Tag: featured

Fossil fuel spikes could well accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels in favor of wind and solar, according to Greg Nemet at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Joining me now is Betül Kaçar. She’s an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the department of bacteriology. She’s also the principal investigator of Project MUSE, a major NASA-funded astrobiology research initiative. Betül Kaçar, thanks very much for being here.Betül Kaçar

Betül Kaçar (18:33): Thanks for having me.

Ultimately, the question of whether the dollar will remain a global reserve currency answers itself. To misquote a famous authority on political economy, “A day may come when the dollar loses its central role as the dominant global reserve currency, but it is not this day.” It is not even this decade, and quite likely not even this century. It won’t even become a possibility until the E.U. becomes a true fiscal and political union — or until China develops an accountable liberal government and much more developed private financial markets and finally accepts the free movement of capital flows. None of those scenarios seems likely to happen soon.

Mark Copelovitch (@mcopelov) is professor of political science and public affairs and director of European Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is the author (with David A. Singer) of “Banks on the Brink: Global Capital, Securities Markets, and the Political Roots of Financial Crises” (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Reading experts have praised the plan, but said that the details of the implementation would be key. Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist and reading expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that all students could benefit from better reading instruction.

“Right now, it’s a giant white-elephant-type project,” said Steven Deller, a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The water lines that they ran into it, the highway infrastructure that they ran into it, the electric lines that they ran into it—it’s all way overcapacity,” he said.

“Right now, it’s a giant white-elephant-type project,” said Steven Deller, a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The water lines that they ran into it, the highway infrastructure that they ran into it, the electric lines that they ran into it—it’s all way overcapacity,” he said.

Another problem with children learning these stereotypes at such a young age is that once stereotypes are learned, it’s nearly impossible to unlearn them. Patricia Devine, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison explained to Wisconsin Public Radio, “A lot of people sincerely embrace egalitarian values, but being socialized into our culture, they learn stereotypes very early in childhood, around age three, four and five. They’re firmly ingrained; they’re frequently activated, very well-practiced, and they end up being the default, or habitual kind of response.” She adds, “I’m not sure if it’s possible to unlearn them…I know I shouldn’t act based on the stereotypes, but it’s not as though my awareness or my knowledge of those stereotypes just goes away.”

Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said that while he found some of the revisions “encouraging,” he was concerned that “objectionable” concepts remain.

“These [particles] get deep into the lungs and cause both respiratory and cardiac ailments,” says Jonathan Patz, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the authors of the study. “They are pretty much the worst pollutant when it comes to mortality and hospitalization.”

“We have the technologies available to get us to essentially an emissions-free electricity sector nationwide in the U.S.,” said Nicholas Mailloux, the lead author of that study and a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Some other sectors will be trickier, like aviation.”

The rise shouldn’t surprise people, given the large number of unvaccinated Americans, said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Eliminating air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels would prevent more than 50,000 premature deaths and provide more than $600 billion in health benefits in the United States every year, according to a new study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.

In December 2021 researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison reported that people with the highest levels of lead in their urine, especially those living in urban areas, were more likely to have antibiotic-resistant bacteria in their bodies, even after accounting for other factors that could drive up resistance. Their results, published in Environmental Epidemiology, are among the first to show this link within the human body. The study adds antibiotic-resistant bacteria to the list of harms visited upon people without much money or social resources, usually members of minority groups, who are most likely to live in these lead-contaminated areas. “It’s really an environmental justice issue,” says environmental epidemiologist Kristen Malecki, one of the study’s authors.

“This is a big step forward to know that you can grow plants,” said Simon Gilroy, a space plant biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who had no role in the study. “The real next step is to go and do it on the surface of the moon.”

“You think you have a chance of winning, so why stop?” said Yoshiko Herrera, a Russia expert and professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She noted that alleged Russian war crimes and reports of thousands of people being forcibly deported from eastern Ukraine is likely to stiffen resolve in Kyiv even further.

Tiffany Green, an economist and population-health scientist and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, noted that many of those effects would disproportionately fall on those who were already marginalized—particularly women of color and nonbinary and transgender people.

Anton Shirikov, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, sees clear parallels between the misinformation campaign Russia is waging in support of its war in Ukraine and how propaganda has been used in previous conflicts.

“Virtually everything the government’s done to fight the disease, since the beginning, has placed the burden on individuals to both assess and mitigate their own risk,” Dr. Richard Keller, a professor in the department of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, told ABC News. “The implications there, for the people who are dying from the disease, are that they’re dying as a result of their own individual failings.”

According to Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin, inflation can be a sign that the job market is strong and people feel comfortable spending money.

“Some of the reasons you might be able to extend the statute of limitations is that there was active concealment of any kind of fraud by the defendant,” Ion Meyn, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin, told Newsweek. “Here, it’d be very hard to argue act of concealment when you’re pleading that you knew about it.”

“Right now, at times, Russian propaganda even equates Nazis and Western civilization,” said Anton Shirikov, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin who specializes in propaganda and misinformation.

“It is conspiracist thinking,” Kenneth Mayer, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Politifact.”They are interpreting data that confirms their pre-existing conclusions. It’s a zombie claim; no matter how many times you kill it, it keeps coming back.”

