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Category: UW Experts in the News

Wisconsin sees sharp increase in Type 2 diabetes among children, according to UW Health Kids data

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Wisconsin doctors are seeing a steady increase in the number of children diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes — a disease that primarily affects adults — which may be linked to COVID-19.

Data released last week by UW Health Kids shows a nearly 200 percent increase in the number of cases of Type 2 diabetes over the past four years.

While this is a trend medical experts have noticed for years, Dr. Elizabeth Mann, a pediatric endocrinologist and director of the Type 2 Diabetes Program at UW Health Kids, said it’s taken a worrisome turn recently.

More than Just Rocks: A Tour of the University of Wisconsin Museum of Geology

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WORT FM

When people think about geology, most people will think of well… rocks. But the geology museum on the UW-Madison campus shows that geology is much more than rocks, it’s rocks from space, bones, and fossilized dino-droppings.
Last month, WORT reporter Andie Barrow went to the Museum of Geology to learn what makes the museum special.

Colleges work to end unpaid internships

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Inside Higher Ed

“I’ve been seeing a lot of interest outside of career center offices and internship coordinators to make sure that most internships, if not all of them, are paid,” said Matthew Hora, co-director of the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “I think it’s been a long-standing concern.”

Doctors and volunteers pack medical supplies to send to Ukraine

Posted on
CBS 58

Doctors and volunteers in Wisconsin spent Saturday packing and sorting medical supply donations. The shipments will go to Ukraine to aid military and community hospitals during the ongoing war with Russia.

Dr. Nataliya Uboha is an oncologist at UW Carbone Cancer Center. She is involved in the efforts to get resources to Ukraine and she says the effort is personal. Dr. Uboha up in Lviv, Ukraine has been living in the U.S. for more than 25 years. She came here by herself so the majority of her family has been in Ukraine all these years.

“When the war started, we really worked hard on getting my family over here,” she said. Keeping her family safe is top of mind but she also wants to do her part to get resources to her home country, including getting involved in a medical drive for Ukraine.

Physicist loses scientific honor and membership in ethics violation

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The Washington Post

Erika Marín-Spiotta, a University of Wisconsin geography professor who holds “bystander training” workshops — which teach people ways to intervene when they see harassment or bullying — stressed the importance of disclosing incidents of misconduct to the broader community.

It “is important so that the community is aware that these behaviors are happening, they are unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” she said.

Despite minimal changes, Wisconsin’s new congressional maps create second competitive seat

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Wisconsin State Journal

Congressional Republicans have filed a motion for reconsideration with the state’s high court on the congressional boundaries, but UW-Madison Law School associate professor Robert Yablon said it’s highly likely the governor’s maps will stand for the Nov. 8 election. “I just don’t expect that at this really late stage, as we’re approaching the April 15 date for nomination petitions to start circulating, that (the court) is going to change course now,” Yablon said.

What more at-home COVID-19 tests mean for Wisconsin’s pandemic surveillance

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PBS Wisconsin

Noted: With rapid at-home tests becoming much more widely available since late 2021, an unknown but potentially large number of positive test results are going unreported. While this dynamic may pose a challenge to public health officials tracking COVID-19, the challenge is not insurmountable. That’s according to Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The fact that we have home-based testing is a good thing,” Sethi said. “While it may compromise our ability to have a good record of cases that are in the community, we don’t necessarily want to abandon this very important way that people can test and take action, so we have to find a workaround.”

The urgent necessity for paid parental leave

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APA

“Even if it goes well, pregnancy and birth is a really serious event. It can be an assault on your body, and you need time to recover,” said Tiffany Green, PhD, an economist and an assistant professor of population health sciences and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Climate report: Despite dire warnings, UW-Madison prof optimistic

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Wisconsin State Journal

After three years of work on a report warning that time is running out to head off a climate disaster, Greg Nemet is optimistic about the planet’s chances.Nemet, a professor at UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, was one of the lead authors of a report on ways to slow climate change released Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Newscast – Goodbye Dot Cotton

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BBC

In its latest report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we need to cut emissions immediately and use technology to suck CO2 from the atmosphere. One of the authors, Gregory Nemet, tells Lewis Goodall that there’s reason to be optimistic.

Report ties COVID-19 deaths to poverty, systemic policy failures

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Wisconsin Examiner

Quoted: The report’s findings confirm other research that has shown the link between poverty and COVID-19, says Tiffany Green, a University of Wisconsin economist who researches the impact of race and economics on health.

“This is not about individual behavior,” Green said in an interview. “It’s about what kinds of social conditions place people at risk.”

Early in the Wisconsin pandemic, outbreaks occurred in the meatpacking industry in Brown County. “And because of the way our occupational system is structured, they were disproportionately likely to be Hispanic immigrants,” Green says. “And they were working under conditions that were not properly regulated, that were not safe, when it comes to trying to prevent COVID.”

UW-Madison working to bring bird flu vaccine to market amid outbreaks

Posted on
CBS 58

If you’ve been paying more for eggs recently, you have the bird flu to thank, according to egg producers.

UW-Madison scientists say they are fighting back.

