Researchers led by Guilherme Gainett from the University of Wisconsin-Madison first sequenced the genome of Phalangium opilio (technically not a spider but a close relative), thought to be among the most widespread of more than 6,000 different species of daddy long legs — also known as harvestmen — documented worldwide.
Noted: Utilizing RNA interference, researchers at the University of Wisconsin Madison were able to sequence the genome of Phalangium opilio and modify six of the arachnids’ eight legs and turn them into half their normal size.
“We’ve shown… how the combinations of these genes create a blueprint in the embryo to differentiate between what’s going to be a leg that is used for walking and what is going to be a pedipalp, which can be used to manipulate food and assess the surroundings,” the study’s lead author, Guilherme Gainett at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview with New Scientist.
Quoted: “If they have issues with their immune system or are immunocompromised, I would say now is probably not a great time to travel, because there are so many things that are outside of your control,” said Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics.
Researchers studying how poverty and adversity affect children’s development often track how negative experiences — be they poverty itself or factors such as having an incarcerated parent — affect decision-making, stress levels or aspects of brain function. But Seth Pollak, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says that most of these efforts miss a crucial but long-overlooked component: children’s perceptions of their experiences.
Pollak spoke with Knowable Magazine about the importance of studying individual differences in experience.
Quoted: “We know that masking allows children to be in school safely, reduces transmission of COVID, and, really importantly, if children are masked, then it provides much less disruption to kids, because they don’t need to be quarantined if they’re exposed to a case of COVID,” said Greg DeMuri, a pediatric epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: The study started in Dane County and contains a disproportionate level of samples from that area, cautioned David O’Connor, one of the authors of the new study and a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Scientists stressed that despite having comparable levels of virus, vaccinated patients remain far less likely than the unvaccinated to become severely ill, hospitalized or die from COVID-19.
Also, O’Connor said the 83 Dane County cases showed that unvaccinated people are more than twice as likely to get the virus as those who’ve been vaccinated.
“What we’re seeing here is that the vaccines are doing a superb job of keeping people out of the hospital,” O’Connor said.
Quoted: Although underpaid, poorly treated service workers certainly exist around the world, American expectations on their behavior are particularly extreme and widespread, according to Nancy Wong, a consumer psychologist and the chair of the consumer-science department at the University of Wisconsin. “Business is at fault here,” Wong told me. “This whole industry has profited from exploitation of a class of workers that clearly should not be sustainable.”
Noted: Some species’ hindmost legs can grow so long that competing suitors will line up to compare them. “Whichever male has the longest leg wins, and it’s the one that is going to mate,” Guilherme Gainett, a developmental biologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me.
Some answers might be hidden in the harvestmen genome. Gainett and Sharma, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, recently teamed up with the genomics expert Vanessa González, of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, to cobble together the first-ever draft of the genome of Phalangium opilio, the world’s most widespread harvestman species.
Quoted: “For this idea of boosters, it’s going to be hard to control. You just have to rely on local public health departments and local providers to prevent that from happening,” said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “It’s conceivable that the two races in Wisconsin could unfold somewhat differently, said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The governor’s race will largely be about Evers’ handling of the pandemic, the budget he recently signed, and the state’s economic situation,” Burden said via email. “The Senate contest is more likely to focus on the Biden administration and whether the president’s efforts to address the pandemic and the economy are necessary remedies or harmful government overreach.”
Noted: Fascinated by the way these appendages develop differently, Guilherme Gainett at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues teamed up with genome specialists at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC to draft a sequence of the genome of a lab-raised harvestman.
“We’ve shown… how the combinations of these genes create a blueprint in the embryo to differentiate between what’s going to be a leg that is used for walking and what is going to be a pedipalp, which can be used to manipulate food and assess the surroundings,” says Gainett.
Quoted: Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said she has some sympathy for Chris Cuomo and his desire to help his brother.
“As hard as it is to see your brother mired in controversy, your obligation as a journalist is to the public you serve,” she said. “If it’s true that Chris Cuomo drafted the statement later put out by the governor’s office or he encouraged an approach that emphasized contrition, his involvement was deeper than what he disclosed to viewers in May. That moves far beyond being ‘looped in to phone calls’ with staff members. It’s playing an active role in shaping the narrative of the controversy.”
“We have learned so much in the past year and we have so much more data to guide our decisions going forward,” said UW Health pediatric infectious diseases specialist Dr. Gregory DeMuri. “Now that we have this information, it is our job to use what we’ve learned. If we do that, kids can return to school and near-normal activities.”
In Wisconsin, we try to adjust our deer population up or down by releasing fewer, or more quotas for antlerless deer, because that’s where you get the population control,” Tim Van Deelen, UW-Madison Prof. of Forestry and Wildlife Ecology said.
