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It’s not even a question. Students for Fair Admissions revealed the discrimination against Asian-Americans with their lawsuit against Harvard. In their petition to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, they documented how Asian students who were academically in the top 10% of Harvard applicants were accepted at a rate of 12.7%, white applicants at a rate of 15.3%, black applicants at a rate of 56.1%, and Hispanics at a rate of 31.3%.

—Jonathan Draeger, University of Wisconsin Madison, economics

In 2020, in conversations stimulated directly by the racial unrest of the time, ASCB leaders decided to systematically examine the awards process. “Forty years is a long time to go without thinking hard from the outside about what’s going on,” said Bill Bement, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who volunteered to lead a task force on the issue. “There was a lot of dust that had to be shrugged off.”

Malia Jones, an epidemiologist who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and who specializes in vaccine hesitancy, said it has been clear for a while that getting children vaccinated against Covid is going to be an uphill battle. She worries that the low level of confidence in Covid vaccines for children will erode parental support for other vaccines. “This is the thing that keeps me up at night,” she said.

If traveling by vehicle, pack a winter survival kit, and in the event of getting stranded in the snow, stay with the vehicle. Laura Albert, an industrial engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies emergency response and preparedness, recommends packing such a kit with jumper cables, a small shovel, a flashlight, warm clothes, blankets, bottled water and nonperishable snacks, and a bag of sand or cat litter to regain traction on snow or ice.

“The idea of being branded a traitor to your country, of committing sedition, stands out,” said Joshua Braver, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin. “It sends a certain political message.”

Pretty much all we can say for sure about the flu is that—as Malia Jones, a population-health expert at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told us—it is “a huge pain in the butt, but also not a global pandemic, most of the time. Unfortunately, there is not a single word for that.”

In a “worst-case scenario,” Gostic said, Delta could transform into something capable of catching up with Omicron, and the two would tag-team. Dual circulation doesn’t just double the number of variants we have to deal with; it “leaves open the possibility for recombination,” a phenomenon in which two coronavirus flavors can swap bits of their genomes to form a nasty hybrid offspring, Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. (Delta’s brutality + Omicron’s stealth = bad-news bears.) Alternatively, a daughter of Delta may totally overtake Omicron, exacting its ancestor’s sweet, sweet revenge. Or maybe the next variant that usurps the global throne will be a bizarro spawn of Alpha … or something else entirely. In the same way that Omicron was not a descendent of Delta, the next variant we tussle with won’t necessarily sprout from Omicron.

Simone Schweber, Goodman Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says there are already so few living Holocaust survivors left, and few teachers have the resources or the time to teach historically and emotionally complex topics.

Part of the problem, David O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin, said, is that the CDC may have painted itself into a corner by initially describing those who went through a two-dose mRNA vaccine course as “fully vaccinated,” despite not knowing the long-term efficacy of the vaccines against new variants.

But because sedition charges so rarely go to trial, there isn’t a great deal of precedent for how such trials proceed, experts say. And US prosecutors have a checkered history in securing sedition convictions. “It’s been used in ways that have been absurd and has been used in ways that were slam dunks,” said Joshua Braver, an assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin.

That’s because cash payments “help stabilize and support the children’s home environment by paying bills that keep the lights on, or buying cleaning products to keep the home safe and clean, or paying rent,” Dr. Katherine Anne Magnuson, a social policy professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who helped lead the study, told Insider.

At this point in the pandemic, it has become more difficult for epidemiologists to say with certainty whether one variant reaches a higher viral load or how that viral load correlates with infectiousness, notes Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. That is because so many people have now been infected with COVID or received different numbers of vaccine doses, meaning that their immune systems respond differently to the newer variant. “It’s too complicated to say one variant will produce a higher viral load,” Sethi says.

