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.
“NATO expansion was deeply unpopular in Russia. [But] Putin did not invade because of NATO expansion,” says Yoshiko Herrera, a Russia expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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.”
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.
Happiness expert Dr. Christine Whelan from the University of Wisconsin-Madison joins Live at Four to talk about Madison’s high ranking on a recent WalletHub study of the happiest U.S. cities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whether the 2022 avian flu will affect the price of eggs and poultry depends on how widespread it becomes, says Ron Kean, a poultry science expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences.
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.
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.”
Russia, on the other hand, is relying ever more on brute force to maintain the regime even in terms of how the past is remembered and commemorated. As Francine Hirsch clearly explains, recent changes and proposed changes to Russia’s memory laws have made it clear that challenges to official narratives of history will not be tolerated.
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.”
To predict our future under climate change, some scientists are looking way into the past — and digging deep into the ocean floor.
Written by J
“There have been swastikas found in ancient civilizations from the Americas to Greece and the Mediterranean, in China, even in ancient synagogues,” said Brandon Bloch, an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies religion, politics and 20th-century Germany.
To answer this question, Vox spoke to two experts: Robert Enright, a professor of education psychology at the University of Wisconsin Madison and a leader in the scientific study of forgiveness, and Laura Davis, the author of several books about estrangement and reconciliation, including The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother-Daughter Story. Both have worked extensively with people who have experienced serious personal injustice, including survivors of child sexual abuse and gender-based violence. Enright and Davis say that forgiving someone who is unrepentant is absolutely possible; here’s how to approach it.
The Journal Sentinel and USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin will livestream several democracy-focused programs this spring from the University of Wisconsin-Madison LaFollette School of Public Affairs.
The first, today at 5 p.m., features Harvard University Professor of Government Daniel Carpenter, who will discuss his book “Democracy by Petition,” which traces the explosion and expansion of petitioning across the North American continent.
While officials at the zoo are taking the flu very seriously, health experts like UW Health’s Interim Director of Infection Prevention Dr. Dan Shirley say the threat to humans is low. “This is not the type of thing we expect caused big time human problems,” Shirley said.
UW Extension poultry specialist Ron Kean said Wednesday that farmers and the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) reacted fast enough to prevent eggs from Cold Springs Egg Farm from reaching grocery store shelves.
“There is real time pressure here,” Robert Yablon, associate professor at UW-Madison Law School, said.
“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.
Quoted: UW-Madison Law School associate professor Robert Yablon said the ruling was highly unusual but not entirely surprising. “Although the (Voting Rights Act) aims to ensure fair representational opportunities for communities of color, the court has been cautioning mapmakers to avoid overreliance on race when drawing district lines,” he said.
After state agriculture officials confirmed the presence of bird flu in Wisconsin, one poultry management expert shared safety tips for poultry farmers and what risk exists to humans.
Ron Kean, a faculty associate and extension specialist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences, also explained what costs farmers can and cannot get covered if the flu hits their farm.
Quoted: Hart Posen, a professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said while concerns of negative effects from a buyout aren’t unfounded, he sees it as a positive story in an industry that has had few positive stories in the past decade.
“This is all happening because Kohl’s is, of department store retailers, one of the best positioned department store retailers,” Posen said. “This is (a) department store that has real potential. Some folks think they can pull more out of it, which may or may not be true.”
The nation may have its eyes on the college basketball brackets, but another March Madness event unfolded Friday at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, where the Class of 2022 graduates received their long-awaited residency placements.
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.
UW Health’s medical director of infection prevention Dr. Dan Shirley joins Live at Four to talk about the latest COVID-19 headlines.
“It is important for us all to be proactive in this situation,” said Dr. Mary Thurber, a veterinarian and clinical instructor at the UW School of Veterinary Medicine who works in the Henry Vilas Zoo Animal Health Center.
“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.”
As for the science behind March Madness, UW-Madison professor of industrial and systems engineering and bracketologist Laura Albert joined Live at Four to talk about how to make the most of your bracket for this year’s NCAA tournament.
Quoted: Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and director of the university’s Elections Research Center, said Vos’ statement will make it even more difficult to assuage concerns within his party over the 2020 election.
“To suggest that it was sort of endemic it was everywhere and substantial. That’s a big statement,” Burden said.
“Even if none of this other stuff had been happening, the investigations, or (Rep. Tim) Ramthun’s (decertification) efforts or anything else, but the speaker of the assembly to say there was widespread fraud in a statewide election is a real statement and a real change.”
Quoted: The imaginary audience shapes how teenagers think about even ordinary tasks like getting dressed, speaking in class or going shoe shopping, said Seth Pollak, a psychologist and director of the Child Emotion Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Whereas an adult may be thinking about cost or comfort, an adolescent may think about what specific people at school are going to think when they walk into homeroom in the new shoes. Those people aren’t necessarily friends. They may even be enemies. “Some adolescents’ lives are very dominated by these audiences in their heads that the
Quoted: “This kind of thing is irresponsible and is unethical when done to score political points rather than to help a patient or to protect the public from imminent threat,” said R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“There are a lot of patients that were in our hospitals in our beds, that could have gone to skilled nursing facilities, but we don’t have enough in the state,” said Rudy Jackson Chief Nurse Executive at UW Health.