Local health officials continue encouraging vaccination. “We’ll see severe disease in people who are not vaccinated, and I think we’ll see amplification and movement of the virus in those individuals to begin with. Because of that, it’s likely there will be continued spread and transmission of Delta,” UW-Health’s Dr. Nasia Safdar.
Noted: “Karl Polanyi for President,” a 2016 article in Dissent that Konczal coauthored with Patrick Iber, is a useful companion piece to Freedom from the Market, and helps illuminate the intellectual genealogy of its arguments.
As Konczal and Iber explain, Polanyi’s most famous work, The Great Transformation (1944), is devoted in large part to a critique of the idea that the so-called “free market” is a precondition for, and guarantor of, freedom more generally. “Polanyi’s work dismantles this argument in two important ways,” they write, first by showing that “markets are planned everywhere they exist.”
Translated from Spanish
Quoted: In fact, for the historian and writer Patrick Iber, author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America, “it is very possible that a student activist in Nicaragua, fighting against the Ortega dictatorship, could move to the United States. and endorse Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren as president. Not everyone would, of course, but it would not be inconsistent, “he said in an interview with El Tiempo Latino.
Americans born in the 1990s have experienced various economic traumas in their lives, says the professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I think that when people express their support for socialism, what they are saying is that the capitalist system is not working well enough. They are saying: “My society says this is capitalism, and I am suffering, so I am against capitalism,” he explains. “These failures, even if someone from Venezuela or Nicaragua would prefer them to the failures of their systems, they are real and it is fair that politics is a scenario in which people demand that their countries do better.”
Quoted: The CDC study “raises the very worrisome possibility that high viral loads can occur in people who have delta, and this is a fundamental as we have to approach the fall and winter,” said David O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Noted: The idea, first put forth in a 2012 paper by Jennifer Francis, now at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, and Stephen Vavrus, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is that two well-established trends — Arctic amplification (intensified global warming at higher latitudes) and depleted sea ice — can force the polar jet stream to dip farther south, thus causing more intense bouts of winter weather than might have otherwise occurred.
Noted: In July, University of Wisconsin scientist Adrian Treves and two colleagues concluded in their new study that the population of gray wolves in Wisconsin is significantly lower than estimated by the DNR. While the DNR made claims about how the February trophy killing season would not cause much of a change in the overall wolf population numbers, mass slaughter during the middle of the breeding season would indeed have a significant impact on the population. This study shows that the population of gray wolves in Wisconsin in April likely falls between 695-751 rather than the far fluffier projections presented by the Wisconsin DNR.
Noted: Dr. Tiffany Green, who was not among the authors of the new research, told Medical News Today that the study aligns with separate research regarding patients who had undergone a cesarean birth.
Dr. Green, of the departments of population health sciences and obstetrics & gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is senior author of a study that was presented at the 2020 Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine Conference.
Dr. Green and her team found that, “Black patients reported higher average levels of pain compared to white patients, but still received similar amounts of pain medication.” Controlling for reported pain scores, explained Dr. Green, they received less pain medication than their white counterparts. This was also true of Asian patients.
Quoted: In response to a second statute cited by Flaherty, related to failure to pay fines, fees, surcharges or court costs, Cecelia Klingele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School professor, said “a judge can decide to impose a jail sentence until the money is paid.” She also noted that, “implicit in that power is some ability to monitor whether the money is paid or the work is done, though the statute does not spell out what such monitoring might look like.”
“In short it’s slow, and it takes time. And that’s a good thing for the most part because that means we are trying to get the facts right because the stakes are really high,” says UW law professor Cecelia Klingele. Klingele says it’s common for charges to be added in a fast moving investigation like the Halderson case.
Written by Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin and the author of Shape and How Not to Be Wrong.
This might be the year for ticks. Or cicadas. But not so much for mosquitoes.
With a long and cold spring earlier this year, mosquitoes didn’t have as much of a chance to ramp up in numbers, said Lyric Bartholomay, a professor in the department of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wiscconsin-Madison.
“I don’t have complete evidence of that, but that’s what I suspect,” she said.
Mosquitoes are pesky, no doubt, but Bartholomay said they’re also integral to the health of local habitats, specifically to birds, bats, ducks and other species that feed on them.
In fact, Bartholomay said that in places where mosquito larvae are well controlled, birds get less protein, which then impairs their own reproduction.
“It’s very likely that (mosquitoes are) really important in a way we under-appreciate,” she said.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center and professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told USA TODAY the image was misleading.
“Because elections are decided by the votes of actual people rather than the land represented by county borders, it is incorrect to conclude that a state is ‘red’ or ‘blue’ because most of the counties in that state are of the same color,” he wrote in an email. “Many counties in the U.S. have extremely small populations that do not contribute much to the statewide result.”