The findings build on evidence that cash support can improve outcomes for older children, said co-author Katherine Magnuson, director of the National Institute for Research on Poverty and Economic Mobility, based at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

“There is such a thing as righteous anger, because that is not about you and your personal ego; it really is the anger you’re feeling on the behalf of the vulnerable,” Dekila Chungyalpa, the director of the Loka Initiative at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. The initiative is a home for faith leaders who want to engage with climate change. Chungyalpa herself learned about transforming anger into love from her upbringing as a Tibetan Buddhist, as well as from Black women leaders such as the late bell hooks. “That kind of anger can galvanize and create change,” she said. “And the trick is to figure out how to direct it in a way that is productive.” If you ruminate on your anger without doing anything with it, it can make you snappish and irritable with those you love; it can boil inside you. It needs an outlet, and what better outlet than activism and advocacy?

But beware of the “false dichotomy” between collective action and individual action, Morgan Edwards, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a leader of the university’s Climate Action Lab told ABC News, adding that reducing personal emissions or shaming others’ lifestyles is not fulfilling or effective.

Haynes stressed his team is trying to get to large-scale human trials “as quickly as possible.” But in the worst-case scenario, it could take years to develop, test and deploy a pan-COVID vaccine, warned Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is working on his own universal jab.

Bids to curb so-called fraud are becoming standard for Republican candidates who want to win over voters, Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview. “Whoever is the nominee in 2024, whether it’s Trump or anyone else, it will likely be part of their platform,” Mr. Burden said.

Legalizing suppliers by helping them file paperwork is at the crux of JBS’s strategy to clean up its supply chain. That’s not the same as eliminating deforestation. “Consumers and governments coming together don’t want zero illegality—they want zero deforestation,” said Holly Gibbs, who runs the land-use lab at the University of Wisconsin. “There’s a big difference.”

Pet owners who are concerned about regular vaccines can opt for titer testing, which can measure whether animals have sufficient antibodies from previous core vaccines. Animals with high enough antibody levels don’t need booster shots, said Dr. Laurie J. Larson, director of the Companion Animal Vaccines and Immuno-Diagnostics Service Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine.

In a remarkable study several years ago, Selin Kesebir of the London Business School and the psychologist Pelin Kesebir of the University of Wisconsin at Madison found that references to nature in novels, song lyrics, and film story lines began decreasing in the 1950s, while references to the human-made environment did not.

The ash cloud was drifting westward and aircrafts will be likely diverted around its periphery as a precaution, said Scott Bachmeier, a research meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Besides keeping them in cold cars while moving them around, we don’t have any experience testing in extreme cold or extreme heat,” said Dave O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin. “My guess—but it is purely a guess—is that freezing of the liquid could cause performance issues if it thaws and isn’t mixed thoroughly.”

“They dissolve easily in water,” says environmental engineer Christy Remucal, who studies PFAS in her lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Remucal was not involved in the testing of the Lake Superior fish.) So, the chemicals move around the environment fairly easily, she told me — and there are thousands of them.

The Marcos regime was “exceptional for both the quantity and quality of its violence,” Alfred McCoy, a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, wrote in 1999. McCoy estimated that 3,257 extrajudicial killings were carried out under Marcos. The specter of violence was horrific and deliberate. Many of the victims were mutilated and then dumped roadside for passersby to see, McCoy wrote: “Marcos’s regime intimidated by random displays of its torture victims—becoming thereby a theater state of terror.”

Another striking example is the singing shawls made by the Karen people of Myanmar and northern Thailand, says Jennifer Angus, who teaches textile design at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. These woven garments, so named because they’re worn at funeral ceremonies where mourners sing around the clock for several days, sometimes have a fringe made from the shiny, iridescent elytra, or hard outer wings, of jewel beetles. Angus, who grew up in Canada, had never seen anything like it. “I really had trouble believing that it was real,” she says.

