One such optical clock exists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This clock holds six strontium pancakes—in effect, six smaller clocks—in the same structure. (There’s nothing unique about that number; they could add more or less. “Six is somewhat arbitrary,” says Shimon Kolkowitz, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.)
“The White House and CDC are in a no-win position,” said David O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin. “Not only is there not a one-size-fits-all solution that they can recommend to the entire country, but there are a spectrum of reasonable options given a receding Omicron surge in late winter.”
For most of human history, we kept time by Earth’s place in space. The second was a subdivision of an Earth day, and, later, an Earth year: The timespan was defined by where Earth was. Then came the atomic clock.
Recently, physicists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison announced the discovery of one of the highest performance atomic clocks ever. They named their instrument an optical lattice atomic clock.
Noted: The report found nitrogen from manure and fertilizer exceeded rates recommended by University of Wisconsin scientists in eight of the nine counties. In four counties, nitrogen from the two sources went more than 50 percent beyond proposed rates, including Kewaunee County where it was applied at nearly double recommended levels. Residents there have long struggled with nitrate contamination of private wells.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said while low-turnout elections like those held in the spring in Wisconsin often provide greater influence for groups that are organized and for more strident candidates, it can work on both ends of the political spectrum.
“Conservatives have long complained that school tax votes that take place in low-turnout elections are dominated by school employees and parents who disproportionately favor higher spending on education,” Burden said. “At other times, low turnout has favored evangelical Christian candidates who were able to mobilize members of their churches to support them around conservative causes.”
Quoted: “The sad truth of endometriosis is that very often young girls who complain of pain or painful periods are told that everyone’s periods are painful; just live with it,” said Bala Bhagavath, UW Health’s fertility clinic’s medical director of Generations of Fertility Care.
UW-Madison law professor Heinz Klug said opponents may be misreading the clause, which was designed to prevent feudal tenure, a system of servitude, rather than restricting a landowner’s ability to lease out land.
David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who focuses on redistricting, told CNN, “It’ll be harder for states to follow what we thought was settled law when it comes to creating minority-majority districts or even influence districts.”
“This is a red-flag warning, like, we can see this freight train coming from a mile away,” said Andrea Dutton, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the relationship between melting ice sheets and sea-level changes, who wasn’t involved with the report.
The report “is the equivalent of NOAA sending a red flag up” about accelerating the rise in sea levels, said University of Wisconsin-Madison geoscientist Andrea Dutton, a specialist in sea-level rise who wasn’t part of the federal report. The coastal flooding the U.S. is seeing now “will get taken to a whole new level in just a couple of decades.”
Video: UW Health’s chief quality officer Dr. Jeff Pothof joins Live at Four to talk about the latest COVID-19 headlines.
“It’s a good day for science, for wolves, for ecosystems, and for the people who value wolves,” says Adrian Treves, a wolf researcher and professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin.
A new report by the Environmental Working Group and Midwest Environmental Advocates (MEA) has found that in nine counties, animal manure is over-applied to farmland, exacerbating rural Wisconsin’s water quality struggles. According to the report, four counties applied manure at more than 50% above the rate recommended by University of Wisconsin researchers to minimize pollution.
“Our study is bringing some much-needed answers to not only the people who live around the bay of Green Bay, but also to all of the Great Lakes communities because it’s an interconnected water system,” Christy Remucal, a University of Wisconsin – Madison professor of civil and environmental engineering, said in a statement.
“We have been studying influenza viruses more than 70 years, and we are trying to make universal influenza vaccines, and we still haven’t been able to do it,” said Yoshihiro Kawaoka, who is working on a pan coronavirus vaccine at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “But this is a different virus, and I think it’s worth trying. What I’m trying to say is that it may not be easy
UW-Madison history professor David McDonald says several things led to this being the perfect time for Russia to stir the conflict that has simmered for decades.
It’s been more than a year since the Cap Times last sat down with our go-to pandemic explainer Malia Jones for her take on the ever-changing COVID situation. These days, Jones, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Applied Population Laboratory, homeschools her kids by day (her solution for protecting her kids and their grandparents), works her day job on the swing shift, and somehow squeezes in time to run a pandemic information site called Dear Pandemic.
UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden told the Cap Times last fall that the term “forensic audit” had never been used in the election administration world until 2021 — when unfounded claims about widespread electoral fraud began circulating.
Quoted: Matt Kures, a community development specialist with UW-Madison Extension, and Laura Dresser, a labor economist and associate director of UW-Madison think tank COWS.
John P. Gross is director of the Public Defender Project at the University of Wisconsin School of Law. Lanny Glinberg is director of the Prosecution Project at the law school.
