UW Madison Associate Professor of Pediatric Pulmonology, Dr. Vivek Balasubramaniam (MD), said the teen vaping crisis took a backseat during the pandemic, but it never went away.
“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.”
“If you keep those mice germ-free, they don’t develop as many amyloid plaques,” said Barbara Bendlin, a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It does really suggest that in some way there’s a link between microbes and the development of Alzheimer’s disease pathology.”
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
Many schools require students to have health insurance and offer university-sponsored plans, said Jake Baggott, a past president of the American College Health Association and an associate vice chancellor of student affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said that while some university health programs are equipped to deal with more complex medical issues or diagnostics, others are not. Students need to be clear on the details, such as whether their policy covers off-campus care.
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.
New University of Wisconsin Division of Arts Director Chris Walker has been at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for many years now. He arrived as a visiting faculty member and worked in the Dance Department, the School of Education and as the founding artistic director of the First Wave Scholarship Program. While reflecting on where he began at UW, he talked about how his journey and work at the UW has come full circle.
After the government siege, Janice Beers at the CMC, with the help of UW-Madison Law Professor Megan McDermott worked to get them to safety.“I connected Janice with the people who I knew who were taking care of these efforts on the ground,” McDermott said.
UW-Madison is launching a new research center to study the applications of certain psychedelic substances. The Center for Research in Psychoactive Substances will study the scientific, cultural and historical aspects of everything from ecstasy to magic mushrooms.
“We typically don’t have significant disease concerns with them,” said PJ Liesch, a University of Wisconsin entomologist. “These floodwater mosquitoes can be a nuisance, and they can lead to lots of bites and things like that, but in many cases they aren’t carrying diseases like West Nile virus.”
Quoted: “This is an appeal, really, to school administrators and other officials in schools, and most importantly to parents and anyone whose decision-making about masks in schools,” said Dr. Ellen Wald, a University of Wisconsin-Madison pediatrician who was one of nearly 500 doctors to sign the open letter from UW Health released Wednesday. “We think this is such an important intervention.”
Wald emphasized that masking everyone in schools has universal support among the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services and other health agencies.
In an independent evaluation of the process, Barry Burden, the head of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Trey Grayson, a former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky, detailed the review’s many “maladies.” “They include processing errors caused by a lack of basic knowledge, partisan biases of the people conducting the audit, and inconsistencies of procedures that undermine the reliability of the review and any conclusions they may draw. In particular, the operation lacks the consistency, attention to detail and transparency that are requirements for credible and reliable election reviews.”
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.
One day pre-pandemic, Lori Lopez, a UW-Madison associate professor of media and cultural studies, joined a Hmong teleconference call with more than 1,000 listeners.
The call was not a meeting or presentation, but a live call-in radio program where people could share their stories, listen to conversations or get news about their community.
She said it was a radio station — without being a radio station.
“I was like Hmong people are being really entrepreneurial and coming up with all sorts of really cool media solutions to the fact that they’re such a small community and they can’t really have a traditional media structure,” the director of the Asian American Studies Program told Madison365.
Now, seven years later, she released her book titled “Micro Media Industries: Hmong American Media Innovation in the Diaspora” on Aug. 13.
Noted: We discuss the public and mental health ramifications of climate change and climate advocacy among health professionals with Dr. Claire Gervais.
Claire Gervais, MD is a family practice physician and is a Clinical Associate Professor with the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a member of the Wisconsin Environmental Health Network and actively works on a number of environmental issues including climate change and eliminating fossil fuel dependence.
Quoted: Steve Deller, an applied economics professor with University of Wisconsin-Madison, said for some businesses, not leasing office spaces has allowed them to bring down operating costs.
“I think three things are happening: a lot of businesses are embracing telecommuting as an alternative to maintaining office spaces; businesses are allowing greater flexibility for some of their workers to continue to telecommute; and finally, some workers are still uncomfortable returning to the office,” Deller said in an email.
But Deller said it’s “too soon to tell” whether shifts to remote work will continue in the long term.
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.
UW Health Principal Vaccine Investigator Dr. William Hartman said Monday even with a shorter timeline for full approval, having more than 170 million Americans fully vaccinated – many of whom of course received the Pfizer vaccine – provided a data set large enough to conclude the vaccine is safe and effective.
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.”
Studies show that dogs and some other animals do appear to respond emotionally to human music, although the type of music they react to can differ significantly depending on the species or breed, Charles Snowdon, an animal psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Live Science in a 2012 article.
