“There are a few factors related to particularities of these cases that could potentially explain why the Jan. 6 defendants were released pending trial at higher rates than average,” said assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School Stephanie Didwania. “But I doubt these factors alone can explain why so many of the Jan. 6 defendants were released.”
UW Health’s chief quality officer Dr. Jeff Pothof said the health system is “extremely short staffed right now.” “We’re doing our best to care for as many patients as we can, but the need is outpacing our capacity,” said Pothof. “With COVID cases rising and staff out because they’re awaiting test results or have tested positive, we’re hitting our limits.”
Ellen Samuels has spent a lot of hours in loud, cramped MRI machines.
She said medical personnel would give her these “little headphones” to play music, but the sound of banging metal coils and vibrating electrical pulses all but muted that music.
So to pass the time, she would craft poems in her head. Without the ability to jot them down, she imagined haiku because the five-seven-five-syllable format was easier to remember.
Quoted: “This has gotten worse, not better,” said Michael Wagner, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication whose research focuses on the functioning of American democracy. “I think we had a moment a year ago to try to push the reset button on how we think about democratic elections, and instead, we kept playing.”
“It’s made it convenient for people who want to doubt the election to cling to that — and that was part of what motivated the insurrectionists,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at UW-Madison.
While many parents have understandably worried about how things like remote learning, mask wearing and missing playdates have affected their children, this new data showing family togetherness should be reassuring, according to Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, a pediatrician and associate professor of pediatrics and clinical associate professor of human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Each test is going to have to be evaluated independently any time there’s a new variant,” said David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who urged people not to stop using rapid tests. “And that takes some time.”
Nearly two years into the global COVID-19 pandemic and with cases once again surging, UW Health’s chief quality officer is warning the next few weeks could be grim.
The concentration in meatpacking also serves as a deterrent to farmers who might want to sell to the new government funded startups — who know “they are unlikely to be welcomed back if the buyer fails,” said University of Wisconsin law professor and former Department of Justice antitrust attorney Peter Carstensen.
That research isn’t conclusive yet, said Paul Hutson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies psilocybin and leads the school’s center for psychedelics research. But he anticipates there will soon be enough evidence for the Food and Drug Administration to approve psilocybin capsules to treat at least some of these disorders — most likely in the next five years or so.
That research isn’t conclusive yet, said Paul Hutson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies psilocybin and leads the school’s center for psychedelics research. But he anticipates there will soon be enough evidence for the Food and Drug Administration to approve psilocybin capsules to treat at least some of these disorders — most likely in the next five years or so.
Lucid dreaming is more than just self awareness. People who lucid dream gain memories of what happened earlier in the dream, the ability to manipulate their environment, control their own actions, and marvel at how strange their dream worlds are. Psychologists compare it to a fully immersive virtual reality inside our own heads, which we have the ability to program and reprogram. “You plug into your extended self,” says Benjamin Baird, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
UW Health pediatric infectious disease physician Dr. James Conway said Tuesday that the data shows how important it is to vaccinate young people. “This is what vaccines do,” Conway said. “They keep people out of the hospital.”
Some of them may turn to cannabis because of the prohibitive costs of certain medications, a lack of access to those medications or mistrust of the pharmaceutical industry, said Lucas Richert, a historian of drugs and medicines at the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the editor of “Cannabis: Global Histories.”
According to Huffington, “It’s similar to happiness, actually—another quality we tend to idealize as an end state. But as Professor Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has shown, we can actually train ourselves to be happier through practice in very tangible and measurable ways by giving ourselves the resources to deal with the ups and downs of life. Similarly, we can train ourselves to be more resilient through practice, and that’s the essence of Resilience+.”
He wasn’t just important for exploring new ground and finding fossils, said Prof. John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but also for “creating an entire scientific, interdisciplinary infrastructure that enabled discoveries” and established a new model for scientific research.
A class of fourth graders from Green Bay public schools recently submitted questions about renewable energy and the environment to WPR’s “The Morning Show.”
Greg Nemet, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, joined the show to answer those questions.
It’s “such sentimentalism,” McCoy, professor at the University of Wisconsin, told The Daily Beast, that “puts the wind in the sails of Bongbong’s would-be ship of state.”
“(Evers) has resources to do things that I think were not expected and are available without him having to raise taxes to make it possible,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The fact that he is basically in sole control of distributing the federal COVID relief funds means that he’s satisfying a lot of different constituencies heading into the 2022 midterm elections without paying the price of being branded as a liberal Democrat who has raised taxes to make that happen.”
