Coyotes have become practically ubiquitous across the lower 48 United States, and they’re increasingly turning up in cities. The draws are abundant food and green space in urban areas.
-David Drake, Bret Shaw, Mary Magnuson
Lizzo’s lyric change in June primed people to recognize the language in Beyoncé’s album, said Sami Schalk, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the upcoming book “Black Disability Politics.”“The important thing is that it was brought up again and slowly over time, we will hopefully see more people thinking differently about this word,” Dr. Schalk said.
“It’s literally the most popular flavor and fragrance in the world, and it’s a multimillion-dollar industry,” University of Wisconsin botany professor and vanilla expert Ken Cameron said recently to On Wisconsin, the UW-Madison alumni magazine.
UW Health’s chief quality officer Dr. Jeff Pothof joins Live at Four to talk about the latest COVID-19 headlines.
Quoted: “Younger generations keep seeing this message of doom and gloom and the end of the world in 12 years, 15 years and so on,” Dominique Brossard, professor and chair in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said. “We know from research in the psychology of risk that if you keep on talking about doom, what you end up doing is fueling a feeling of helplessness, anxiety.”
Over the past few weeks, the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) in West Bend has opened two new exhibitions by indigenous artists to the public.
On July 23, the museum opened Ho-Chunk photographer Tom Jones’s first major retrospective, which features 120 photos from sixteen bodies of work over 25 years.
“There’s something that a friend of mine said once,” says Jones, a professor of photography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “She came to a show, and she’s like, ‘Your work is so beautiful, but then when you really look at it and get up on it, it slaps you in the face.’”
Quoted: “It’s usually not just contact in passing, but really close skin-to-skin contact, that’s the major risk to spread,” said Dr. Dan Shirley, medical director of infection prevention at UW Health.
“Had this unfolded on this kind of timeline in 2020, it really could have created problems, because there would have been questions about whether the state could have actually named a slate of electors,” Robert Yablon, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, told the Times. “You could imagine there being disputed slates of electors that were sent to Congress, and it could have been a big mess.”
With the help of Ho and Chaney – as well as Sami Schalk, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and my own experience as a plus-size international travel writer – we’ve compiled a series of tips that can help anyone, regardless of their size, feel a little more comfortable and confident about their next flight.
“I choose window seats so I can lean against the wall more,” said Schalk.
The news came as no surprise to Karen Oberhauser, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. A globally recognized expert on monarch butterflies, Oberhauser has been studying the species for nearly 40 years.
Saying “it would be surprising” if Wisconsin’s fake electors weren’t subpoenaed while other states’ fake electors were, UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said, “Government officials issuing these subpoenas would treat all of the states equivalently, especially because it was a shared network of conspirators who were communicating across state lines.”
Silicon Valley is the perfect example of the international hiring phenomenon. Researcher Sarah Edwards from the University of Wisconsin-Madison explains that “the expansion of Silicon Valley into increasingly intimate and global spaces” will result in the decentralization of the Valley as the leading startup city. Other cities like Miami are thriving in the industry thanks to digital nomads and increased job mobility (as was shown during the Great Resignation.)
Quoted: “Overall, Americans are vaccinating their children. Overall, we have really good vaccination rates. And then there’s minority pockets of communities where they do it less, for different reasons,” said Dr. Dominique Brossard, a professor at UW-Madison who chairs the Department of Life Sciences Communication. Brossard’s area of expertise is in risk communication.
Research from the American Chemical Society concluded that the oxalate in soy and foods made from soy might increase the chances of developing kidney stones (via Science Daily). This is because oxalate and calcium are two key components of a type of kidney stone. However, registered dietician Dr. Kristina Penniston told the University of Wisconsin that oxalate-rich foods tend to contain other components that could inhibit kidney stones from forming. Additionally, not getting enough calcium (which is added to some soy milks) can lead to your body absorbing too much oxalate, which can result in calcium oxalate stones.
“In Chicago and New York, in areas where there’s hundreds of cases, there are vaccine programs that are starting to get launched. And Wisconsin is prepared to do that, but there’s some details to work out when there’s sort of an opportunity to do that. Where there’s a lot of cases, we can expect a vaccine program at some point,” Ajay Sethi, a population health sciences professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison said.
Ken Mayer, a UW-Madison political science professor and chair of the committee, said the group decided early on that its focus would be on the physical safety of the elections process, noting that much past attention to election security has been on cybersecurity and information technology.
Talk to your family and friends as well as other members of your community to find out whether they’ve had Covid recently or know anybody who has or recently had Covid, Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said. Because you’re more likely to interact with people in your network, you may get a better sense of incidence in your community and what your own risk of getting sick may be.
Noted: A University of Wisconsin economics professor estimated an annual loss of more than 6,000 jobs and roughly $5 billion in lost economic output due to reduced production or closure of refineries in the Upper Midwest. Experts for the tribe dispute those findings.
