Category: UW Experts in the News

“The FDA rarely approves a food,” R. Alta Charo, a professor emerita of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told USA TODAY. “Foods go on the market without any prior screening by the FDA if they are generally recognized as safe.”

In Wisconsin, brook trout are expected to disappear by 2050 from nearly 70 percent of the 10,000 miles of rivers and streams where they now swim, John Lyons, curator of fishes at the University of Wisconsin Zoology Museum, and colleagues reported in 2019. “You could argue this is a best-case scenario,” Lyons said.

The practice of ethical entomophagy started haphazardly. In 1974, Gene DeFoliart, who was the chair of entomology at the University of Wisconsin, was asked by a colleague to recommend someone who could talk about edible insects as part of a symposium on unconventional protein sources

The New Horizons flyby found evidence that Pluto—little Pluto!—might even have an ocean beneath its surface. “The name doesn’t matter,” Sanjay Limaye, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “It doesn’t matter what we call it, as long as we can explore it and learn from it.” Regardless of what we decide here on Earth, Pluto will still be there, doing its thing, blissfully unaware that some aliens a few rocks down are mesmerized by its existence.

Another issue is that the people who are most at risk, such as homeless people, older people living alone or people living in poverty, are often the ones who are the hardest to reach, said Richard C. Keller, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who focuses on the global history of the environment. For them, naming a heat wave may have limited, if any, impact, but it could raise overall awareness within a community, and prompt people to check in those who are more vulnerable.

The topography of the Midwest was always in his DNA — he grew up a farm boy in southwestern Iowa — but it wasn’t until he arrived at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as a graduate student that he began to see what was lost and how to revive it in some measure.

That’s probably because of complicating factors in the Atlantic Ocean basin, according to James Kossin, a senior scientist with the analytics firm the Climate Service and a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has studied the poleward migration of hurricanes.

The Atlantic has been several degrees warmer than normal over the past week, feeding the intensity of Henri as it barreled towards Rhode Island. Ocean temperatures “are very anomalous right now”, said James Kossin, a hurricane expert at the University of Wisconsin. “There’s a likely human fingerprint on that.”

“We’re the first to demonstrate, as far as I’m aware, that infectious virus can be cultured from the fully vaccinated infections,” says Kasen Riemersma, a virologist at University of Wisconsin who is one of the authors of the study.

“It is a far cry from an in-vitro lab replication to helping humans,” Dr Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection prevention at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Hospital, told the Associated Press.

Other election experts have previously torn into the Arizona review as unprofessionally run, including a report from former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, a Republican, and Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

“The Cyber Ninjas review suffers from a variety of maladies: uncompetitive contracting, a lack of impartiality and partisan balance, a faulty ballot review process, inconsistency in procedures, an unacceptably high level of error built into the process, and insufficient security,” Grayson and Burden wrote in their June report. “Because it lacks the essential elements of a bona fide post-election analysis, the review currently underway in Maricopa County will not produce findings that should be trusted.”

“If you watch a daddy longlegs move, it will effectively walk on just three pairs of its legs,” said Guilherme Gainett, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The remaining pair of legs, he adds, wave around in the air, probing the arachnid’s surroundings.

“It is basically an indicator of the success of the election,” said Barry Burden, the director of the elections research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Election administrators managed to pull it off and support a record number of voters.”

Steven Howard Wright, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and co-director of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, said the challenge for plaintiffs will be to prove an active conspiracy between the city, law enforcement and White militia members. “They are swinging for the entire community, which will make it a lot harder to sell,” he said. Because there is not a specific “smoking gun” to prove the conspiracy, he said he expects plaintiffs’ attorneys to ask the court “for the widest degree of discovery” to show that both departments had significant race problems long before the Blake incident.

“If we can make these things less and less invasive while making sure we are engaging the nerves, we can start to move beyond just doing this for people who have injury or ailments,” says Justin Williams, a Darpa-funded neuro-engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is studying how nerve stimulation can impact learning.

“I am shocked it’s gotten this far without him even receiving a suspension,” said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

“Climate scientists were predicting exactly these kinds of things, that there would be an enhanced threat of these types of extreme events brought on by increased warming,” said Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s very distressing. These are not encouraging signs for our immediate future.

James Crall, assistant professor of entymology at the University of Wisconsin, told the Harvard Gazette last year: “If they do become established, then the honeybees will experience strong evolutionary pressures over the next years as they adapt to this new ecological interaction.”