Noted: The fridge was co-founded by Taste Of Home Associate Culinary Producer Sarah Tramonte and University of Wisconsin-Madison Division Of Extension nutrition educator Hataya Johnson.
Quoted: “We used public data that is so often used against people to help correct situations or improve situations that might be barriers to employment, housing, education, childcare and health,” explained Marsha Mansfield, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Economic Justice Institute and director of LIFT Dane.
Quoted: “We haven’t seen these kinds of protests in Cuba, in part because the system is not one that grants the legitimacy of that kind of civic protest,” said Patrick Iber, an associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The Cuban government often sees and accuses people who are involved in these protests as being interests of foreign powers, and that is the kind of accusation that the current president has used against the protestors.”
Noted: Steven Deller, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economist and part of a group that studied the impact of Verso’s closure in Wisconsin Rapids, said he thinks the paper industry in Wisconsin is declining for reasons similar to what happened in Maine, where he worked at a university before coming to Wisconsin.
The problem in both states, he said, is that many of the plants are old and companies are finding it doesn’t make sense to invest in aging facilities. Instead, they are building new, often in the south to reduce transportation costs by being closer to timber producers in warmer places where trees grow faster.
Quoted: Ajay Sethi, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that even though the Delta variant is the most infectious strain, “there are areas of the country where too many people have not yet gotten vaccinated and wrongly believe that the pandemic is over.”
An increase for Wisconsin’s K-12 schools in the state’s budget coupled with one-time federal pandemic aid still falls short according to public school advocates. Julie Underwood, former dean of the UW-Madison School of Education and board president for the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools, explains.
But, according to numbers from Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services, only about 83 casesof the variant have been formally diagnosed in the state.
For more on the variant, and the risk it could pose, our producer Jonah Chester spoke with Doctor Ajay Sethi, an Associate Professor in Population Health Sciences at UW-Madison.
Quoted: The proposals, which would broadly make absentee voting more difficult, are in line with legislation that’s moved forward in other battleground states with Republican-majority legislatures, said Barry Burden, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and director of the Elections Research Center. Similar bills advanced in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona.
“The bills we’re seeing in Wisconsin and other battleground states are really just an immediate reaction to legislators’ discontent with what happened in 2020,” said Burden. “Its roots are in Donald Trump’s complaints about absentee voting. He railed for about a year, consistently and publicly, in speeches and on Twitter, about what he believed was fraud happening with mail-in voting,” he added.
Quoted: “This is just a stunning change in the American social policy context,” says Tim Smeeding, a professor of public affairs and economics with the LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an advocate for the policy.
Dr. Ann Sheehy, who works in the COVID-19 ICU at UW Health, says even if a breakthrough infection happens, severe illness is even more rare.
Dr. Ann Sheehy with UW Health said everyone should enjoy the moment, but do so safely. “We’re all really excited for the Bucks, and I love the celebrations going on,” said Dr. Sheehy. “Especially after we’ve all been so separate for a year, it’s even more meaningful, I think, to gather people in the state of Wisconsin, to celebrate these things. I would just say that I hope that people that are attending have been vaccinated.”
Interview: Christine Whelan, UW–Madison professor and Chief Happiness Officer at Dear Pandemic, offers “Nerdy Girl” insight into navigating our emotions, finding joy, and spreading kindness at this stage of pandemic life.
Noted: A recent study from UW-Madison showed that about an additional 100 wolves had been killed during the hunt last winter on top of the 218 killed by hunters and trappers.
“Researchers estimate that a majority of these additional, uncounted deaths are due to something called cryptic poaching, where poachers hide evidence of illegal killings,” a university release about the study said.
“Prices on consumer products have risen one to two percent every year for the past two decades,” said Cliff Robb, a consumer behavior expert at UW-Madison. “But this year, that jump is around four percent.”
World-renowned Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist and UW Madison Zoology Professor Dr. Patricia McConnell said Rafa likely has a mild case of separation anxiety because he paces, whines and is a little destructive. She said a more severe case of separation anxiety could be dangerous for pets.