Quoted: What’s not good is to be the town that’s only a short ways from a retail hub because people will easily go there instead of shopping locally, according to Steven Deller, a professor and community development specialist with University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension.
“You don’t try to compete head-on with a Walmart because they will chew you up and spit you out,” Deller said. However, businesses can gain customers from being in the same plaza as one of the big chains, or at least near it.
Unless there are deficits in care or a stressful family environment, extra time at home may have benefitted the very young. For babies, caregivers are their whole world, and their greatest need is responsive, sensitive care. “There’s really no indication that their social development is going to be impacted at all,” says Seth Pollak, a psychologist and brain scientist who studies child development at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts co-directors Dan Vimont, a professor of atmospheric science at UW-Madison, and Stephen Vavrus, a senior scientist at UW-Madison’s Center for Climatic Research.
“I honestly let out a woo-hoo of elation that reason and science had prevailed, and that they actually really did do the right thing,” said Dr. James Conway, a pediatric infectious disease expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“While the increase in inflation during the pandemic has been problematic for many reasons, it is perhaps a necessary side effect of economic aid that has helped keep Americans out of poverty and businesses solvent during an extraordinary crisis,” wrote Menzie Chinn, a professor of public affairs and economics.
Stephanie Diem of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said the technology used by JET to achieve the result, using magnets to control ultra-hot plasma, show that harnessing fusion — a process that occurs naturally in the stars — is physically feasible.
“It’s just so expensive and so hard to constantly provide food and oxygen and all the things that you need to keep people alive,” Simon Gilroy, professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved with the research. Space is a “weird” place for biology to exist in, says Gilroy, and that’s one of the reasons it’s a great opportunity to study plants and humans’ evolutionary record.
Holly Gibbs, professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, said: “At the same time that soy farmers comply with the moratorium, they continue to deforest illegally for other purposes.”
“That is actually one of the key reasons for judicial review,” said Susan Yackee, director of UW-Madison’s LaFollette School of Public Affairs and an expert on the rule-making process. “We actually have a pretty clear process for doing this exact thing already.”
The Wisconsin bill also mimics what University of Wisconsin Law School professor David Schwartz deemed most “sly” about Texas’ law. Because private citizens rather than state officials would enforce the ban, “it would be challenging for courts to block the law before a bounty-hunter brings a case under it, yet the law would deter access to abortion even without a bounty-hunting case being brought,” he said in a statement.
“Throughout most of the country, big storms are happening more often,” says Daniel Wright, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There’s every reason to expect that rainfall will continue to intensify in the future.”
Steven Wright, a clinical associate professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, teaches criminal appellate law and creative writing.The fate of Ahmaud Arbery’s murderers, whose federal hate-crimes trial began on Monday, took an unexpectedly dark turn last week when a federal judge rejected a plea deal reached with prosecutors. Under the deal, two of Arbery’s three killers were to accept responsibility for federal hate crimes; at least one had confirmed he would publicly admit race had motivated the murder. In exchange, the two men would serve the next 30 years in federal custody. The plea deal fell apart largely because the Arbery family objected.
Dr. Angela Byars-Winston is a professor in the UW-Madison Department of Medicine and a leading thinker on the science of mentoring.
But MD Michael Beninati, an OBGYN at UW Health, says there is no evidence to suggest the vaccine impacts a woman’s ability to conceive.
But censorship continues today, often indirectly. Academic Tyrell Haberkorn, a professor of Southeast Asian Studies at University of Wisconsin Madison, said the authorities use many methods to censor books. “There are different ways of banning books.
Official ways, such as when lists of banned books have been published in the Royal Gazette after 6 October 1976,” she said, referring to the black massacre of students on the campus of Thammasat University. “And unofficial ways, when Special Branch police or other state agents intimidate writers, publishers, or printers,” she said.
Quoted: The rapid growth of the Hispanic population is part of a national trend that demographers cite as a natural increase, growth that’s driven by an established population rather than immigration, said David Egan-Robertson, demographer at the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In other words, it’s the result of families like the Villas, Guzmans and Castros deciding to stay in the region and raise the next generation of northeast Wisconsin’s children.
Still, Egan-Robertson acknowledged that one reason for the rise in numbers for the Hispanic population and for other groups is increased participation in the 10-year survey, because of the U.S. Census Bureau’s improved system of gathering the information.
“In some ways, maybe the diverse population was there in 2010, but the way the Census Bureau captured it then, it really wasn’t giving the full scope of the race and population,” Egan-Robertson said. “In 2020 they got their act together and expanded the amount of data they captured.”