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.
Engineers at UW-Madison have created a new method for improving the quality of 3D-printed metal products.
Additive manufacturing, commonly known as 3D printing, can create complex metal structures with greater ease than traditional manufacturing processes, a release from the university shows. But the process often introduces defects such as tiny cracks and pits in the materia
Quoted: Sanctions aimed at Mordashov and other Russian oligarchs are meant to squeeze these powerful domestic allies of Putin, according to Andrew Kydd, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The idea is that if you seize the assets of these oligarchs, then they will feel the pain of the war and lean on Putin to stop the war,” he explained.
A new procedure called “radiofrequency ablation” is bringing relief to people who suffer from migraine headaches. The procedure uses heat delivered via electrical stimulation through wires and probes to nerves in the head.
Dr. Alaa Abd-Elsayed, medical director, UW Health Pain Services and Pain Management Clinic, says with one visit, patients can see relief for months.
“Around a year for most of the patients we see. It can actually for some patients go for two years,” he said.
Quoted: There’s a scientific explanation for that feeling, according to Simon Gilroy, a professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Gilroy researches how plants sense and respond to their environment. Houseplants are an occupational hazard, he said. “The real thing that defines where you are is the plants that are around you, because they’re absolutely everywhere. That is the environment where we, as human beings, grow up,” Gilroy said. “That’s the background of what it means to be alive.”
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.
Quoted: Ajay Sethi, a professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he expects to see plenty of people continuing to wear masks long into the future. In addition to COVID-19, masks can help protect against other respiratory pathogens like rhinovirus, enterovirus and RSV, Sethi said.
“If you’re around somebody who’s coughing or sneezing, it may not be SARS-CoV-2,” he said. “So wearing a mask protects against all those things that spread by large droplets and to some degree, the aerosolized pathogens too.”
Patricia Téllez-Girón, professor of family medicine at UW-Madison, remembers occasionally seeing people wearing masks before 2020, especially while traveling. She remembers thinking that was unusual, and wondering if those people were really sick. Now, she’s changed her perspective.
“No, they were smart!” she said. “They already have learned what we just learned.”
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.
“I’m a first-generation woman of color who has to learn a completely new world,” says Melinda Soares-Furtado, Ph.D. 2020, a Hubble fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who studies stars with odd chemical abundances. “I can code-switch, but it’s exhausting.” Kao is first-generation Taiwanese-American: “From day one I’ve struggled to belong in the space I’m in. Half the time I want to change my name.” Lopez says, “I’m Mexican-American and have cerebral palsy, so that’s another set of hurdles.”
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.”
“In a carbon-constrained world there’s going to be, I think, a growing role for nuclear energy,” said Paul Wilson, professor of nuclear engineering at UW-Madison. “Particularly as we electrify more of the economy.”
Political expert and UW-Madison professor John Gross called the request Friday a “Hail Mary” from the 23-year-old Halderson’s defense team.
Quoted: The consolidation of farms seen across agriculture is a big part of why the state has fewer licensed dairy producers, according to Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“In many cases when farms sell out, most of their cows may go to other dairy farms. And so the remaining farms have gotten a little bit larger,” Stephenson said.
Stephenson said in 2005, the average herd size in Wisconsin was 82 cows per farm, and in 2020, that average climbed to 177 cows per farm. In other words, the average more than doubled over 15 years.
CIA director William Burns told the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday that he believes Vladimir Putin is losing the “information war” over Ukraine, and this may chip away at his domestic support for the invasion. But what are Russian citizens hearing about the war? Anton Shirikov, who researches misinformation at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, joins William Brangham to discuss.
Scott Seyforth has read more than 100 interviews with Carson Gulley.
Not once did the culinary, radio and TV pioneer of the mid-1900s mention how proud he was of his now-famous fudge bottom pies, said Seyforth, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant director of residence life at University Housing.
“It’s one of the only things people know him for because for 40 years, it’s the only way almost that university communications has presented him to the public — as in relationship to fudge bottom pie,” Seyforth said recently on WPR’s “The Larry Meiller Show.”
Quoted: Tom Eggert, a retired sustainability professor who taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said customers, employees and investors are pushing businesses to make commitments to reduce their emissions.
“You start with maybe a lot of greenwashing, but we’ve seen over time that the infrastructure gets created underneath those goals, underneath those targets, to be very credible, when people then question them on what they’re doing,” said Eggert. “I would say companies in Wisconsin, companies in the United States, companies around the world are on a continuum from complete greenwashing at one end to complete transparency and viable targets on the other.”
Quoted: The Journal Sentinel talked with financial aid experts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Ascendium Education Group about the top questions borrowers have asked about the changes.
“This is huge and it’s well worth (borrowers) time to look into this,” said Emma Crawford, director of financial wellness and financial aid advising at UW-Madison’s School of Medicine & Public Health.
UW-Madison political science professor Andrew Kydd said for some Republicans embracing Putin has become “a big problem right now, politically speaking.” “That invasion is so brutal. Ukrainians are so heroic and their resistance to it is making it look really bad to have been on Team Putin all this time,” he continued.
