Category: UW Experts in the News

If traveling by vehicle, pack a winter survival kit, and in the event of getting stranded in the snow, stay with the vehicle. Laura Albert, an industrial engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies emergency response and preparedness, recommends packing such a kit with jumper cables, a small shovel, a flashlight, warm clothes, blankets, bottled water and nonperishable snacks, plus a bag of sand or cat litter to regain traction on snow or ice.

“You won’t see the like of this kind of a storm probably another time in the next 25 or so years,” Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells The Verge. “It’s really intense, and in some locations, the impacts will be extraordinary.”

Along the way, testimony provided by Richard Baris, the director of Big Data Poll, a group that conducts exit polling, and Dr. Kenneth Mayer, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, highlighted the use of polls and methodology, a key feature of elections that are sure to continue to be put under scrutiny in future cycles.

So how can we best navigate this icky viral chaos? I asked Elizabeth Stuart, a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health professor, and James Conway, a physician specializing in pediatric infectious disease at the University of Wisconsin. Here’s their advice, edited for length and clarity.

But, some psychologists dislike the term. Robert Enright, Ph.D., an expert in forgiveness science and professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says “toxic forgiveness” is a “misunderstanding of what forgiving another person actually is.”

Leah Horowitz, a cultural geographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, takes a different view. “It stops being persuasion and becomes manipulation when you’re offering someone something they don’t feel that they can refuse,” she said. This kind of process, Horowitz added, is shaped by massively unequal power dynamics between the corporations, local elites and villagers. In many cases, the latter are very poor and have not been empowered to make informed choices. Shukla, the Chhattisgarh-based activist, put it like this: “How can you even expect villagers to give a free and informed consent in such compromised situations?”

ECOLOGIST Jonathan Pauli used to spend a lot of time keeping track of animals over winter – often across cold, harsh landscapes that seemed inhospitable to life. It always surprised him that as soon as the weather got warmer in early spring, insects would pop up. “Snow fleas would emerge from underneath the snow,” Pauli recalls. Where, he wondered, had they been hiding? Eventually, he discovered some old scientific papers from the 1940s and 1960s. They revealed a secret world that Pauli, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been studying ever since: a hidden ecosystem under the snow.

It takes more than extreme heat and pressure. It also takes precision. The energy from the lasers must be applied precisely to counteract the outward force of the fusion fuel, according to Stephanie Diem, an engineering physics professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Speaking to Newsweek, Ion Meyn, an assistant law professor at the University of Wisconsin, said Greene’s comments would fall under “protected speech,” meaning she is unlikely to face any police action in response.

But that’s changing, said Greg Nemet at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And that change matters for the proliferation of renewables.

“China is the biggest driver of it, one, because China is so big, but also because they now have much more ambitious targets for renewables and, you know, China lives up to its targets,” he said.

The finding matches with climactic modeling suggesting that Ireland would be a hospitable environment for the yeast, said Chris Hittinger, a professor of genetics at University of Wisconsin — Madison, who was on the team that found the yeast in Patagonia and not involved in the current study. What’s less clear is why the yeast been so difficult to find in the wild beyond South America, where it grows plentifully in association with beech trees and is thought to be a native species.

“Although the DOJ is independent, such a referral is more than symbolic,” Ion Meyn, an assistant law professor at the University of Wisconsin, told Newsweek. “A referral from a congressional committee that has conducted its own investigation is particularly influential. The referral would place significant pressure on the DOJ to prosecute, and the DOJ will be expected to justify any decision to decline the referral.”