Across the nation, tens of thousands of birds have had to be put down in recent weeks as the bird flu ravages flocks, and farmers say while it’s already making eggs expensive, it won’t stop there.

UW-Madison scientists say this is an issue that comes and goes, which is why they’re looking to bring a vaccine for the birds to market.

“Knock on wood, we’ve been doing okay in Wisconsin. We’ve had two outbreaks here in Wisconsin,” said UW-Madison Poultry Specialist Ron Kean.

From TYME machine to ope!, here’s why many Wisconsinites say these words and more

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: While Tom Purnell — a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of English language and linguistics — was living in Pennsylvania in the mid-1980s, he said the cash dispensing machines in that area were called MAC (money access centers).

“ATM (automated teller machine) is the generic term that is being used more widely now, overtaking the local variants,” he said in an email.

“A lot of changes and variations in pronunciation reflect things that not just happen in our mouths, but also what happens in our ears,” said Joe Salmons, a longtime professor of language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In many languages, when there’s an “l” at the end of a syllable, it will mess with how people hear a preceding vowel, he explained, especially when the “l” is in the same syllable.

A similar example of this is pillow v. “pellow,” he noted.

The “melk” pronunciation is also heard in other parts of the Midwest, he said. And while it’s not exclusive to the state, it appears to be most common in eastern Wisconsin.

Russia denies atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine, saying images of apparent war crimes are fabricated

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The Washington Post

That type of response is common these days among Russians, said Anton Shirikov, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies Russian state propaganda. The Kremlin’s misinformation “might not work in the sense that people believe everything, but people who are on the side of the government think that some of it must be true,” he said. Or they think, “We, the Russian army, cannot be that bad, so the other side must be bad.”

Madison’s transportation businesses try to resist energy market fluctuations during war, COVID

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Wisconsin State Journal

And companies that use transportation have to pass those increases on to someone, said Moses Altesch, a lecturer for the Marketing Department inside UW-Madison’s School of Business. Altesch is also the president of Madison-based business consulting firm Moses Altesch Consulting. “Trucks that move product from manufacturing plants to retailers and wholesalers … they are incurring extra costs,” said Altesch, who has written extensively about current affairs in the energy market. “If the manufacturer can’t ship product because the transportation company needs to get paid more money … the store isn’t going to sell the product. That increases prices across the board for a variety of products.

Tom Still: Road to widespread electric vehicle use is long, but bumps can be smoothed

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Wisconsin State Journal

“So, how are we going to decide where to put these charging stations? The way I think about it and the way we’re looking at it, at least from a research perspective, is related to something (we call) an origins destination study,” said David Noyce, a professor in the UW-Madison College of Engineering who specializes in transportation planning and the future of on-the-road vehicles.

Electric vehicle experts encourage Wisconsin lawmakers, officials to prepare for expanding charging infrastructure

Posted on
Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Panelist David Noyce, who is the executive associate dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Engineering, said consumer worries about not being able to recharge an electric vehicle — what the industry calls range anxiety — is still one of the biggest barriers to electric vehicle adoption.

Noyce said vehicle makers are working to improve batteries as a remedy to this problem. But he said making charging stations more available is the other half of the solution.

“That’s where the emphasis is going on as we speak,” he said during the panel. “The federal government has jumped into the fray here … because of the market demand, but as well as climate goals, decarbonization, reduction in the use of fossil fuels and so forth.”

The human genome is finally complete

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The Daily Beast

This is an impressive tour de force and a landmark accomplishment,” Lloyd Smith, a biochemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved with the T2T project, told The Daily Beast. “It takes tremendous commitment, perseverance, and deep technical knowledge to decipher these most difficult to access regions of the genome.”

Failure to understand and share feelings with each other runs counter to our nature. So why are we in a severe empathy crisis?

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Noted: In a 2011 study, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison compared the impact of enhanced, high-empathy medical care with what they called “standard care.” When patients with colds rated their care “perfect in empathy” they had shorter and less serious illness than peers who rated their care less than perfect, an indication that even the perception of empathy makes a difference.

Moreover, the body’s own chemistry reflected the difference in care. Patients who perceived their care to be high in empathy showed higher levels of neutrophils ― a type of white blood cell that fights infections ― than those given standard care.

The difference between the standard and the more empathetic care affected the doctors, too.

“When they pulled the card to provide standard care, they felt terrible. When they pulled the enhanced care card, they felt great,” said David Rakel, lead author of the study and chairman of the department of family medicine and community health at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. The study was published in the journal Patient Education and Counseling.

Attorney who backs election decertification enters Attorney General race to investigate doctors who won’t prescribe ivermectin

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Patrick Remington, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Preventive Medicine Residency Program, said doctors who do not prescribe ivermectin to COVID-19 patients are upholding the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm to patients by making decisions according to the consensus of available credible medical research.

“We strive to get it right. We do the best job we can to do no harm and this is an example that would be unthinkable to me to ask a physician to prescribe a medicine that is at best, ineffective and at worst, harmful,” Remington said. “There are valid debates about the best ways to treat serious illnesses and science is iterative, that as we go along we learn by experimentation, we learn by carefully conducted research.”