Ajay Sethi, director of the Public Health master’s program at UW-Madison, told the Wisconsin State Journal that if the Wisconsin Senate bill becomes law, “you would have people who falsely believe that they are protected against reinfection. And the science continually shows that people who are unvaccinated, even if they’ve had COVID before, are more likely to be hospitalized compared to people who are vaccinated and haven’t had COVID before.”

Kris Olds, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies the globalization of higher education, noted that in almost all cases, branch campuses are funded by their host nations, shifting the balance in setting an institution’s direction and agenda. Because they rely on their foreign sponsors, western universities don’t have full autonomy over their offshore campuses, Olds said. Texas A&M and its Qatar campus are “wholly dependent upon the largess of a foreign state.”

“There are a few factors related to particularities of these cases that could potentially explain why the Jan. 6 defendants were released pending trial at higher rates than average,” said assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School Stephanie Didwania. “But I doubt these factors alone can explain why so many of the Jan. 6 defendants were released.”

While many parents have understandably worried about how things like remote learning, mask wearing and missing playdates have affected their children, this new data showing family togetherness should be reassuring, according to Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, a pediatrician and associate professor of pediatrics and clinical associate professor of human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Each test is going to have to be evaluated independently any time there’s a new variant,” said David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who urged people not to stop using rapid tests. “And that takes some time.”

That research isn’t conclusive yet, said Paul Hutson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies psilocybin and leads the school’s center for psychedelics research. But he anticipates there will soon be enough evidence for the Food and Drug Administration to approve psilocybin capsules to treat at least some of these disorders — most likely in the next five years or so.

Lucid dreaming is more than just self awareness. People who lucid dream gain memories of what happened earlier in the dream, the ability to manipulate their environment, control their own actions, and marvel at how strange their dream worlds are. Psychologists compare it to a fully immersive virtual reality inside our own heads, which we have the ability to program and reprogram. “You plug into your extended self,” says Benjamin Baird, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Some of them may turn to cannabis because of the prohibitive costs of certain medications, a lack of access to those medications or mistrust of the pharmaceutical industry, said Lucas Richert, a historian of drugs and medicines at the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the editor of “Cannabis: Global Histories.”

According to Huffington, “It’s similar to happiness, actually—another quality we tend to idealize as an end state. But as Professor Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has shown, we can actually train ourselves to be happier through practice in very tangible and measurable ways by giving ourselves the resources to deal with the ups and downs of life. Similarly, we can train ourselves to be more resilient through practice, and that’s the essence of Resilience+.”

According to Dr. Cliff Robb, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, those terms run longer than the average amount of time a driver typically owns a vehicle.

It’s easy to believe we’re adept at taming anxiety born of uncertainty thanks to the pandemic. But this may be a false assumption. Dr. Jack Nitschke, a clinical psychologist, and associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, told me that exposure to unpredictability doesn’t necessarily improve our coping skills. “I actually don’t think people get better at tolerating uncertainty just because there’s a lot of it,” he said.

David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said of the Omicron estimate, “The 73 percent got a lot more attention than the confidence intervals, and I think this is one example among many where scientists are trying to project an air of confidence about what’s going to happen.”

The legacy of “Sociobiology” was profound for researchers who study animals. “It was liberating,” Karen Strier, a primatologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the president of the International Primatological Society, said in an interview. “You can study all animals with the same basic perspective.”

With less real-time reporting and piecemeal testing programs, policy makers are reacting to Covid-19 rather than proactively working to contain it, said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Nasia Safdar, the vice chair for research in the School of Medicine and Public Health and UW Hospital’s medical director of infection control, made the remarks in a live-streamed question-and-answer session focused on the variant Tuesday night.

Shorter incubation periods generally lead to more infections happening in less time, because people are becoming more contagious sooner, making onward transmission harder to prevent. Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me he still wants more data on Omicron before he touts a trim incubation. But “it does make sense,” he said, considering the variant’s explosive growth in pretty much every country it’s collided with. In many places, Omicron cases are doubling every two to three days.