Quoted: “When we get that high community level CDC indicator, that’s when community-wide masking is really necessary,” said Ajay Sethi, a University of Wisconsin epidemiologist. Even at lower community levels of COVID-19, “people who are especially vulnerable to severe disease should always be wearing their mask indoors,” he added.
For the first time, researchers have learned two cancer drivers are linked together, and some top University of Wisconsin scientists are taking the credit for the incredible discovery.
“It’s an emergent field,” lead author Dr. Mo Chen said as she explored how the two most mutated cancers markers actually work together.
“Science teaches you that you have to be open to things that are unexpected,” UW Health’s Dr. Vince Cryns said of what they found underneath the microscope.
Quoted: “As we talk about inflation, I think sometimes we hear about the price of houses or the price of big things, but little stuff that really hurts low-income families,” said J. Michael Collins, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs who studies consumer decision making. “If you think about an extra $2.50 for a gallon of gas or an extra dollar for a gallon of milk, those things just start to add up because you buy them so frequently.”
The Waukesha signage directive came as conservative politicians, pundits and constituents continue to demonize public schools and their staff, accusing those who support LGBTQ students of “grooming” them in a rallying cry to the polls in a pivotal midterm election.
OBERHAUSER: If you see it, you report it. So in the United States, you can report it to a program called Journey North, which is something that we run out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. And the final thing that people can do now that you’ve heard this interview, you are an expert on monarchs, so you can spread the word.
RASCOE: That’s Karen Oberhauser. She directs the arboretum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is the founder and director of the Monarch Lava Monitoring Project. Thank you so much for talking with us.
Quoted: Jennifer Van Os researches animal welfare on dairy farms for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said cow-calf separation is standard for dairy farms across the U.S. and the world. She said the practice started as a way to prevent newborn calves from contracting diseases from other cows in a herd.
“Newborn dairy cows are vulnerable to disease because their immune system is still developing,” Van Os said. “Their immune system develops in a way that’s a little bit different from that of humans. So it came from good intentions, and it was done for the sake of the animal.”
While it may be clear that doom-scrolling may have a negative effect on your mental health, a new report out of UW Madison shows that it may not just be negative news, but any negative news in excess.
Earlier today, WORT Producer Nate Wegehaupt spoke with Markus Brauer, a psychology professor at UW Madison, about the report.
Noted: Entomologist PJ Liesch is director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab, aka @WiBugGuy on Twitter. He’s been studying the not-so-little buggers for nearly 15 years and graciously agreed to share his insights, offer some tips and bust a few myths.
Quoted: “The first place you should look is the human resources department of the prior employer,” says Anita Mukherjee, an assistant professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin—Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business. “There, they should have all of the information as to the whereabouts of the 401(k) account you had with them.”
Noted: In the summer, peak energy demand is pretty well matched with peak solar generation, as University of Wisconsin at Madison professor Gregory Nemet notes. People crank up the AC most when it’s sunny out.
Written by Andrea Dutton, an international expert on climate change and sea level rise who is a MacArthur Fellow and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Eight years ago, as John Jartz and his wife drove home to Barrington Hills, Ill., after their first visit with kidney transplant specialists at UW Health, he suddenly became overwhelmed with emotion.
“We found our place,” Jartz told his wife. “It just hit me.”
Even though Michigan’s Abbott Nutrition, the nation’s largest manufacturer of baby formula products, is slowly coming back online after closing down a few times over contamination concerns and a torrential June thunderstorm, it could still be a few months before shelves are fully stocked, said Peter Lukszys, lecturer for the Department of Operations and Information Management at the UW-Madison Grainger Center for Supply Chain Management.
“My research is [focused on] how to improve access, how to make sure that communities benefit from the research, and how to make life a little easier, at least on the healthcare side,” says Dr. Maria Mora Pinzón, a preventive medicine physician and scientist at the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who focuses her research on improving access to Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia (ADRD) services within the Latinx community.
UW-Madison political scientist David Canon and Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari told the Cap Times they’ve observed a decline in Wisconsin’s democracy since 2010.
Jo Handelsman, a UW-Madison biologist and director for the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, warns in her new book “A World Without Soil” that global soil erosion is an invisible crisis. We have the author on to discuss the harms of worldwide soil erosion and what can be done to stop it.
Quoted: “[Infected people] are shedding virus through those blisters during that period, until it sort of scabs over,” said Dr. Ajay Sethi, a population health scientist at the University of Wisconsin. “They’re itchy, they can be painful. When they scab over, you’re no longer infectious. But there’s a several week period when you are infectious. It’s not that different from chickenpox.”
Quoted: “What’s happening to monarchs is like a death by a thousand cuts,” said Karen Oberhauser, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.