Quoted: Keith Findley, a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Yamahiro can essentially pick any licensed attorney in the state for the task.
That person will then review all the evidence in the case. They could ask the police for more reports or issue subpoenas as well.
“She or he will then evaluate all of the evidence and determine whether it’s appropriate to proceed with a prosecution,” Findley said.
Noted: Citizen-initiated John Does are rarely used in Wisconsin. Marcus Berghahn, a criminal defense attorney and adjunct law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said they happen perhaps once or twice a decade in the state.
While Madison’s students are preparing for the fall semester, the Delta coronavirus variant is complicating plans for the upcoming school year. According to local public health officials, Delta is now the dominant coronavirus strain in Dane County.
For more on what the Delta surge means for local students, our Producer Jonah Chester spoke with Dr. Gregory DeMuri, a professor of pediatrics at UW-Madison.
Quoted: “Breakthrough infections started out at a very low rate. But now with the delta variant and the higher ease of transmissibility, those breakthrough infections are growing,” said Dr. Nasia Safdar, director of infection control at UW Hospital and Clinics and faculty at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “So, the mask then will be this extra layer of protection in addition to the vaccine. Of course, it’s crucial for unvaccinated people (to mask up) because they don’t have that layer of protection from the vaccine.”
“There’s no way to sugarcoat it, it’s going to be bad,” said Kurt Paulsen, University of Wisconsin-Madison urban planning professor. He explained that the eviction moratorium barred landlords from evicting tenants who were unable to pay their rent during the pandemic, but that renters are still ultimately on the hook for all the rent they missed when the moratorium expires.
“Thousands and thousands of renters have been unable to pay the rent because of unemployment or COVID-related financial hardships, and eventually the rent comes due,” Paulsen said.
Quoted: The CDC based their recommendation on new evidence about the delta variant. Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said he would classify the latest science as “a bit of a game-changer.”
“We didn’t know this was going to be the case until we discovered that people who are vaccinated and get a breakthrough infection can potentially spread that to other people and that wasn’t the case before delta,” Sethi said.
Quoted: Public health officials do not know how long the immune system protects itself after an infection with COVID-19 and encourage all eligible people to get the vaccine.
“The duration of that protection is unknown,” said Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. “The science is already showing that people who have had the vaccine have better responses to the (delta) variant than people who had past infection.”
Written by Susan Yackee, director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs and a Collins-Bascom Professor of Public Affairs and Political Science at UW-Madison.
Noted: Trump’s agencies wrote fewer rules than past administrations, including other Republican ones, says Susan Yackee, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin who focuses on rule-making. Although many controversial regulations wind up in court, agencies typically win those cases, she told me. Here, too, the Trump administration was an outlier: It lost a lot.
A day after the CDC announced new mask guidance based on new research that shows infected, vaccinated people could spread the Delta variant of the coronavirus to unvaccinated people, researchers at UW-Madison say that type of spread is likely happening here, too. Professors Dave and Shelby O’Connor say that the new research shows vaccinated people who experience a breakthrough infection of the Delta variant carry high loads of virus deep within their noses.
Howard Schweber, a political law professor at UW-Madison, pointed to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s tracking of voter fraud cases, noting it had found a total of 47 cases going back to 2004.”It’s almost impossible for me to express how absurd the search for culprits in voting fraud is,” Schweber said.
While the debate over enhanced federal unemployment aid in Wisconsin has been settled for now, the broader, national discussion on the issue continues.
At least 26 states have cut their ties with the program. Business owners and interest groups argue that ending the additional aid is the best way to address difficulties in hiring new workers.
For more on the debate, WORT producer Jonah Chester spoke with Laura Dresser, a labor economist at UW-Madison.
Industry experts Mark Stephenson and Bob Cropp say they see optimism in price and supply for the coming months, according to the latest episode of the Dairy Markets and Policy podcast.
Cropp, professor emeritus of UW-Madison’s Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, said cold storage reports bring both bad and good news to dairy farmers: American cheese stocks are slowly decreasing at 2% this month, but butter stocks have gone up 14% in the same timeframe. Stephenson, director of the Center for Dairy Profitability, said cheese stocks will continue to see rising price support.
Quoted: The authority of the minister and her deputies in advocating vaccination doesn’t guarantee a new national attitude, says Aikande Kwayu, honorary research fellow specializing in political governance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is based in Tanzania.
“Their actions and statements during the last administration influenced a lot of conspiracies, lies and also denial about the pandemic,” says Kwayu.
Quoted: Lead author Adrian Treves, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, argues that without a more precise number the hunt quota should be set as low as is possible.
“A quota of one would comply with the statute [mandating a hunt] and acknowledge that we have no clue how successfully the wolves reproduced this year,” Treves said. “Because the hunt happened during the mating season, we would need good data on how many packs produced pups, and that is data we do not have.”
