“Truly every aspect of our lives has been turned on its head,” said Malia Jones, a UW-Madison infectious disease epidemiologist who runs the Facebook page Dear Pandemic.
“I think a really useful way of thinking about these variants isn’t to think about their abstract names which are impossible to remember, it isn’t to think about where they were originally from, but instead, it’s to think about them like individual songs,” explained UW-Madison professor of pathology and laboratory medicine Dave O’Connor.
Quoted: “I think one of the unfortunate things about 2020 was that the election system itself was a top issue,” Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told Newsweek. “It got debated and litigated more than just about any other issue in that election. … And that’s not how elections should be run.”
Noted: Psychologist Richard Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes the brain can be trained, and that exercises including short meditation practices will become routine, like running and weight lifting. Emotional well-being will be as important as physical well-being in the coming years, according to Dr. Davidson.
Noted: Because the association wants to equip as many homes as possible with the Ring devices, leaders had to seek out grant funding to buy the equipment. Salb said Steve Chmielewski, a community educator with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension Waukesha County, has helped facilitate that process, which involves Community Block Grant Funds.
Balancing different needs can be particularly difficult in larger, more diverse districts, says Thomas Friedrich, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, part of a team at the school’s AIDS Vaccine Research Laboratory that is sequencing virus samples from Wisconsin.
Quoted: “Indoor settings with prolonged exposure present the greatest risk for transmission, hence why universal masking is particularly important — even if the individuals are immunized,” said Jim Conway, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute.
“A lot of folks are confused why a Mexican cultural center is with this fight,” said the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Carolina Sarmiento, who isn’t related to the Santa Ana mayor. “We’re not just a facade of Mexican culture. The question of displacement is at the heart of who we serve. It would be a contradiction to be talking about housing rights and immigrant rights and talk about not treating these folks as part of our community.”
10. Finding Your Purpose by Christine Whelan, narrated by the author (Audible Originals)
CHIEF CRITIC: “The typical response by a losing party in a functioning democracy is that they alter their platform to make it more appealing,” Kenneth Mayer, an expert on voting and elections at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the New York Times last week. “Here, the response is to try to keep people from voting. It’s dangerously anti-democratic.”
Quoted: “Most mutations that occur do not cause the virus to be more infectious or deadly, but some variants have mutations that are more concerning,” said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Quoted: Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said Brooks has a responsibility to disclose to his editors, and to readers, his connections with the Aspen Institute and Facebook.
“If the Times and David Brooks are asking people to trust his opinion journalism, then he should be clear about any entanglements that might affect the independence of that journalism,” she said.
Quoted: Whether a registration requirement complies with open-meetings statute has not been tested in the Wisconsin court system, said attorney Philip Freeburg, with UW-Madison Division of Extension’s Local Government Center.
“The main thing about open meetings is to provide open access,” he said. “If you’re putting up barriers to that, I think you may be at some risk.”
Quoted: In 2015, Congress convened a committee to study how to cut child poverty in half within a decade. Hoynes served on that committee, as did Tim Smeeding, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They say the group issued a clear warning to policymakers: Alleviating child poverty would cost billions, yes, but not doing so would be even more expensive.
“We argued that the cost of not doing anything was $800 billion” in lost productivity, as well as in increased costs associated with crime and health care, Smeeding says. “On the other hand, the cost of doing one of our [recommendations] was about $100 to $110 billion — an 8-to-1 return.”
Noted: The number could rise as climate science advances, said Paul Kelleher, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in climate change economics. Advances in translating temperature increases to economic damage have enabled more precise measurements of climate impacts. And the Biden administration has emphasized equity considerations to take into account low-income areas and communities of color, which new modeling makes more possible.
Quoted: “The typical response by a losing party in a functioning democracy is that they alter their platform to make it more appealing,” Kenneth Mayer, an expert on voting and elections at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said. “Here the response is to try to keep people from voting. It’s dangerously antidemocratic.”
The Wisconsin Sea Grant recently released it’s biennial report addressing the organization’s progress on its four pillars: healthy coastal ecosystems; sustainable fisheries and aquaculture; resilient communities and economies; and environmental literacy and workforce development.
Part of the national Sea Grant, the Wisconsin Sea Grant has studied the Great Lakes for more than 50 years.
Jim Hurley, director of the Wisconsin Sea Grant, said it makes sense for the Great Lakes to be part of the Sea Grant because many of the issues that occur in the oceans and coasts also occur in the Great Lakes.