Quoted: Trump lost Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes in 2020. It was a key state to his re-election and one that he won in a historic victory in 2016 that a Republican hadn’t pulled off in decades. The state is key to any new run for president, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Wisconsin is one of the states where he falsely claims to have been robbed of victory, so the recent Supreme Court decision gives him yet another opportunity to explain why his loss wasn’t actually a loss,” Burden said.
“Nearly two years after an election that every judge and security expert deemed to be proper, Trump’s continual fixation has an air of desperation.”
Dr. Claire Wendlund, a medical anthropologist at UW-Madison and a former practicing ob-gyn, said a pregnant woman might have cancer that can make abortion necessary. Radiation and chemotherapy to treat cancer can be destructive to the fetus, but delaying treatment might be life-threatening to the woman, depending on the type and stage of cancer, Wendlund said.
Noted: While some families don’t mind dividing labor in this normative way, with moms controlling the scheduling, other hetero couples would prefer to make scheduling more egalitarian. So I called Allison Daminger, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who studies how couples divide labor, to see if she had any thoughts about how to divide this work.
Daminger suggested two potential ways to help divide scheduling. One is a shared family email address or calendar. The latter is a tool my husband and I use — he’s more proactive than a lot of dads, and has organized many a playdate, but I still do more than half of the scheduling. The other is dividing tasks by area. For example: “Partner A does the school stuff and Partner B does extracurriculars,” Daminger suggested. Or Partner A does the dentist appointments and Partner B does the pediatricians’ appointments. It might help to specialize because then you can build relationships and learn all the peripheral information you may need, Daminger said — you’ll know how long the dentist appointments take and how your kid responds to them, and you’re the one who always interacts with the staff.
Quoted: UW–Madison clinical professor in the School of Human Ecology Dr. Christine Whelan says this number will reduce the stigma attached to mental health care.
“This an incredibly important and frankly long overdue and much awaited necessary tool in the fight against suicide and to really raise awareness about mental health. So, when we break an arm or have a physical emergency, we might call 9-1-1, and now to have 9-8-8 for a mental health emergency is really finally sending the right message,” said Whelan.
Quoted: “Scientists are developing an Omicron-specific booster, and BA4 and BA5-specific boosters, but you know that process, they must finalize and test them, then get formal approval, so the exact timing is still unknown,” said Dan Shirley, the Medical Director of Infection Prevention at UW Health.
Dr. Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer with UW Health, joined FOX6 News Tuesday, July 19 to discuss the latest COVID-19 information, including the BA.5 variant.
UW Health’s chief quality officer Dr. Jeff Pothof joins Live at Four to talk about the latest COVID-19 headlines.
Quoted: IUD insertion pain may be another example of the gender pain gap, an adjacent topic that has recently been experiencing a swell of attention. It’s based on the understanding that there is an implicit bias in health care rooted in sexism and racism that has led to the underserving of women in medical settings. Even if your practitioner is another person with a uterus, and a person of color, they are working within a system that still doesn’t adequately legitimize pain experienced by women or marginalized folks.
“The pain gap is particularly pronounced when it comes to gynecological services, because for most of medical history, and up until now, women’s voices about what they are experiencing have been disregarded, minimized and trivialized,” says Leigh Senderowicz, a health disparities research scholar at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Dr. Elizabeth Salisbury-Afshar, an addiction medicine physician with UW Health who treats people with alcohol and substance use disorders, argued a “one size fits all” method — like Madison’s approach — can be effective, but it also can add “barriers at every turn,” especially if only one piece of a problem is addressed at a time.
’Using the correct pronouns when referring to trans, nonbinary and gender expansive youth is nothing less than life sustaining and nothing more than basic decency,’ UW Assistant Professor says.
Quoted: “It ends up being a win-win,” said Tim Baye, a professor of business development at UW-Madison who studies carbon markets. “The farm has a different revenue stream. The quality of the nutrients are better.”
Quoted: “As a human, my heart breaks that we have not mustered the political will to meet the climate crisis with the urgency that is required,” said Andrea Dutton, a climate researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, via email.
Quoted: There is no consensus among religions on these questions. In fact there is no consensus among Muslims, says Asifa Quraishi-Landes, a professor of U.S. constitutional law and modern Islamic constitutional theory at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Quranic verses can be interpreted in many ways and “Muslims simply select whichever sharia school of thought they want to follow,” she wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle. “That means it is normal for some Muslims to oppose abortion while others insist on its legitimacy.”
One of the experts Frederickson enlisted to help chart that path was James Tinjum, the director of the geological engineering program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In addition to helping the city develop an easy-to-understand guide to PFAS for residents, Tinjum and some of his graduate students also launched research in Rhinelander, putting together a map of how water flows and interacts in the water table beneath the city and its surrounding areas.