Video: Interview with Professor Michael Wagner with the University of Wisconsin Madison’s – School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Quoted: “I have The Nature and Properties of Soils in front of me — the standard textbook,” said Gregg Sanford, a soil researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “The theory of soil organic carbon accumulation that’s in that textbook has been proven mostly false … and we’re still teaching it.”
Quoted: “People respond to price changes by shifting their consumption,” according to Noah Williams, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Quoted: “If you look at the language of some of these bills, they’re really pretty broad,” says Diana Hess, dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s school of education. “There’s a lot of things that are in the language that would make it really hard to teach civic education.”
For today’s show, Tuesday host Carousel Bayrd talks about uncovering UW–Madison’s campus history with Kacie Lucchini Butcher, director of the Public History Project. They discuss some of the project’s research, including fraternity ties to the Ku Klux Klan, housing discrimination, blackface and minstrelsy on campus, and the UWPD.
Quoted: “The virus multiplies exponentially so 10 today could be 100 tomorrow,” said Dr. Nasia Safdar, director of infection control at UW Hospital and Clinics and faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. Safdar urged people to take precautions like mask wearing and getting vaccinated.
“All around us, we are surrounded by high transmission, and it’s just a matter of time before we are right in there with the rest of the country,” she said.
Quoted: “If that indeed means that vaccinated people can become a source of transmission, though not the majority of transmission, mask use is a good idea,” said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Doctors and researchers who share Ciappa’s hope are worried about how much progress the movement lost during the last year and a half. “It took time to get those family-centered policies into the fabric of hospitals,” said Traci Snedden, a career critical care nurse and assistant professor of nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Will Covid give clinicians permission to pull back again, or will it propel us forward like, ‘I can’t believe we went without family at the bedside’?”
Noted: The law Motley is seeking to use — Wisconsin Statute 968.02 — is similar to a John Doe proceeding, but is technically not the same thing, according to Keith Findley, a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Findley said the law is essentially used as a check on the court system. Findley also said Statute 968.02 means a judge has more discretion when it comes to filing charges. Under the statute, a judge “may” file charges if they find probable cause.
With several professional athletes taking a break to place their mental health as a priority, UW Health’s Distinguished Sports Pscyhologist Dr. Shilagh Mirgain encourages fans and family to remain supportive. “She’s human. She’s really showing that the weight of that pressure can really undermine people’s performance. And she really did what was best for her, prioritizing her mental health by pulling out of this competition,” explained Dr. Mirgain.
UW Health’s Dr. Jeff Pothof says that new research shows how alarmingly that Delta variant spreads. “We have studies that show in folks unvaccinated, their viral load can be 1,000 times greater than what we saw with normal COVID,” he said.
UW Madison Professor and Director of Money, Relationships and Equality Initiative Christin Whelan, researches these kinds of societal trends.“Every job has a uniform, but when you are an athlete, what you want to be able to do is be skilled, be strong, be powerful,” Whelan said.
UW Health’s Dr. Jeff Pothof said the Delta variant is one factor driving the change in guidance, as there are more breakthrough cases. The CDC now believes vaccinated people may spread the variant just as easy as vaccinated people.
Dr. Shilagh Mirgain, a distinguished sports psychologist at the UW, said performance anxiety is often a part of high-level competition. “For many people it can actually fuel them to show up their best to give it their all. But they can reach a tipping point,” she said.
Quoted: “It is as simple as if we’re all vaccinated, hanging out together in large groups, however large you want, that becomes a safe thing to do,” said Dr. Pothoff, an emergency medicine doctor at UW Health.
Quoted: “It’s almost like a personal tourniquet system. So you have a cuff that’s applied to your arm or leg that significantly reduces blood flow,” Marc Sherry, a physical therapist and manager of the UW Health Sports Rehabilitation Department in Madison, Wisconsin, told TODAY. “The basic premise is that it’s inflated to a pressure that prevents the blood from coming out of your arm but doesn’t prevent the blood from going into your arm.”
Quoted: Adrian Treves, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied wolf-hound conflicts, found that neighboring Michigan, which has stricter hounding regulations, has seen far fewer dogs injured or killed by wolves. Lighter regulation in Wisconsin means more dogs in the woods, Treves said, which leads to more conflict. “Houndsmen prefer to hunt in a place that lets them do what they want to do.”
Quoted: Landlords have a lot more options available to them than eviction, Madison-based rental housing lawyer and University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor Mitch said. Mitch said property owners can negotiate rather than file evictions that will go permanently on the tenant’s record.
“I know that eviction isn’t the only tool in your toolbox when renters don’t pay, and I wish that property owners would realize that they have other tools such as working out agreements on early move-outs, working on payment plans or working together to get government assistance,” Mitch said.