Mysterious wave of COVID toes still has scientists stumped

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National Geographic

Lisa Arkin saw more swollen, discolored toes during the early months of the pandemic than she had during her entire career. Arkin, a pediatric dermatologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, treated just a couple of patients with temporary skin lesions called pernio, or chilblains, each year. But in April 2020, when COVID-19 cases first surged, she saw 30 chilblain patients.

Into the wild: Animals the latest frontier in COVID fight

Posted on
Associated Press

Quoted: To infect any living thing, the virus must get into its cells, which isn’t always easy. Virology expert David O’Connor likens the process to opening a “lock” with the virus’ spike protein “key.” “Different species have different-looking locks, and some of those locks are not going to be pickable by the key,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist said.

JetBlue starts Milwaukee flights as Wisconsin airports recover from COVID-19

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Laura Albert is a professor of industrial and systems engineering with University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said business travel in particular is slower to return to pre-pandemic levels.

“We found ways to do things remotely that are quite effective,” Albert said. “There’s not a substitute for everything, but some of that, I think, will stick around, and that might affect where routes are selected, because a lot of routes follow where business travel is needed.”

Market volatility caused by war in Ukraine has Wisconsin farmers, agriculture companies on edge

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Wisconsin producers primarily grow winter wheat, which is planted in the fall and harvested in the summer, making it unlikely farmers will plant more this spring in response to potential shortages or to capitalize on higher prices, Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.

But farmers in the state will likely spend more time managing the wheat fields they do have planted this spring, he said.

“More fertilizer, maybe more concerned about fungicide applications if you’re looking at a problem with disease. That’s what we might see, is farmers more willing to spend money on managing the planted crop for winter wheat,” he said.

How a UW-Madison professor’s algorithm helps find The New Yorker’s cartoon caption

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Wisconsin Public Radio

The New Yorker relies on an algorithm from Robert Nowak, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Nowak said on WPR’s “The Morning Show” that the algorithm collects the ratings and over time pushes more successful captions to the top of a sorted list. It’s similar to how a search engine such as Google tracks how many times a website is chosen after a given search.’

So roughly speaking, the funnier the caption, the more ratings it receives, providing a more statistically accurate estimate of just how funny it is,” he said.

UW researcher wants to know: What does your dog like to watch on TV?

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Wisconsin Public Radio

A new project from a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison aims to answer the question: What do dogs like to watch on television?

She’s asking dog owners to contribute to her research by sharing their own pups’ preferences.

The survey is part of a larger and more ambitious research project by Freya Mowat, a veterinary ophthalmologist and professor at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, to learn more about how canine vision degrades over time and what factors contribute to it. That research could have implications for the treatment of human eyesight, as well.

Coming together: Dairy farmers debate plans for overseeing US milk supply

Posted on
Wisconsin Public Radio

Noted: Instead of limiting milk production, the plan focuses on reducing the negative impacts of uncontrolled expansion and sending stronger market signals to farms about whether they should produce more milk. The group worked with researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create models for what a mandatory management program could look like and how it would affect farmers’ and consumers’ prices.

Black households never recovered from the Great Recession, a UW-Madison report on racial wealth gaps suggests

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A new report is highlighting how much the Great Recession widened racial wealth gaps, particularly on the basis of income and homeownership.

“Racial Disparities in Household Wealth Following the Great Recession,” authored by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Fenaba R. Addo and Duke University Professor William A. Darity Jr., found that Black and Latino households continue to lag behind white households in wealth and income statistics.

The report was published this month through the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty and used Survey on Consumer Finances data to come to its conclusions.

Was Everyone Really Just Doing Drugs In Regency England Like They Are In ‘Bridgerton’?

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Women's Health

Today, there are strict rules and laws that separate recreational and medical drug use. There are also plenty of drugs that are legal, and others that are illegal. But in Regency England, these boundaries didn’t exist. “The legal structures just weren’t in place,” says Lucas Richert, PhD, a historian of drugs and medicines at the University of Wisconsin—Madison School of Pharmacy.

Vladimir Putin’s Empire of Delusions

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The New Republic

Nor did things change when the Bolsheviks surged to power a century ago. As scholar Francine Hirsch notes in her seminal work on the creation of Soviet republics, the Bolsheviks swiftly realized they’d be better off maintaining the tsarist-era empire, even if in “many regions … the Bolsheviks had no indigenous support whatsoever.”

Redistricting back in Wisconsin Supreme Court’s hands following SCOTUS reversal

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Essentially, the U.S. Supreme Court was saying that the Wisconsin Supreme Court didn’t properly show its work,” said Professor Robert Yablon, a redistricting expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School.

But Yablon said the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling did not close the door on the governor’s plan if he can demonstrate to the Wisconsin Supreme Court that the additional majority-Black district was necessary.

“The U.S. Supreme Court said that the Wisconsin Supreme Court was free to consider additional evidence about the governor’s map,” Yablon said. “And I expect that they will try to more fully explain why the lines in the Milwaukee area should be drawn the way that they drew them.”