UW Health medical director of infection prevention Nasia Safdar said these are some of the mitigation strategies necessary to prevent future outbreaks, especially among unvaccinated children. Camp Woodbrooke accepts kids ages seven to 12, which means only a handful of campers are even eligible.
Quoted: Ajay Sethi, professor of population health sciences at UW-Madison, said this scenario is proof the pandemic is not over.
“It’s a good reminder that anybody who is not yet vaccinated against COVID-19 really ought to do so because as soon as you leave your house without a mask, you have a risk of catching the virus,” said Sethi.
Interview with Howard Schweber, a professor of constitutional law and free speech at UW-Madison.
Quoted: Earth’s vegetation is changing as fast as it did during the Ice Age, according to University of Wisconsin geography and climate professor Jack Williams. Organizations like the Prairie Enthusiasts conserving and restoring land makes a big difference.
“One of the things we’ve definitely learned from the past is that when climates change, species move and one way we can help those species is helping this movement across these modern, fragmented, very much transformed landscapes,” Williams said.
Quoted: Thomas Friedrich, professor of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the FT that federal regulations designed to protect people’s privacy can get in the way of the “rapid sharing of information we need.” States interpret these regulations in different ways, he said.
During the 2020-21 academic year, 14 Wisconsin third through fifth grade teachers took part in the Shipwrecks! Game Design Fellowship with PBS Wisconsin Education and Field Day Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Throughout the winter, these educators met with teachers, game designers, researchers and maritime archaeologists to co-design a video game that investigates shipwrecks in the Great Lakes using the practices of maritime archaeologists.
Quoted: “Management of forage fish populations should be based on data that are specific to that forage fish, and to their predators,” University of Wisconsin-Madison Associate Professor Olaf Jensen, a co-author of the study, said. “When there aren’t sufficient data to conduct a population-specific analysis, it’s reasonable to manage forage fish populations for maximum sustainable yield, as we would other fish populations under the Magnuson-Stevens Act.”
Noted: When poor, Black or brown students score lower, it’s not exactly the tests’ fault, says Eric Grodsky, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who analyzed the links between standardized testing and socioeconomic status in the Annual Review of Sociology. That’s because scores reflect disparities in students’ lives before testing. Wealthy students, for example, might have benefited from parents who had more time to read to them as toddlers, all the way through to being able to afford to take both tests, multiple times, to obtain the best score.
Thus, the disparities reflected in test scores result not from a failure of the tests so much as a failure to create a just educational system, Grodsky says. “We don’t do a good job of serving all our kids.” And if test scores determine one’s future opportunities, using them can perpetuate those inequities.
Quoted: “The classic thing is that attackers go in and lurk, sometimes for very long periods of time, and maybe exfiltrate data,” said Molly Jahn, a plant geneticist at University of Wisconsin-Madison who was undersecretary of research, education and economics at USDA in 2009 and 2010 and has done extensive research on cybersecurity. Jahn is currently on loan to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) but spoke to Agri-Pulse in her personal capacity as an expert.
Includes interview with Diana Hess, dean of UW-Madison’s School of Education, about civics education in Wisconsin after an organization gave the state an ‘F’ for its standards for history and civics.
Interview with Shelby O’Connor from the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. Shelby has worked with several other labs at UW-Madison on several specific areas of study, one of which she refers to as passive surveillance.
After contributing to an independent study to assess how many wolves were killed during the February wolf hunt, Professor Adrian Treves expected some criticism. “There’s just more controversy surrounding wolves, their protected status, and the conflict that some people experience with them that makes management very difficult and controversial,” Treves, a professor of environmental studies at UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies, told Wisconsin Examiner. It’s also normal for new research to be debated, questioned, and compared with other existing information. Treves, however, feels that’s not how the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is handling the study’s findings.
This summer, UW-Madison researchers further looked at the links between certain types of crops, the growth in those types of crops and the correlation to a decline in native bees across the state and the midwest as a whole.
“Rarer [bees] that have become increasingly rare, they might not be able to thrive because we’ve eliminated those flowers that they need from the landscape,” said Jeremy Hemberger, a research entomologist at UW-Madison “by converting prairies and wetlands to agriculture and developments.”