A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies reproductive health said the findings of a recent news story highlighting potential fraud among Milwaukee’s prenatal care coordination companies were “really atrocious and really horrific.”
Tiffany Green, an assistant professor in the departments of Population Health Sciences and Obstetrics and Gynecology, specializes in racial disparities within reproductive health.
Today, about 30% of Wisconsinites live in rural areas and rural millennials are fleeing to population hubs, according to Malia Jones, a social epidemiologist at UW-Madison’s Applied Population Laboratory.
As the University of Wisconsin philosophy professor Harry Brighouse points out:
Instructional quality is the most neglected—and perhaps the most serious—equity issue in higher education. Good instruction benefits everyone, but it benefits students who attended lower-quality high schools, whose parents cannot pay for compensatory tutors, who lack the time to use tutors because they have to work, and who are less comfortable seeking help more than it benefits other students.
Quoted: Menzie Chinn, an economist with the Robert M. LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is skeptical of the idea that federal pandemic relief spending is the primary cause of recent inflation.
“It’s certainly part of the explanation – but other economies (UK, Euro Area) have also seen an acceleration of inflation,” Chinn says, with higher oil prices, continued supply disruptions and other factors being the main contributors. “One could argue that part of the inflation is due to too little spending, say, on childcare support, which would enable parents to work.”
Mark Copelovitch, a La Follette School political scientist whose work looks at the intersection of economics and politics, says that the ability of the U.S. to finance its debt at virtually no interest shows that the marketplace — essentially, the world’s lenders — isn’t worried about the sustainability of the economy.
On inflation, he considers shortages such as in semiconductors, a key component of cars, or the spike in energy prices, not pandemic relief aid, as leading culprits for rising prices. “Most of what’s driving the inflation is global supply chain issues during a pandemic,” Copelovitch says.
He credits pandemic relief, in the form of direct aid to households as well as other forms of support as well as directly to the state, for preserving incomes, keeping businesses going in the pandemic, and enabling the economy to recover much more quickly than it might have otherwise.
“The reason we have this big surplus now in Wisconsin and elsewhere is because all the other things basically prevented people’s incomes from going down — which meant tax revenue didn’t crater like we worried it was going to,” Copelovitch says.
It’s not even a question. Students for Fair Admissions revealed the discrimination against Asian-Americans with their lawsuit against Harvard. In their petition to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, they documented how Asian students who were academically in the top 10% of Harvard applicants were accepted at a rate of 12.7%, white applicants at a rate of 15.3%, black applicants at a rate of 56.1%, and Hispanics at a rate of 31.3%.
—Jonathan Draeger, University of Wisconsin Madison, economics
In 2020, in conversations stimulated directly by the racial unrest of the time, ASCB leaders decided to systematically examine the awards process. “Forty years is a long time to go without thinking hard from the outside about what’s going on,” said Bill Bement, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who volunteered to lead a task force on the issue. “There was a lot of dust that had to be shrugged off.”
“Tampa Bay has huge flood risk. What should we do about it?” by Tampa Bay Times’ Zachary T. Sampson and Langston Taylor: “Thousands of years ago, researchers say, the people who lived in what we now call Florida had to accommodate rising seas. They responded, excavations suggest, by retreating. Kenneth Sassaman, a University of Florida archaeologist, has theorized that some even picked up and reburied the bones of their ancestors. This ancient problem is not so different from the conundrum Floridians face today, he thinks. It shows that nature is always in control, but people can adapt. ‘The challenge we face today, though, is you just can’t pick up a city and move it,’ said Andrea Dutton, a geoscience professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.”
There are plenty of indicators that farmers across the country are starting 2022 in a strong financial position, said Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Christy Clark-Pujara, a tenured professor in the UW-Madison Department of Afro-American Studies, said the center can do a great job attracting Black professionals to the city and keeping those who are already here.
Sarah Halpern-Meekin, an associate professor at UW-Madison, said people should also note that “earned income” does not just include a “9 to 5″ job but also includes “gig work.”
“We can’t use a crystal ball to see what COVID-19 will bring us next, but we do know the now approved vaccines for COVID-19 work against these variants when we are fully vaccinated,” Dr. Nasia Safdar, a UW Health infectious disease specialists, said in a statement. “We can do our parts to prevent prolonging this pandemic by getting vaccinated and getting our booster shots.”
“Once when we realized that more than half of people with this virus transmit without any symptoms at all, that’s when it became pretty clear that this was something that could be very hard to contain,” Ajay Sethi, population health science associate professor at UW School of Medicine and Public Health, said.