“Issues like sea level rise,” he said. “We’ve seen tremendous fluctuations in Great Lakes water levels. Where they may be looking on the ocean coast at small increments of sea level rise, we’ve seen changes in Lake Michigan of 4 feet over the course of maybe five or six years.”
Quoted: “At a time when we want to encourage saving and investment in the state, the Evers budget would sharply raise the cost of capital by increasing capital gains taxes,” Noah Williams, Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, told the Institute for Reforming Government (IRG), a Wisconsin-based think tank that recently published an analysis of Evers’ budget. “I also think it’s unlikely that the capital gains tax would raise the projected amount of revenue, as past episodes of capital gains increases have found that people either realize the gains before the tax takes hold or delay realization.”
Quoted: Because these mice mimicked Rett model mice in some ways but not in others, it may be that mCAC methylation, “although significant, does not account for the entirety of MECP2 function,” says Qiang Chang, professor of medical genetics and neurology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the work.
If you’ve wondered just how, or whether to, discuss the Holocaust with a younger child, Simone Schweber has a workshop that should be able to help you.
The Goodman Professor of Education and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Schweber will be working with the Jewish Museum Milwaukee this week to host the online event: How to Talk to Your Kids About the Holocaust.
Quoted: Repeated, daily acts of racism at work — like those some employees described last year — can wear people down, said Jerlando Jackson, director and chief research scientist at Wisconsin’s Equity & Inclusion Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In workplaces where employees of color see that harassment is not handled well by supervisors, they might not speak up about their experiences, Jackson said.
The issue is two-fold, he said: most workers face both organizational and internal barriers to success. So even if companies work to address some of the structural hurdles, employees might be struggling silently if they aren’t given a chance to be heard.
Each person carries their burden differently. Many people in hostile work environments eventually quit or are fired, he said.
“Usually there’s no good end to it, for those people,” Jackson said. “Individuals leave opportunities they spent their whole lives trying to get.”
Noted: Brock was a pioneer in studying microbial ecology at Yellowstone, and his research was funded by the National Science Foundation, according to a recent article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Now 94, he retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison after a distinguished career as a professor and researcher and runs a nature conservancy with his wife, Kathie.
As a scientist, Tracey Holloway has spent a lot of time thinking about how climate change is going to affect the world.
As a mother of two young boys, she spends a lot of time thinking about what the world will be like when her youngest son — now only 10 months — turns 30.
“It always seemed like 2050 was so far into the future, but now my baby’s going to be 30 in 2050, and that’s not that far away,” she said.
Holloway, a professor at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been studying air quality and pollution for nearly 20 years. Now, she’s teaming up with other women scientists to help make understanding climate change accessible, forming a group called Science Moms.
Quoted: Omar Poler wants people to recognize that and to remember the people who lost their battle with COVID-19.
‘We never take the time to stop and reflect on the loss we’re all experiencing,’” “A friend said to me, ‘We never take the time to stop and reflect on the loss we’re all experiencing,’” Poler said. “At the same time, a newspaper article came out that said no collective mourning had emerged within the United States.”
Poler is UW-Madison’s Indigenous education coordinator. He wanted to change the way America looks at coronavirus-related deaths. He wanted people to spend a moment grieving.
“What we do is I spend some time before Thursday trying to learn about specific people,” Poler said. “I look through obituaries and try to come up with a way to remember them.”
Noted: Zone designation led to job growth in urban but not rural zones, according to a study led by Alina Arefeva, an assistant professor of real estate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business. Her study didn’t look at activity in 2020.
Quoted: Then there are antioxidants that aren’t exactly considered essential nutrients, but still have effects on cells and tissues, Bradley Bolling, Ph.D., an assistant professor of food science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells SELF. You can find these in plant, animal, and other dietary sources.
Many of these non-essential antioxidants are being studied for their potential effects on optimizing health, preventing chronic disease, promoting longevity, and reducing inflammation, says Dr. Bolling. “There are varying grades of evidence for the effectiveness of these non-nutritive antioxidants,” he says.
Noted: Jonathan L. Temte, associate dean for public health and community engagement at the University of Wisconsin and a liaison to to the covid-19 work group that helped the CDC advisory panel issue its guidelines, called the result a “free-for-all.” The decisions could become even more torturous when a third vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson — which is expected to gain regulatory approval this weekend — joins the mix, though with only a trickle of supply at first.