The decline of native bees is a decades-long problem that keeps the list of endangered bees growing.
“Native bees are silently playing these really important roles, so just people becoming more aware that there’s all these other groups out there that through our actions we could be supporting, I think is a really valuable thing,” UW-Madison professor Claudio Gratton said.
In an analysis published in the journal PeerJ on July 5, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM) estimate that Wisconsin’s wolf population was reduced by about one-third between April 2020 and April 2021. Specifically, the researchers estimate that 313 to 323 (27 to 33 percent) of the state’s 1,034 wolves were killed by hunters or poachers in that period of time.
Quoted: “The really good news is that if you have gotten your vaccine, you’re not going to be sick with the Delta virus,” said David O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the July 7 edition of Here & Now’s Noon Wednesday.
“Most of the people who are getting sick with the Delta variant, and indeed with covid generally, in the United States are people who are not vaccinated,” said Thomas Friedrich, a professor of pathobiological sciences at UW-Madison, also during the July 7 episode of Noon Wednesday.
Stu Levitan welcomes one of the brightest stars in the firmament that is the University of Wisconsin faculty, Professor Jordan Ellenberg, here to talk about his New York Times best-seller, Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else.
Quoted: Dr. María Carolina Mora Pinzón, a preventive medicine physician and scientist at the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Institute at University of Wisconsin, Madison, says that Latinos are less likely to move a relative into a residential care facility or access other forms of help.
“We have heard from people that are looking for the services, that they are not available for their family members,” said Mora Pinzón. “It’s either an access issue where they are not eligible, or the insurance does not cover these types of services.”
Quoted: There are a few likely reasons why they don’t attack more often. Looking at our physiology, humans evolved to be bipedal — going from moving with all four limbs to walking upright on longer legs, according to John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“There is a threat level that comes from being bipedal,” Hawks told Live Science. “And when we look at other primates — chimpanzees, gorillas, for instance — they stand to express threats. Becoming larger in appearance is threatening, and that is a really easy way of communicating to predators that you are trouble.”
Five months after hunters blew past the DNR’s harvest quota, a population study by UW-Madison researchers highlights an additional estimated impact of poaching the species after it lost federal protections.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at UW-Madison, agreed the tax cut will likely play to the governor’s advantage during campaign season.
“He will not be easy to paint as a tax-and-spend liberal,” Burden said. “I think (the tax cut) takes the edge off some of the criticism that Republicans would use.”
Quoted: Jeff Sindelar is a meat specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension. He said small and mid-size processors saw demand for their services and products expand rapidly in 2020, after coronavirus outbreaks forced large processing plants to reduce capacity or shut down.
“They were really stressed because (farmers) were needing places to go with their animals, (consumers) were interested in buying more protein, and there was also this small hoarding phenomenon that was going on for a short period of time,” Sindelar said.
In the Season 4 premiere episode of Military Matters, host Rod Rodriguez discusses “wokeness” and critical race theory in the military with guests, Brian “BK” Kimber, Air Force veteran and host of the weekly podcast, “World News with BK,” and John Witte, professor emeritus from University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the departments of political science and the Robert La Follette School of Public Affairs.
About 90 percent of kids and families in the country are eligible for some credit, according to UW-Madison professor of public affairs Tim Smeeding. Smeeding said about 80 percent of families will hear from the IRS directly because they filed 2019 or 2020 tax return, but other families still have options.
“Prices on consumer products have risen one to two percent every year for the past two decades,” said Cliff Robb, a consumer behavior expert at UW-Madison. “But this year, that jump is around four percent.”
Includes interview with KT Horning, director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the School of Education.
Guest Dr. Joshua Mezrich, an associate Director of Surgery at University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, shares insights from his book, “When Death Becomes Life: Notes from a Transplant Surgeon.”
And even that is likely an underestimate, according to Adrian Treves, study co-author and professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We took the most conservative estimates of poaching and cryptic poaching,” or illegal hunting that goes unrecorded, he says.
UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said Republicans may have inadvertently handed Evers a huge re-election gift by allowing him to sign such a monumental income tax cut, defusing the GOP attack line that Evers is a tax-and-spend liberal. “I think that’s more the irony in all this,” Burden said. “The budget itself looks like a win for Republicans, they mostly got what they wanted. But the budget I think will help Evers’ re-election and doesn’t do much to help Republicans out.”
“We know that uncertainty can be a major driver of anxiety for some people,” Brian Leitzke, a pediatric psychologist at UW Health said.
“This all takes place in a country like ours with less upward mobility and less opportunity for kids now than in past,” said Tim Smeeding, who studies poverty as a professor of public affairs and economics at UW-Madison. He sees the payments as good public policy “based on the idea that kids are expensive, and society has a shared interest in seeing them thrive.”
Scientists and public health officials are using genomic sequencing to plan for future pandemics and to detect variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, such as the more contagious Delta variant. UW-Madison virology professors and researchers Tom Friedrich and Dave O’Connor explain.
Not everyone in the field is convinced of the timeline, though: Caitlin Pepperell, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison not involved with the study, told NS that when organisms recombine their DNA—like adenovirus C often does, ’the signal gets scrambled.’
“The difference in the survival rate among ICU patients was much higher than I expected,” said William Hartman, an assistant professor of anesthesiology at University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. Hartman was not one of the study authors.
Hilbert is based on pioneering work over the last several decades by Mark Saffman, ColdQuanta’s Chief Scientist for Quantum Information and professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Cold Atoms are nature’s qubits. Their pristine characteristics enable control of their quantum state with a clear pathway to rapidly scaling to multiple thousands of qubits,” said Mark Saffman.
Leslie Bow, a professor of Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin, describes Blackfishing as “a racial masquerade that operates as a form of racial fetishism.”
“There is still so much to learn – how long immunity persists after vaccines, what kinds of reactions people might have with additional doses, and do the vaccines need to be updated for new strains of SARS-CoV2 – that it’s just too soon to know whether we will all need to have booster shots like we do for the flu,” Dr. Jim Conway, medical director of UW Health’s Immunization Program and professor of pediatrics and infectious disease specialist at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, said.
Currently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not recommend boosters for any COVID-19 vaccine, indicating that the need for and timing of COVID-19 booster doses have not been established. It may be a while until those recommendations are made, according to Dr. Jim Conway, medical director, UW Health Immunization Program, and professor of pediatrics and infectious disease specialist, UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that at this time they are not recommending booster doses of any of the COVID-19 vaccines currently in use in the United States. Dr. Jim Conway, the medical director of the UW Health Immunization Program, and professor of pediatrics and infectious disease specialist at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, says it might be a while before those recommendations are made.
“People know the risk, and that’s been a little bit of a wake-up call to ecologists like myself,” said Volker Radeloff, a fire ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
“What the AP has done here is say, ‘Well, we can still report on these cases. But can we really justify the harm that’s being done to people when the case is just a minor crime?’” said Katy Culver, the James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Scientists debate what this floral rearrangement will look like. In some places, it may take place quietly and be easily ignored. In others, though, it could be one of the changing climate’s most consequential and disruptive effects. “There’s a whole lot more of this we can expect over the next decades,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison paleoecologist Jack Williams. “When people talk about wildfires out West, about species moving upslope—to me, this is just the beginning.”
Earthworms are good for the soil, but so-called Jumping Worms, an invasive species from Asia, can devastate gardens and forests. Jumping Worms are spreading across North America. “Invasive species can really quickly do a number on native species that don’t have defense mechanisms against their invader,” said Brad Herrick, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. Herrick told Inside Edition Digital, “It’s still early in the invasion, but it’s happening fast.”
It’s still difficult for Rosa Rivera y Rivera to talk about the village she grew up in. Decimated by the Salvadoran Civil War that left more than 75,000 civilians dead, she hasn’t been back to the land since 1980.
Paula Niedenthal is an emotions researcher and professor of psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She tells Inverse that working toward emotionally express robots is important as well because humans will read emotions into these robots no matter what. Take, for example, food delivery robots milling the streets around UW Madison.