“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.
Quoted: “That’s a great thing in just the first month, I’m guessing that those numbers are going to improve,” said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economist and child tax credit expert. “The word’s getting out, so I expect it’ll even be better soon for people who really need it.”
The Urban Institute estimates 78 percent of eligible families will be receiving their tax credits by February, though Smeeding said he expects it will take even longer. He’s been working with several groups in Wisconsin to help connect harder-to-reach groups to the payments, especially immigrant families.
“All U.S.-born children who have Social Security numbers are eligible for the child tax payment, but (the families) are gun-shy because they fear public charge rules, they fear all sorts of things that took place under the last administration, and they need trusted people who they can work with,” he said.
We are conducting research on peptides derived from both common and unique food proteins, such as soybeans, dairy, fish, meat, and insects. Thanks to research by Srinivasan Damodaran of the University of Wisconsin, we already know that small peptides from fish gelatin and cattle collagen proteins are effective in preventing ice recrystallization in ice cream. This power of peptides varies greatly depending on the source protein, however, so we are investigating the reasons for these differences
Quoted: The U.S. health system excels at the specialized, high-tech care provided by the most advanced neonatal intensive care units in Wisconsin.
“You probably won’t find newborn intensive care that’s any better in the world,” said Philip M. Farrell, a specialist in neonatology and former dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
“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.
State law gives the Public Service Commission regulatory authority over electricity plants larger than 100 megawatts, leaving communities with very little say in what gets built and where, said Brian Ohm, a professor of planning and landscape architecture at UW-Madison. “Cities and villages do have limited extraterritorial authority, but in this case that’s not going to come into play,” Ohm said. “The village’s future plans can be a consideration, something that could be a consideration by the PSC, but again there’s nothing that’s going to lock the PSC into the village’s plans for growth.”
There is a “social component” of back-to-school shopping, said Hart Posen, a professor of management and a retail expert at UW-Madison. Children are excited to pick out personalized items that will make them look cool in front of their friends, Posen said.
Quoted: Because schools can’t be separated from their larger communities, some of those cases will spill into schools, as well, said University of Wisconsin-Madison pediatric disease researcher Dr. Greg DeMuri. Those are “primary cases,” or cases of COVID-19 that were picked up at home, at birthday parties and other places in the community. He said the more concerning question is whether there are “secondary cases,” or cases of COVID-19 that were transmitted between students and staff within the school.
“Those are the ones that we really worry about,” he said. “That’s the one that tells you, ‘Hey, it’s dangerous for kids to be in school.'”
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.”
Quoted: Andrew Kydd, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that while he was surprised by the speed of the takeover, the lack of commitment by Afghan forces and rampant corruption in the government made a long-term defense of Afghanistan impossible.
“The Afghan military simply wasn’t fighting for the Afghan government,” Kydd said. “There’s no way to overcome that with training.”
Mou Banerjee, an assistant professor in the UW-Madison history department, wondered what the human and emotional toll, both in Afghanistan and here in the U.S., would be.
Although Banerjee said it would likely be decades before the U.S. had a full understanding of the Afghanistan war, she said a key takeaway was the costs — whether of people, resources or foreign relations — that came with fighting a war of this magnitude for this long.
“It’s almost impossible to sustain a war against an idea, the ‘war against terror,’” Banerjee said.
“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.
And this was having a deleterious effect on rural spaces. University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross argued in 1922 that the “folk depletion” caused by talented rural youths departing the countryside left the farming areas of the Midwest “fished out ponds populated chiefly by bullheads and suckers.”
“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.”
UW-Madison assistant professor of history Mou Banerje joined News 3 Now Live at Four to provide some perspective on what is happening with the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan and what may lie ahead.
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.
“This is a sales tactic that some salespeople and finance people use at dealerships,” said Sarah Orr, Director at UW-Madison’s Consumer Law Clinic. The clinic provides legal services to those who can’t afford to hire an attorney.
Led by Prof. Xudong Wang, scientists at the University of Wisconsin have developed a patch-like tissue-stimulating implant that gets around such problems. It’s known as a piezoelectric wafer, and it contains crystals of the non-toxic amino acid lysine. Via a self-assembly process, those crystals form and align themselves between two sheets of a flexible, biocompatible, biodegradable polymer called polyvinyl alcohol (PVA).
“What happens to him at CNN is less important to me than what happens to all the other journalists whose ethics will be questioned and whose bond of trust with the citizens they serve could be damaged by the choices he made,” wrote Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication in an opinion piece for USA TODAY published this week.