Noted: Manny Teodoro, a public policy scholar at the University of Wisconsin, suggests that states should prioritize simplicity over precision — by using an allocation formula based on population and poverty. He argues in favor of a two-tier system. Large utilities, which generally have more experience with financial assistance programs and more administrative resources, should be capable of handling outreach and distribution on their own. Smaller utilities, which have less sophisticated billing systems and fewer staff, should be assisted by regional social services agencies.
Denia Garcia, a UW–Madison sociologist whose specialty is race and ethnicity. The answer is that immigrants are a self-selected group. They have the resources and motivation to uproot themselves for a foreign shore. Often, they move to the U.S. to provide better opportunities for their children. Social networks of kin and friends are extraordinarily helpful in navigating their strange new world, including its prejudices, Garcia points out.
Quoted: “Indoor settings with prolonged exposure present the greatest risk for transmission, hence why universal masking is particularly important – even if the individuals are immunized,” said Jim Conway, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute.
Patrick Remington, former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program, said if lawmakers who choose to go maskless are vaccinated against COVID-19, then the risk is lower.
“One obvious question for people not wearing masks is whether they have been vaccinated. If they have, then it seems to be a reasonable thing to do,” Remington said. “That is, the vaccine provides sufficient protection to significantly reduce the risk of becoming sick or getting others sick.”
But according to Jeff Sindelar, meat specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, higher meat prices and empty store shelves weren’t simply due to problems with production. Just like toilet paper and hand sanitizer, consumers who don’t normally buy ahead were stockpiling meat in their home freezers.
As for the future, “We might only be seeing the tip of the iceberg here. In the future, we expect to find many more associations between high-energy neutrinos and their sources,” said Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not directly involved in the study. “There is a new generation of telescopes being built that will provide greater sensitivity to TDEs and other prospective neutrino sources. Even more essential is the planned extension of the IceCube neutrino detector that would increase the number of cosmic neutrino detections at least tenfold.”
“So it’s going to go up from $2,000 to $3,000 for all children, and then an additional $600 for young children,” said Katherine Magnuson, who runs the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said ranked-choice voting systems, such as the proposed bill, removes some power that parties have in choosing their nominees for office because there would no longer be partisan primaries.
Growing cow numbers and increased milk production have dairy experts walking on a knives edge when predicting the trajectory of milk prices for the coming year.
Mark Stephenson, director of Dairy Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the Center for Dairy Profitability and Bob Cropp, emeritus professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, delved into the factors impacting milk prices for 2021 during the February “Dairy Situation and Outlook” podcast this week.
Quoted: David Canon is a political scientist at UW-Madison, and he echoes many of Gardner’s concerns.
“In my view, it’s clearly voter suppression…Our elections are very secure. The number of cases of voter fraud are so infinitesimally small that it’s just not something that changes the outcome of elections,” Canon says.
Clark-Pujara is advocating that the move is the first of many, hoping it would lead to commemorative monuments, statues and museums in every state to celebrate Tubman and teach people about her life and legacy.
Benjamin Baird, a sleep researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who wasn’t involved in this study, told Scientific American the findings “challenge our ideas about what sleep is.” SciAm has more:
“People are hungry – literally hungry to eat these foods,” says Mr. Cornelius, who is also a technical adviser for the Intertribal Agriculture Council, based in Billings, Montana, and an instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But also, in a more figurative sense, they’re just hungry for knowledge.”
Francis Halzen, Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Principal Investigator of IceCube, who was not directly involved in the study, said, “We might only be seeing the tip of the iceberg here. In the future, we expect to find many more associations between high-energy neutrinos and their sources. A new generation of telescopes will be built that will provide greater sensitivity to TDEs and other prospective neutrino sources. Even more essential is the planned extension of the IceCube neutrino detector, that would increase the number of cosmic neutrino detections at least tenfold.”
Elizabeth Howard, founder and director of Journey North at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum, told The Nature Conservancy’s “Cool Green Science” that the birds “can withstand very cold temperatures. In most places you can see robins in the wintertime. You’ll see them wandering around and yet it’s not considered migration because basically they’re moving in a nomadic way, following the food.”
Quoted: Benjamin Baird, a sleep researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who wasn’t involved in this study, told Scientific American the findings “challenge our ideas about what sleep is.” SciAm has more: Sleep has classically been defined as unresponsiveness to external environmental stimuli—and that feature is still typically part of the definition today, Baird explains. “This work pushes us to think carefully—rethink, maybe—about some of those fundamental definitions about the nature of sleep itself, and what’s possible in sleep.”