Despite a federal effort to expand lung cancer screenings to more individuals, research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows Black and Hispanic individuals were still less likely to be eligible for screenings than white counterparts.
“There is only so much humans can take before they say, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” the UW Health doctor told News 3 Now. “You see death and dying every day in a row, and it wears on you.”
“Now school is out and kids are at home, the hospitalization part has settled down a little but we are seeing more cases in kids,” said Dr. James Conway, Pediatric Infectious Disease Specialist at UW Health.
Beginning in 2018, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers Ellen Converse, Matt Borkenhagen and Mark Seidenberg transcribed a collection of popular contemporary children’s books, frequenting several local libraries — from Madison Public Library to the university’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center … “One surprise is just how robust some of these gender associations are, given how little text is actually in these books,” said Gary Lupyan, a UW-Madison psychology professor and advisor to the study.
Quoted: Dr. Nasia Safdar, Medical Director of Infection Control at UW Health, and Dr. Jeff Pothof, an emergency physician and chief quality officer with the UW Health system.
According to Dr. Cliff Robb, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, those terms run longer than the average amount of time a driver typically owns a vehicle.
It’s easy to believe we’re adept at taming anxiety born of uncertainty thanks to the pandemic. But this may be a false assumption. Dr. Jack Nitschke, a clinical psychologist, and associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, told me that exposure to unpredictability doesn’t necessarily improve our coping skills. “I actually don’t think people get better at tolerating uncertainty just because there’s a lot of it,” he said.
Valentin Picasso, an agronomist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said researchers in his field have known for a long time that planting perennial crops in farm fields has a long list of environmental benefits.
The plants’ year-round presence protects the soil from erosion and helps absorb nutrients that would otherwise runoff into lakes and rivers. The forages, which are used for livestock feed, also create an environment for increased biodiversity and can even help fix carbon into the soil, mediating the effects of climate change.
“We’ve shown, in looking at long term research here in Wisconsin, that the more diversity we have in a cropping system, the more resilient it is to weather extremes like drought. And we’ve also shown that the more perennials in the system, we have more stability in production,” Picasso said.
Embedded within a four-decade-long endeavor to document the history of cartography is a deceptively simple question: What is a map?
In a world where most people interact with maps almost daily, pulling them up on their smartphone to effortlessly chart a path through the lattice of streets that lie between Point A and Point B, the map, at first glance, is a tool.
But ask a generations-spanning team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison what a map is, and they’ll give you a more complex answer. Maps are more than a flattened rendering of the land around us, said Matthew Edney, a senior scientist at UW and a professor of geography at the University of Southern Maine.
“They’re cultural documents,” he said. “They’re social instruments.”
We Are Here: Local Mapmakers Explore the World That Connects Us is an exhibit that was developed by the UW Madison Cartography Lab and currently showing at the Overture Center until January 16th. The exhibit features work from both current students and alumni from their current places of employment and aims to let people know that Madison is a hub and important place of cartography training.
List includes:
April 16: A Johnson & Johnson vaccine update and vaccinating children
Dr. Jim Conway, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, explained why distribution was paused for one type of COVID-19 vaccine, and expanding vaccination eligibility to teenagers and younger children.
June 25: The roots of ‘critical race theory’
Gloria Ladson-Billings, a professor emerita at the UW-Madison School of Education, and John Witte, a professor emeritus at the UW’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, discussed the academic origins and underpinnings of critical race theory.
Oct. 29: Ground rules for the Rittenhouse trial
Lanny Glinberg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and a former prosecutor, explained pretrial rulings made by a Kenosha Circuit Court judge in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse and legal requirements of a self-defense argument.
David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said of the Omicron estimate, “The 73 percent got a lot more attention than the confidence intervals, and I think this is one example among many where scientists are trying to project an air of confidence about what’s going to happen.”
Quoted: At the beginning of the pandemic, the rate of inflation was almost zero and prices were falling, said Dr. Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the UW-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs.
In response, the government passed robust support packages — including stimulus checks, enhances unemployment benefits and tax cuts — to boost spending. The spending those programs created was concentrated more on goods than services, Chinn said.
