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.
Earth’s vegetation is changing as quickly now as it changed at the end of the ice age 10 to 15 thousand years ago according to research in part out of the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has joined an international effort to create a pandemic prevention institute aimed at helping researchers, public health officials and governments respond quickly to future pandemics.
Mary Thurber, clinical instructor in zoological medicine at UW-Madison and Vilas’ primary veterinarian, said zookeepers continue to take precautions around animals potentially at risk of contracting COVID-19, including wearing facemasks.
Quoted: In many states, the basic requirements for becoming a police officer are lower than they are for other professions, according to Jirs Meuris, assistant professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin’s school of business.
“You need 1,500 [hours of training] to become a barber, on average — you need years of trade school to become a plumber or electrician,” he said.
In addition, a new report published last week and co-authored by former Kentucky secretary of state Trey Grayson, a Republican, and University of Wisconsin Professor Barry C. Burden concluded that the Arizona procedures “deviate significantly from standard practices for election reviews and audits” and that any findings are “suspect and should not be trusted.”
Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and director of the school’s Elections Research Center, said the latest extension was “yet another sign that the Cyber Ninjas are in over their heads and didn’t really have the experience or qualifications to do the review that they’re doing.”
Quoted: “It could radically change the meaning of the text,” Prof. Howard Schweber from UW-Madison’s political science department said. Unless the legislature could overturn the partial veto with an unlikely two-thirds majority vote, that would be the law.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Associate Professor of Population Health Sciences Ajay Sethi does anticipate that Wisconsin will reach the 70% mark this summer but says the goal isn’t to stop at that benchmark but to keep vaccinating.
“I do think that will start to change things,” said UW Madison Law Professor Ryan Poe-Gavlinski.
Quoted: A legal expert who spoke with FOX6 News said he understands why the Pennsylvania Supreme Court made the ruling it did.
“The victim here can’t force the prosecutor to prosecute,” said Ion Meyn, an assistant law professor at UW-Madison.
Meyn also said he disagrees with former Castor’s decision to not bring charges against Cosby in 2005.
“So at that time, she wanted to move forward when the evidence was as fresh as possible, to go through with the civil litigation. That makes sense,” Meyn said.
In extreme heat, asphalt gets soft and behaves kind of like peanut butter, says Hussain Bahia, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin who heads the school’s Modified Asphalt Research Center. Put it in an oven and it will become a “slush fluid,” he says. Sustained heat on roads not built for heat can lead to potholes, pockmarks, and bumps.
Quoted: “Pocan has been is kind of taken up the mantle that Baldwin had kind of started in the House,” said Dave Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And he’s been really active in the Equality Caucus in the House and played a key role in helping get that passed through the House.”
The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health is recruiting volunteers for a Phase 3 clinical trial of a treatment aimed at stopping Alzheimer’s disease even before the first symptoms of memory loss.
Noted: Zoo veterinarians injected the bonobo in the hip with medication to render him unconscious. Then, Schroeder and a colleague, Kyle Bartholomew, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, injected Qasai with two additional medications, Lidocaine and Propofol.
Noted: Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison looked at data on covid-19 cases across the U.S. reported during the spring of 2020 and focused on comparing counties with prisons and jails to those without them. After controlling for other variables linked to covid-19 spread, like nearby nursing homes or population density, they found a clear link between having a state prison in the area and increased covid-19 cases.
“Our big takeaway from this research is that prisons are a particularly vulnerable type of facility when it comes to risk for disease spread, which may add additional stress to rural healthcare systems that are already struggling to cope with the pandemic,” study author Kaitlyn Sims, a doctoral student in agricultural and applied economics at UW–Madison, told Gizmodo in an email.
Quoted: The Maricopa County review “does not meet the standards of a proper election recount or audit,” said an evaluation of the ballot review by Trey Grayson, former Republican Kentucky secretary of state, and Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist.
While it may seem there are more of the pesky biters this year, it’s not clear if the number of ticks is higher this year than other years, said PJ Leisch, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison insect diagnostic lab.
But by those same parameters, if we were observing our own solar system from afar, we might think Venus should be Earth-like too. “If you can’t understand Venus, which is our closest Earth-like neighbor, what chance do you have of believing anything some astrophysicist tells us about exoplanets?” says planetary scientist Sanjay Limaye of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Limaye is part of a contingent of Venus researchers interested in finding out whether its cloud layer could still host microbial life. In 2020, investigators reported in the journal Nature Astronomy seeing signatures of phosphine—a chemical known thus far only to come from biological sources—in the atmosphere. Though claims about the possible discovery didn’t pan out, the news helped to spotlight the planet as an overlooked astrobiology target.
Elections experts are already warning that any conclusion drawn from the Arizona review will be untrustworthy. A report from the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center, co-authored by former Kentucky Republican Secretary of State Trey Grayson and Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, ripped into the Arizona effort as being poorly run and not transparent.
Quoted: While it may seem there are more of the pesky biters this year, it’s not clear if the number of ticks is higher this year than other years, said PJ Leisch, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison insect diagnostic lab.
“It’s my overall impression that it’s rather variable depending on where you are in Wisconsin,” he said. “In some areas, ticks are having a good year, in other spots, it’s typical levels.”
The move could be “a really big deal” for people with diabetes, said Dawn Davis, an associate professor and endocrinologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
One of the biggest grilling weekends of the year is almost here. There’s more to grilling successfully than you may realize.
Quoted: “I think it’s clear it’s a contributing factor. What we don’t know is how large,” said Noah Williams, director at the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy at UW-Madison. “It is the one piece which is most amenable to policy change.”
“That doesn’t gain us anything on the deficit that we had accumulated, but these plants need it now,” UW-Madison’s agronomy professor Christopher Kucharik said. “This was actually a really good stretch for them.”
Quoted: “It’s more contagious than the viruses that have come before, and it’s a little bit slippery so immune responses don’t work quite as well against it,” said Dave O’Connor, Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Migraines affect more than 40 million people in the United States and are the number two cause of disability worldwide.