UW-Madison Law School associate professor John Gross said Wisconsin’s proposed constitutional amendment sets it apart from states reducing or entirely eliminating cash bail’s use. “They’re not seeing spikes in recidivism, their costs are down and public safety is at the same level, but more people are out on the street,” he said. “And so I feel like Wisconsin is bucking the trend here.”
Malia Jones, an epidemiologist who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and who specializes in vaccine hesitancy, said it has been clear for a while that getting children vaccinated against Covid is going to be an uphill battle. She worries that the low level of confidence in Covid vaccines for children will erode parental support for other vaccines. “This is the thing that keeps me up at night,” she said.
If you only read the national news, you could be excused for thinking that climate change is solely a coastal problem. While hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, freak snowstorms on the East Coast and wildfires in the West grab the headlines, the flyover country in the Midwest faces its own set of challenges. Thirty local governments, academic institutions and nonprofits from the space between the Appalachians and the Great Plains have joined together to create the Midwest Climate Collaborative. The collaborative kicked off its work with a virtual summit on January 28. Here to tell us more is Missy Nergard, Director of the Office of Sustainability at UW-Madison, one of the Collaborative partners.
Quoted: Choosing day care doesn’t inherently harm a baby, but stress — whether related to the separation or worries about the quality or cost of care — can hinder their development, said Julie Poehlmann-Tynan, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of human development and family studies.
“Babies are often really sensitive to what’s going on,” she said.
Since babies require high-quality, lower-stress care, Poehlmann-Tynan said, policymakers should consider how best to support a child’s transition to family life.
Quoted: Those changes can already be seen clearly by examining lake ice, said Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Climatic Research.
Scientists studying Wisconsin’s inland lakes are able to collect a wealth of information on Madison’s lakes Mendota and Monona, whose ice records stretch back close to 170 years. Lakes have ice cover for about a month less now than they did when the records began, researchers estimate.
Out of Lake Mendota’s long ice record, the five years with the longest stretch of ice cover all occurred during the 1880s or earlier, and the five years with the shortest ice cover have all been since the 1980s, Vavrus said. It “really is a very different winter climate that we’re living in nowadays compared to over a century ago,” he said.
“I think what we’re seeing is people are pushing in at the limits of the edges of the season where it is potentially more dangerous,” said Titus Seilheimer, fisheries outreach specialist for the Wisconsin Sea Grant.
A new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison explains how hibernating animals use bacteria in their gut to maintain muscle density over the winter. The findings could lead to solutions for people with muscle-wasting disorders or astronauts headed on prolonged journeys into space.
Hannah Carey is a professor emeritus at UW-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine and an author of the study. She said scientists have known for years that ruminant animals, like cows and sheep, are able to recycle their own nitrogen as a way to build muscles while eating a low protein diet. Nitrogen is a vital building block of amino acids and proteins.
More than 13,000 Afghan refugees landed in Wisconsin at Fort McCoy near Tomah in August 2021 and are now being resettled across the state and nation. Not only did they face trauma in being airlifted suddenly from Kabul, but continue to face uncertainty about their futures, including the legal process for obtaining legal immigration status in the U.S. that’s described as complex.
“A lot of people specifically with this situation were hoping there would be something called an Afghan Adjustment Act,” says Erin Barbato, director of the University of Wisconsin Law School Immigrant Justice Clinic. “We’ve had before it with the Cuban Adjustment Act, which would allow everybody who came in this emergent situation to have an expedited manner to obtain their lawful permanent resident status and then have a pathway to citizenship. But so far, it doesn’t seem like there has been much movement in our Congress to make this happen.”
Quoted: UW politics professor Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center, says, “Really in modern times, we’ve seen nothing like what has happened in Wisconsin, and nationally, since the 2020 election.”
He continues, “The unwillingness of most of one party to accept the results and to continue pushing with audits and investigations and questions and subpoenas and other efforts to try to keep their concerns alive, is really new and doesn’t have any precedent. And I think it is not well supported by the facts of the election.”
Professor Ted Gerber is the featured expert on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “The Morning Show.” He discusses the current tension in Ukraine and Russia and answered questions called in from the public. Gerber is a member of the Department of Sociology faculty and is Director of the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Greg Nemet, a UW-Madison professor who specializes in energy policy, said utilities need to begin shutting down gas plants, and acquisitions like this cast doubt on ambitious decarbonization goals. “We want to see less demand for gas-fired electricity, not new purchases of it,” Nemet said. “If we are trying to reduce emissions by 80% in the next eight years, we should be investing rapidly and heavily in clean energy and energy efficiency.”
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, and a bag of sand or cat litter to regain traction on snow or ice.
