisconsin Public Radio

It’s also not clear that social media use contributes to young people’s emotional struggles, said Heather Kerkorian, who researches the effects of media on children’s development and family interactions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“If we look at individual kids, some kids might benefit a lot from social media, some might be harmed by social media and most of them are not affected much,” Kerkorian said.

Wisconsin businesses want more workers, but barriers prevent many from joining the labor force

Wisconsin Public Radio

Laura Dresser, associate director of the COWS economic think tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said another approach could be addressing the issues that prevent people from joining the workforce, like child care, transportation and mental health.

“The central question is: Do we support workers and … (build a) system that supports their engagement in the labor market, and, therefore, economic development in our communities? Or do we try and pretend that there’s just a lot of lazy people?” Dresser asked.

National report finds sharp decline in abortions in the U.S. since Dobbs decision

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Jenny Higgins, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Collaborative for Reproductive Equity and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, said the biggest takeaway from the report was that these declines were not balanced out by increases in the number of abortions happening in states where abortion access is less restricted.

“One of the things that people had expected after Dobbs was that states like California would get an influx of people … states with relatively few restrictions,” Higgins said. “What the #WeCount report shows is that we haven’t seen the flooding into those states.”

Why we celebrate: Essayists offer reasons for hope from Wisconsin, birthplace of Earth Day

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Greg Nemet continues the tradition of environmental scholarship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison through the La Follette School of Public Affairs, studying energy, climate change and public policy. He says despite a gloomy international report, the capacity to tackle problems has never been greater:

“If there were ever a time to have optimism about our collective capacity and will to address climate change, this is it.  This idea was threaded through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which emphasized that we can still effect transformational change that could stave off the worst possible outcomes and lead to a sustainable, equitable world. Globally, we’ve made considerable progress in a broad range of technologies that are making the transition to a low-carbon economy more affordable and feasible than ever.”

How to ‘buy nothing’ and join Madison’s sharing economy

The Capital Times

Nancy Wong, a consumer psychologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sees the irony in trying to make money with an app for free stuff.

“As a marketer, I just find that evolution very interesting. It was borne out of a desire to escape the marketplace, but then they find themselves coming back to the marketplace,” she said. “It’s almost a victim of its own popularity.”

How To Prevent Unconscious Bias In The Workplace

Forbes

And in one study of university students by University of Wisconsin researcher Patricia Devine, unconscious bias training attendees were able to notice and distinguish bias in others more than their colleagues who had not taken the training after two weeks, and they were still able to do so two years after training. This particular training included awareness training, testing, and training on strategies to identify and overcome bias when they recognize it.

For Centuries, Boys Used To ‘Dress Like A Girl.’ Here’s When Everything Changed.

HuffPost Life

Jessica McCrory Calarco, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, weighed in on the little-known history, too. “As I teach my students, kids’ clothing only became gendered when capitalists realized they could double their money by selling separate clothes for girls and boys,” she tweeted. “Before that, kids wore gender-neutral dresses, which better accommodated growth spurts and toilet training.”

Why is there always a blood shortage?

Vox

With its direct connection to the heart, its vivid hue (from wine-dark to cherry bright and cobalt blue), and its spilling in both birth and death, blood has historically served as a metaphor for humanity, as Susan Lederer, a professor of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues in her 2008 book, Flesh and Blood. “Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1880s. “All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood,” wrote Rainer Maria Rilke in 1921. “Blood is memory without language,” added Joyce Carol Oates, more recently.

‘Big sponge’: new CO2 tech taps oceans to tackle global warming

AFP

Keeping global warming under control will require the removal of between 450 billion and 1.1 trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2100, according to the first global report dedicated to the topic, released in January. That would require the CDR sector “to grow at a rate of about 30 percent per year over the next 30 years, much like what happened with wind and solar,” said one of its authors, Gregory Nemet.

Look! Webb Recaptures a Famous Hubble Image in Incredible New Detail

Inverse

“Our whole program was ~24 hours, which isn’t that much time in the grand scheme of how much time other observatories have looked at it,” said Michael Maseda, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in a statement. “But, even in this relatively short amount of time, we’re starting to put together a new picture of how galaxies are growing at this really interesting point in the history of the Universe.”

Froedtert, ThedaCare plan to merge, hope to launch combined health system by end of 2023

Wisconsin Public Radio

In December, University of Wisconsin-Madison Economist Alan Sorensen told Wisconsin Public Radio that mergers may give hospitals more leverage in negotiations with insurance companies.

