Category: UW Experts in the News

“It’s a purple state, as purple as you get. The Republican party has managed to lock in a very large and durable majority in the state legislature that is unmovable,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

You might be able to feel on your face if air is coming out of any gaps. “When you exhale, you can feel the jets of air coming out” if the mask doesn’t fit well, says Scott Sanders, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“People hunger for the narrative that the toad was used ancestrally by the Indigenous people of Sonora,” said Ana Maria Ortiz, a doctoral student who is carrying out a population study of the toad at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Human Ecology. “There’s an appeal to that narrative, and even I believed it at the onset.”

“We do have to try anything,” said Gregory Nemet, who studies how public policy can spur climate-friendly technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If we want to deal with the climate problem and make it safe, we have to get to net zero emissions by 2050, and that’s not that far away.”

Propaganda is a powerful tool. For years, Russian officials and state media have “pre-conditioned” Russian people to treat Ukraine with some suspicion, said Anton Shirikov, a disinformation researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

“Not a good sign when you see that sort of thing happen,” said University of Wisconsin meteorologist Matthew Lazzara.Lazzara monitors temperatures at East Antarctica’s Dome C-ii and logged 14 degrees (-10 degrees Celsius) Friday, where the normal is -45 degrees (-43 degrees Celsius): “That’s a temperature that you should see in January, not March. January is summer there. That’s dramatic.”

Toad venom proponents are divided between those who insist that “milking” straight from the source is the only way to smoke up, and those who advocate for a synthetic version of the venom. “Synthetic 5-MeO-DMT is just as good,” said Ana Maria Ortiz, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin studying the species. “People need to leave the toads alone.”

It’s important to understand what’s contributing to the high prices of oil in the first place. Gregory Nemet, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Energy Institute, pointed out that the cost of oil has steadily increased since last fall, when it was around $70 a barrel, to more than $130 last week before settling back at around $100 a barrel on Tuesday. That initial jump in the cost of crude was driven by the ongoing economic recovery, which boosted demand by consumers and businesses that had been dampened by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dan Phaneuf, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s unclear whether we would be better off operating on daylight saving time vs. standard time year-round.

It’s important to understand what’s contributing to the high prices of oil in the first place. Gregory Nemet, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Energy Institute, pointed out that the cost of oil has steadily increased since last fall, when it was around $70 a barrel, to more than $130 last week before settling back at around $100 a barrel on Tuesday. That initial jump in the cost of crude was driven by the ongoing economic recovery, which boosted demand by consumers and businesses that had been dampened by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yoshiko Herrera, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Russia expert, noted that the Ukrainian president has an important role to play in maintaining support among the public in Western nations.

There are other problems for Russia, such as finding replacement switches, routers and other hardware. At least one bank began stockpiling equipment before sanctions hit. The typical life cycle for such parts is two to three years, said Paul Barford, a computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin.

According to Jeffrey Sindelar, meat extension specialist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison: “The primary reason most bacon is not lower sodium is due to consumer preference. A majority of consumers expect bacon to have a certain amount of saltiness. So unless all bacon is lower in salt, some companies will lose market share if they reduce sodium (while others do not) since the majority still prefer ‘regular’ salt bacon. It’s all consumer driven.”

But what makes the mutation “weird and unique” is that it appears to set the stage for other variants, says Kyle Wolf, a biophysicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. SARS-CoV-2 infects cells faster when it has more RBDs flipped up—but that also makes its spikes more likely to fall apart before they find their target. A virus with DOUG appears to be more stable: When its RBDs up, they wedge together, holding the spike proteins together until it finds a host, Wolf explains. The mutation could be required for other variants, which opened the spike even further, but needed a way to stabilize the package, says Sophie Gobeil, a structural biologist at Duke University.

Elliot Tebbe, a University of Wisconsin assistant professor with a Ph.D. in counseling psychology and a trans man, said he and other trans people feel “a sense of exhaustion (from feeling) constantly under attack by different legislators and all these different policy initiatives.”

“It’s been shown that infected butterflies have lower flight ability and suffer from all of these fitness ramifications, but this is the first time it’s really been shown on a population level that a really important feature of monarch biology is affected by the rate of infection,” says Karen Oberhauser, director of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum.

Ellen Zweibel, professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Wisconsin, explained why the findings could rule out the starburst model. She said the typical duration of a nuclear starburst, and therefore the length of time into which a starburst would inject the energy that forms the bubbles, is about 10 million years.

But Thomas O’Guinn, a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Business who specializes in political branding, said…(behind paywall.)