“We have kind of a weird time where people have shifted more towards buying goods and we get a lot of our goods from China and abroad,” Chinn said. “So that means you have this collision, at least in the goods sector, of enhanced demand and not quite enough supply to keep up. And what happens is prices go up. Supply and demand.”
Wisconsin families may have received their last Child Tax Credit payment for a while, as Congress has missed its year-end deadline to pass President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better framework.
The roughly $2 trillion package would have reauthorized the expanded Child Tax Credit through 2022. Parents received their last credit on Dec. 15, and Timothy Smeeding, professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin Madison, said to get the rest of the aid, they’ll need to file their income tax returns for 2021.
“So, there’s still another $1,500 or $1,800, depending on how old the child is, that will come to them once they file their taxes this next spring,” he said.
The legacy of “Sociobiology” was profound for researchers who study animals. “It was liberating,” Karen Strier, a primatologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the president of the International Primatological Society, said in an interview. “You can study all animals with the same basic perspective.”
In an aquatic lab in Madison, four juvenile nurse sharks are living up to their name. They’re providing treatment for COVID-19.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that antibody-like proteins from sharks are highly effective at neutralizing coronaviruses, according to a new study published this month.
Nurse sharks (Ginglymostomatidae) are slow-moving, bottom-dwelling predators that stalk prey in warm shallow waters of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In a new study published in Nature Communications, scientists suggest the sharks could lend a fin in a new, more effective treatment for Covid-19.
Quoted: “If you’re a virus and you turn off the innate immune system, it’s like a thief cutting off the alarms in a bank in order to sneak in,” said Thomas Friedrich, a professor in the department of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that running for office is a remedy “as long as it is done in the spirit of genuine public service and not merely to implement a dogmatic agenda.”
He notes: Volunteering on local boards and commissions is “an underappreciated way to contribute and see what good is happening in the public sphere.”
Noted: Another striking example is the singing shawls made by the Karen people of Myanmar and northern Thailand, says Jennifer Angus, who teaches textile design at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. These woven garments, so named because they’re worn at funeral ceremonies where mourners sing around the clock for several days, sometimes have a fringe made from the shiny, iridescent elytra, or hard outer wings, of jewel beetles. Angus, who grew up in Canada, had never seen anything like it. “I really had trouble believing that it was real,” she says.
The discovery inspired Angus to start incorporating insects into her own work. Her first installation was at a storefront gallery in Toronto, where she arranged hundreds of weevils into a wallpaper-like pattern on the walls. When people walked up to take a closer look, Angus says, “literally, I saw them take a step back as they realized the wallpaper was composed of insects.” The piece created tension, she says, between what people expect when they see a pattern they associate with domestic spaces and the realization that the pattern is composed of bugs, which most people don’t like to find in their homes.
More than 1 million metric tons of salt is flowing into Lake Michigan each year, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The findings come as the state has been making significant strides to reduce salt use on roads to curb pollution.
Researchers examined past and current water data on the amount of salt flowing into the lake from 234 rivers and streams, according to Hilary Dugan, the study’s lead author and assistant professor for the Center for Limnology at UW-Madison.
“There’s a tremendous amount of salt going into the lake each year,” said Dugan. “But because of the volume of Lake Michigan, that concentration is still pretty low.”
Quoted: In Wisconsin, there were more deaths than births for the first time since the state began keeping vital records, said demographer David Egan-Robertson of the Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.
“It’s just been a complete sea change in terms of how we view the population,” Egan-Robertson said.
“If I was an advisor to the Biden White House on communication, the first thing I would tell them was to not use the word ‘climate’ for anything like this,” said Dietram Scheufele, a communications professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It erased an idea that resonated across the aisle — “conservation” sounds a whole lot like “conservative” — and replaced it with one “that’s going to make one side cringe,” Scheufele said.
“It’s going to be harder to attract people and to pay them,” said David Kreling, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy. “If there’s not a generational thing where someone can sit down with their son or daughter and say that they could take the store over, there’s a good chance that pharmacy will evaporate.”
Quoted: Recruitment and retention has always been difficult in corrections due to grueling work conditions and lower pay, according to Jirs Meuris, assistant professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“You have a job that’s already difficult to get people to apply to, to join and then to retain those people. And then you add a labor shortage, as well as a pandemic, that’s going to make that job even harder to do,” said Meuris.