University of Wisconsin-Madison public affairs and economics professor Timothy Smeeding noted the rise in wages for low-income workers means it’s a good time for workers to reassess their jobs and find a better one.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor Timothy Smeeding said the rise in wages for low-income workers means it’s a good time to reassess their jobs and find a better one.
“For those reasons, the job market is in favor of workers right now and turnover is good,” Smeeding said. “When people voluntarily leave jobs, economists think that’s good, because that meant they found something better.”
Quoted: “It’s sort of like a race, where you’re only seeing people at the starting line and people at the finishing line but you’re not seeing how they go around the track,” David Egan-Robertson, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said of the data released every 10 years.
Noted: Stephen Young is a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor who studies basic income programs in the United States and worldwide. Young said universal basic income is not a “magic bullet solution” but an idea that has gained traction in the past decade to “address structural unemployment and poverty.”
Dr. Marcia Slattery is a UW-Madison Professor of Psychiatry & Pediatrics. She specializes in child and adolescent psychiatry and anxiety disorders in kids, adolescents, and adults. Dr. Slattery expressed concern that some teens may feel they are behind the curve after a year of virtual learning. She said getting a consistent sleep routine in check will help them balance out these emotions and get their brain and body back in sync.
David Egan-Robertson, a demographer at the UW-Madison Applied Population Laboratory, said the state’s population growth of 3.5 percent over the last decade is the smallest leap Wisconsin has had since the 1980s.
One of the major factors that has contributed to this polarized political climate — where false claims can gain momentum — is enhancements in technology and communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Michael Wagner said.
“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.”
Sami Schalk, an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Cornell’s protocols are “great safety measures that will protect probably the vast majority of their campus. But there are many disabled folks or immunocompromised people who have been pretty hyper-isolated over the past year and a half. To force them out, it’s just unconscionable.”
Noted: David Egan-Robertson, a demographer in the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said one of the key points he would be looking at is changes in the state’s race and ethnicity data.
Much of the state’s growth in recent decades has been attributable to an increase in the Hispanic population, he said.
Quoted: “With Kind out of the picture, Republicans have a really good shot at winning that seat and having a bigger majority in (Wisconsin’s) congressional delegation,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Adrian Treves, an environmental studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the population is at risk of dropping below 350 wolves. A recent study by Treves and other researchers concluded that hunters and poachers might have killed a third of the wolf’s population since the animal’s delisting.
In a statement following the vote, conservation group Wisconsin’s Green Fire said the quota is likely to cut the state’s wolf population in half.
“Removing 300 wolves in another hunt would likely have a destabilizing effect on almost every wolf pack in the state,” said Adrian Wydeven, a former DNR wolf biologist. “There is no other wildlife species where that level of reduction would be acceptable. And it’s highly likely it would trigger a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service review of state management.”
Quoted: “I think that there was some concern that inflation would continue to accelerate,” said Tessa Conroy, an assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Producers haven’t been able to respond with supply as enthusiastically as consumers have responded with demand as the economy has sort of opened back up.”
Conroy said the new numbers indicate the current accelerated inflation is a temporary trend brought on by supply shortages.
“I think that’s hopeful for a lot of consumers in particular, that as some of the short-term problems resolve themselves, prices will stabilize,” said Conroy.
Gregory Nemet, a University of Wisconsin professor who has written a book about recent innovation in solar power, said the policy shift will put pressure on government officials who will have to sort through complex market dynamics while managing demands from companies seeking profits and lawmakers pushing for home-state handouts.
“There are sensitive periods in early childhood development in which language development and emotional development are really rapidly developing for the first few years of life,” said Ashley Ruba, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Child Emotion Lab.
Vaccinating children as young as 6 months of age against COVID-19 may become the new front in the global pandemic fight, if the vaccines prove to be safe and effective.
One such trial by the American pharmaceutical company Moderna will begin enrolling children 6 months through 11 years old on Friday at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. UW will be one of 75 to 100 sites in the U.S. and Canada for the trial, which has been named the KidCOVE study.
Quoted: “Teachers do not deliberately set out to make students feel bad about themselves. The problem this bill seems to identify, that Wisconsin’s teachers intentionally or otherwise want to make students feel bad, is simply not real,” said Jeremy Stoddard, a University of Wisconsin-Madison curriculum and instruction professor.
“What I fear is that if it becomes law, it will have a chilling effect inhibiting teachers from teaching a full account of history.”