“It’s a way to draw analysis to what types of compounds are contributing to the ‘fingerprints’ of the wells, whether it’s an organic sludge, (firefighting foam), or a more dispersed pattern of PFAS typical of landfill situations,” Tinjum said. “If we don’t have this information, we don’t know how to fix the problem.”
Quoted: “By definition, chronic fatigue syndrome symptoms must be ongoing for at least six months,” says Dr. Srivani Sridhar, a family physician with UW Health Northern in Rockford, Illinois. “It can last several years or a lifetime without treatment. Symptoms can also wax and wane over months and years.”
Quoted: The ambiguity in Wisconsin’s state abortion ban, for instance, has left doctors like Abigail Cutler, an OBGYN in Wisconsin, in an impossible bind. Wisconsin’s law, written in 1849, allows abortions to “save the life of the mother.” “Where’s that line?” Cutler asks. “How close does a patient need to be? On the brink of death for me to step in and intervene? What if I wait too long and she dies in front of me? Or what if in the eyes of some prosecutor who’s not a doctor, not at the bedside, not staring at the patient bleeding or infected in front of them—to them, what if I intervene too soon, and I’m charged and risk going to prison?”
Quoted: Prof. Tiffany Green, a health economist at the University of Wisconsin who studies health equity, particularly in the area of obstetric and reproductive care, calls expanding access to reproductive health services “crucial and important in helping people to exercise their right to reproductive autonomy.”
At the same time, “it is not a substitute for abortion care access,” she said, adding that she believes that Madison and Dane County officials understand that as well.
Green said it will be important as agencies expand their services that they do so in ways that reach out to the communities they serve and take time to understand and respect their needs and preferences. That will include being careful about scheduling times when they provide their services. It will also include being culturally responsive and respectful to people of color and to other marginalized groups, including transgender and gender-non-conforming people, she added.
It will also include heeding and respecting the contraceptive choices that their patients want to make, rather than “pushing a kind of contraception on them they do not want,” Green said. “There is a history of doing that with Black people.”
Quoted: Medical Director for Infection Prevention at UW Health Dr. Dan Shirley told CBS 58 BA.5, a subvariant of omicron, seems to be the dominant strain.
“It has a little bit better capacity to overcome our immunity,” Shirley said.
It’s hard to resist the urge to spend as much time outside as possible in the summer.
But, experts at UW Health in Madison say it is important to maintain skin safety while enjoying all that sunshine.
“Over the years, we’ve started to bring awareness about skin cancer in general and interestingly enough we are still seeing an increase in incidents of melanoma across the United States,” said Medical Oncologist at UW Health Dr. Vincent Ma.
Quoted: “This one-size-fits-all approach is truly devastating for my patients and the doctors who take care of them,” said Dr. Abigail Cutler, a practicing OB-GYN and an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-School of Medicine in Madison.
Quoted: For University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center director, Barry Burden, Democrats are in trouble if 2022 remains a referendum on Joe Biden.
“If Trump enters the race, then 2022 could transform into a contest between Joe Biden and Trump, which could help soften the blow for Democrats,” Burden said. “Trump is also likely to derail attention, campaign dollars, and the agenda from his fellow Republicans.”
“At the same time, Trump will energize some supporters who would otherwise sit out the midterm election, particularly those with lower levels of education tend to vote less in nonpresidential election years,” Burden countered.
Noted: This is the second year on the job for Patrol Officer Nicole Schmitgen. She patrols Madison’s Central District around the state capitol and part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. She says while people think policing is about guns and drugs and driving fast, it’s more about communication and helping people.
University of Wisconsin law professor Keith Findley is a member of Madison’s Police Civilian Oversight Board. He says there’s a plethora of research that shows women on the force have a positive impact on police departments and communities. He says they are often better at communicating and de-escalating tense situations.
“They are sued less frequently than their male counterparts,” Findley says. “They make fewer discretionary arrests, especially of non-white residents. They use force less frequently and excessive force less frequently than their male counterparts.”
Noted: According to the study, which was conducted by researchers with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the state Department of Health Services, 92% of the 4,452 adults surveyed said they had eaten fish within the last 12 months, with most of those surveyed reported eating fish they purchased. But because the fish were bought, instead of caught, those consuming the fish were likely to be less aware of the advisories.
Henry Anderson, one of the researchers involved in the study and a professor at the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said to counter the lack of information, states in the Great Lakes region should focus on putting advisory information in areas they know people will be looking.
“You don’t go to the grocery store and go to the fish counter there and point to the salmon or sea bass or walleye and ask what the fish consumption advisory is,” Anderson said.
Quoted: “Abortion has a kind of special place in American politics,” said UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden. “It’s an issue that does not go away and the Supreme Court has essentially guaranteed that it will be a front-page matter this year — and I think that does play for suburban voters in a particular way.