“Those negotiations are enormously important for the bottom lines of these companies,” Sorensen said at the time. “A lot of times what’s driving the mergers is that (hospital systems) feel like if they’re bigger, they’ll do better in those negotiations, they’ll have more bargaining power, they’ll be more indispensable to the insurance company.”

Do schools need to know when your last period was? Here’s what’s on student athlete forms and who sees it.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The forms are meant to stay in the provider’s office, as with other medical evaluation forms a patient might fill out during an exam, said David Bernhardt, a UW Health Kids general pediatrician, sports medicine physician at UW Health and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

“The form is not designed to go back to the school, so the history and the physical exam form are meant as a framework to guide the provider in getting information in an efficient way,” he said.

‘We’re testing the waters’: Researchers sample bears, deer for COVID to see how the virus spreads

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“It’s really dynamic. We can expect that there will be mutations that pop up and a lot of them won’t be very successful at being transmitted and maintained in populations of animals,” Thomas Yuill, a professor emeritus of pathobiological science, forest and wildlife biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Why Wisconsin Has Republicans Worried

The Atlantic

“Extreme” is no overstatement. Robert Yablon, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a faculty co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative, told me by email that although Democrats have won more of Wisconsin’s statewide elections in recent years than their Republican opponents have, “under the maps that the Republican-controlled legislature drew in 2011, Republicans maintained an iron grip on the legislature throughout the last decade—even in years when Democratic candidates won more votes statewide.”

‘A nightmare’: Texas parents say their baby was taken by CPS after using midwifery care for jaundice

Yahoo News

Jaundice occurs when blood contains an excess amount of bilirubin. “For most babies, this is not a big deal, it clears out,” Tiffany Green, an associate professor in the obstetrics and gynecology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Yahoo News. “But for a certain small subset of babies, high levels of bilirubin can lead to brain damage, including cerebral palsy and other illnesses.”

NATO Ally Bordering Russia to Meet With Top U.S. Weapons Makers

Newsweek

“I think it is important for Poland to keep up its credentials as an indispensable ally of the United States in Europe—especially in light of the pre-war frictions that marred Poland’s relationship with European Union bodies,” Mikhail Troitskiy, professor of practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek via email. “Warsaw is likely to be considering various scenarios of continuation of the war in Ukraine and various designs for post-war Europe.

Participating in clinical trials

Wisconsin Public Radio

Thousands of clinical trials underway in Wisconsin require thousands of volunteers – people whose ailments, desire for compensation or altruism motivate them to take part in medical research. We talk with Betsy Nugent, the director of clinical research for the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine.

Abortion Ruling Could Undermine the F.D.A.’s Drug-Approval Authority

The New York Times

R. Alta Charo, a professor emerita of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin and an author of a brief by drug-policy scholars in support of the F.D.A., said, “The biggest threat that a decision like this brings is the threat of creating chaos.” The ruling, she added, could empower a range of groups to begin “looking over the shoulder of the F.D.A., re-evaluating their risk-benefit analyses.”

As the UW System Raises Tuition for the First Time in a Decade–Some Students Worry They Won’t Be Able to Afford It

Up North News

The UW System Board of Regents voted last week to raise tuition prices by an average of 4.9% (or $404) across all 13 universities and 26 campuses in Wisconsin. Room and board rates will increase too, by an average of 3.5%, resulting in an overall 4.2% (or $706) increase for all in-state students.

Declines in Loan Values Are Widespread Among Banks

WSJ

“Fair values of loans and securities are not qualitatively different,” said Tom Linsmeier, an accounting professor at the University of Wisconsin and former member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board. “They measure the same amount: the price at which the asset can be sold in an orderly transaction in the market today.”

Video games as educational tools

Wisconsin Public Radio

The Field Day Lab in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research is creating online video games to be used as learning tools for students. We talk to Sarah Gagnon, creative director for the Field Day Lab in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the UW–Madison School of Education, about their latest games and how they work.

Voters pass referendums on changes to bail policies, Gov. Evers makes it official

TMJ4

Quoted: Both referendums to change the state’s bail policies passed with nearly 70% in favor. Howard Schweber, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the changes take effect right away.

“There will need to be a drafting of a formal version of the rules we put in the legislative record, but there’s no reason not to take much time at all,” Schweber said.