Noted: Brenda Gayle Plummer is a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in African American history, the history of U.S. foreign relations, race in international affairs and Caribbean history. She is the author of several books, most recently of In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956-1974.
As we approach a full year of this pandemic and attempt to survive sub-zero Wisconsin winter, many of us are tired; physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I teach at UW-Madison and the beginning of the semester is always an intense energetic marathon for me so I find myself having to be extra mindful about resting. So this month’s piece isn’t about food, but about rest as a political practice of resistance.
Quoted: “That high-resolution temporal record is, I think, pretty impressive,” says Brad Singer, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the history of the Earth’s magnetic field but was not part of the research team. “This is only a small number of specimens that they measured, but the results look fairly reproducible in the different trees, and I think that’s a pretty impressive set of data.”
Quoted: These findings “challenge our ideas about what sleep is,” says Benjamin Baird, a postdoctoral researcher who studies dreams at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was not involved in this study. Sleep has classically been defined as unresponsiveness to external environmental stimuli—and that feature is still typically part of the definition today, Baird explains. “This work pushes us to think carefully—rethink, maybe—about some of those fundamental definitions about the nature of sleep itself, and what’s possible in sleep.”
Quoted: “This work challenges the foundational definitions of sleep,” says cognitive neuroscientist Benjamin Baird of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who studies sleep and dreams but was not part of the study. Traditionally, he says, sleep has been defined as a state in which the brain is disconnected and unaware of the outside world.
Noted: Demand for electricity goes up when temperatures drop, said Dr. Line Roald, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The surprising part of what happened in Texas was that so many generators — from nuclear and natural gas plants to wind turbines — stopped producing energy due to the freezing temperatures, she said.
Quoted: “That would be a really interesting future direction of this methodology,” Benjamin Baird tells Inverse. Baird is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who studies lucid dreams, but was not involved in this study. He also has lucid dreams himself.
“It’s a mix of everything coming together,” said Line Roald, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UW-Madison. “It’s the generators we think of as being super reliable not being reliable at all.”
Like so many great scientific discoveries, Tom Brock started the research that would go on to revolutionize the field of biology — and pave the road to the development of the gold-standard COVID-19 tests used to fight a pandemic — with a question.
To bring surgical and cloth masks up to par with N95s and KN95s, you can opt for a mask brace, which is an even better solution than double masking, says David Rothamer, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has conducted work evaluating mask braces.”It’s kind of interesting that it’s taken awhile for mask fitters or braces to have more visibility,” Rothamer tells Popular Mechanics. “The whole double masking thing is really trying to do the same thing as a mask fitter or a brace, but in a more indirect way. My main concern with double masking is that it’s going to depend on the combination of the two masks.”
While the life expectancy gap between Black, Latino and white populations were narrowing before the pandemic, overall life expectancy was steadily declining because of a variety of public health issues, said Michal Engelman, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In Wisconsin, while the maternal mortality ratios are lower in absolute terms than the nationwide average, the magnitude of the gap between Black mothers and white mothers is larger, said Tiffany Green, University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor in the Departments of Population Health Sciences and Obstetrics and Gynecology.
These national figures likely reflect similar trends in Wisconsin, says Kristen Malecki, professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
But the US experienced a backslide due to the pandemic, according to Michal Engelman, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“This has been an issue of concern for a while, that we weren’t making progress and we were sliding a little bit backwards,” Engelman told the newspaper. “After a couple of years of worrisome declines, we dropped as a country a whole year just in the first half of 2020.”
“You’ve got a small number of academic and public health labs that have been basically doing the genomic surveillance,” said David O’Connor, an AIDS researcher at the University of Wisconsin. “But there is no national coherence to the strategy.”
Adrian Treves, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is concerned about the quick opening of a season. He says the population’s data is not current enough to justify holding a season without putting the wolf population in a tenuous situation.
In this episode, UW-Madison journalism professor Michael Wagner, speaks with Girard and Reilly about how political attitudes and behaviors are affected by the ways in which information flows across the state.
Quoted: “When you’re talking about winter, (humans) are really wimps,” said David Drake, professor of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It helps our appreciation of wildlife, I think, to understand how the animals are able to make it through the season.”