Interview with Andrew Nine, a graduate student in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Astronomy
With less real-time reporting and piecemeal testing programs, policy makers are reacting to Covid-19 rather than proactively working to contain it, said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Jeff Sindelar, associate professor in the meat and science department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agrees 100% with the European influence when it comes to Wisconsin’s sausage skills.
It started with people with strong meat-processing skill sets putting down roots here, but having people who wanted to purchase those foods provided a sustainable market throughout the generations.
Wisconsin was also well-positioned geographically to help carry on those traditions, Sindelar said. Being located between the large population centers of the Twin Cities and Chicago, the latter with its famous stockyards, brought railways to Wisconsin.
Dr. Jamie Hess, an emergency physician at University of Wisconsin, reported that her team is seeing higher volumes of patients in the emergency department than ever before.
Dr. Nasia Safdar, the vice chair for research in the School of Medicine and Public Health and UW Hospital’s medical director of infection control, made the remarks in a live-streamed question-and-answer session focused on the variant Tuesday night.
This holiday weekend, AAA expects over 100 million Americans to travel. But state health leaders urge unvaccinated people to reconsider.
“If they’re not [vaccinated], really, it’s important that folks do not try to gather,” Dr. Jeff Pothof said.
According to the UW Health Chief Quality Officer, only a group of people who are fully vaccinated with a booster shot should get together during Christmas time.
Quoted: “If you’re vaccinated and boosted, holiday celebrations for the most part pose really low risk,” UW Health Chief Quality Officer Dr. Jeff Pothof said.
For unvaccinated people, that’s not the case. If someone gets vaccinated or boosted now, they won’t be fully protected by Christmas Day, but Pothof said some protection is better than none.
“The best day to get your booster shot, if you haven’t gotten it, is today, as soon as possible,” Pothof said.
Quoted: “We’ve entered a convergence of timing here of cases are rising,” said. Dr. Dan Shirley, an infectious disease physician with UW Health. “There’s this kind of variant question, and obviously the holiday season is an important time to get together.”
Shorter incubation periods generally lead to more infections happening in less time, because people are becoming more contagious sooner, making onward transmission harder to prevent. Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me he still wants more data on Omicron before he touts a trim incubation. But “it does make sense,” he said, considering the variant’s explosive growth in pretty much every country it’s collided with. In many places, Omicron cases are doubling every two to three days.
Although millions of monarchs used to arrive in California each fall, this year’s tally is still an encouraging sign. It indicates that monarchs, like many insects, can recover quickly under the right conditions. “They lay hundreds of eggs,” Karen Oberhauser, a monarch expert and professor of entomology at the University of Wisconsin Madison, told Vox in December. “Good conditions can lead to quick increases in their numbers.”
A study released by UW-Madison economist Noah Williams says eliminating the personal income tax and raising the sales tax would jump start Wisconsin’s economy.
Noted: Written by Robert Yablon, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and faculty co-director of the Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.
Quoted: The U.S. last experienced rampant inflation four decades ago. “We have very short memories,” says Steven Deller, an economist in the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture & Life Sciences. “We don’t remember what it was like during the 1970s and early 80s, so this is unusual.”
In a recent analysis, Menzie Chinn, an economist at the UW’s Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs, writes that inflation averaged just 1.7% in the last decade, at times “raising concerns that inflation was too low.”
But while the current inflation might have first looked like the economy playing catch-up after prices tumbled early in the pandemic, it has since “overshot the trend,” Chinn adds. Big-ticket purchases — cars, appliances and other so-called durable goods — are showing the sharpest increases, Chinn writes on his blog Econbrowser. High real estate prices and rental costs have also been a factor.
Antibody-like proteins found in a shark’s immune system could be a natural COVID killer that not only prevents the virus that causes it, but also different variants – such as Omicron that is currently spreading across the globe.
The proteins, known as VNARs, are one-tenth the size of human antibodies, making them small enough to ‘get into nooks and crannies that human antibodies cannot access,’ Aaron LeBeau, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of pathology who helped lead the study, said in a statement.
Antibody-like proteins developed from the immune systems of nurse sharks can prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 from infecting human cells, a University of Wisconsin researcher reports.
Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison, said the record warmth is a byproduct of a warming climate. “We always expect an event like this to be rare, but climate change loads the dice so that these freakishly warm days, like we had today, become more likely,” he said.
Jonathan Martin, an atmospheric and oceanic sciences professor at UW-Madison, joins Live at Four to talk about Wednesday’s record-breaking heat and climate change.