And not much beyond mass culling can be done to slow the spread once it starts. Adel Talaat, a professor of microbiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says we should improve disease surveillance and farm biosecurity to help prevent new outbreaks and slow the spread, but a vaccine that could reliably reduce transmission would go a long way.

Absentee ballots are also verified by signature and tracked closely, often with an option for voters themselves to see where their ballot is at any given time. That process safeguards against anyone who tries to illegally cast extra ballots, according to Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and the director of the Elections Research Project.“It seems impossible in that system for a nefarious actor to dump lots of ballots that were never requested by voters and were never issued by election officials,” Burden said.

This would help accrue “a kind of common law,” says Lucas Graves, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Now, we have the equivalent of secret courts; their decisions are unseen and judgements forgotten. Transparency “pushes back against the arbitrariness” of executives, Graves says.

That is the conclusion of 12 studies by researcher Chia-Jung Tsay, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She gave investors different types of records of pitch competitions—such as video only or audio only—and asked them to guess which entrepreneur had won each round. The investors who made the best guesses saw only visual images of people making pitches, with no sound or information about the pitch itself.

Russia’s decision to cut off gas exports to Poland and Bulgaria — the latter of which had remained undecided in its stance regarding Russia up until the recent ban — is a risky move meant to act as a warning to other European countries.

But some experts have written off the move as a miscalculation.According to Yoshiko Herrera, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison specializing in Eurasian politics, it may have the opposite intended effect.

What’s more, people can mistakenly think affirmations are about “seeking perfection or seeking greatness,” said Chris Cascio, an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied the practice. Instead, Cascio said, the key concept of affirmations is: “As you are, you are good enough and you’re valued being you.”

Some anthropologists, including Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, are skeptical about whether the trees were, indeed, infested. An editorial published in response by The New York Times also said: “We have been importing ornamental plants from Japan for years, and by the shipload, and it is remarkable that this particular invoice should have contained any new infections.”

“They occur under specific atmospheric conditions,” Orf, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said. “They require lots of moisture, atmospheric instability, and wind shear. Supercells produce the most violent tornadoes compared to all other thunderstorm types. A recent example of a violent supercell is the storm that hit Mayfield, Kentucky, in December of 2021.”

Gregory Nemet is a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs whose research focuses on the process of technological change in energy and its interactions with public policy.

To get the world economy to zero emissions by midcentury, we need to move light and fast. That means aggressively expanding what we know works and is affordable—wind, solar and electric vehicles—on the order of how quickly we built ships and airplanes in World War II. Falling prices, digitization of the economy and more flexible electric grids can enable us to do that.

“What if I told you…that the inflation was a cross-national, pandemic- and war-induced phenomenon & not primarily due to Jerome Powell or Joe Biden and their policies?” said University of Wisconsin political economy professor Mark Copelevitch, posting a series of global inflation charts on Twitter.

“It feels like we’re being asked to partake in a trust fall,” says Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, referring to the team-building exercise that involves falling backward and counting on others to catch you before you hit the floor. “When is the last time you did a trust fall and enjoyed it?”

“Your goal is to inform. Your goal is to say there are disparities,” says Dominique Brossard, a professor and risk communication expert at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, referring to my role as a journalist. But advocacy groups, “whose primary goal is to inspire change,” she says, “might take a much different approach.”

The University of Wisconsin-Madison ecologist also belongs to an evangelical church and has struggled with deep despair over climate change. He has had a front-row seat observing the effects of a warming atmosphere through the aspen trees he has studied for decades. But he lacks the support of many within the evangelical community.

The more the virus is allowed to mosey about, the more chances it will have to mutate and adapt. “Variants are always the wild card,” says Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Already, America is watching BA.2—the speedier sister to the viral morph that clobbered the country this winter (now retconned as BA.1)—overtake its sibling and spark outbreaks, especially across the northeast.

Monica Turner was cataloging that recovery. On a sweltering July day, Turner, a professor of ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, shuffled along a line of tape she’d stretched 50 meters across the ground. She and a graduate student were counting every lodgepole pine seedling within a meter on either side. We were far enough from paved roads that there was no telling which forest inhabitants might be lurking—elk, deer, moose, wolves. The air was so hot I wondered fleetingly if the bear spray canister on Turner’s hip might explode.

“There’s a lot of other cues that kids can use to parse apart how other people are feeling, like vocal expressions, body expressions, context,” says study author Ashley Ruba, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Jeannina Smith, a doctor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, cares for organ-transplant recipients, who are on immunosuppressive drugs and are therefore particularly vulnerable to disease; she told me that she lost more patients in the Omicron surge than at any previous point in the pandemic. “They did everything right—they got vaccinated and boosted and were so careful,” Smith said, and their loved ones must now mourn them “while society is saying that COVID is over.”

“Bongbong Marcos is as if Marcos Sr. rose from the dead,” said historian Alfred McCoy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who documented the Marcos dictatorship. “He is a surrogate for his father.”

“Life makes our planet an incredibly exotic place compared to the rest of the known universe,” says astrobiologist Betül Kaçar, whose research uses statistics and mathematical models to simulate ancient environments and gather insights into the origins of existence.

Erika Marín-Spiotta, a University of Wisconsin geography professor who holds “bystander training” workshops — which teach people ways to intervene when they see harassment or bullying — stressed the importance of disclosing incidents of misconduct to the broader community.

It “is important so that the community is aware that these behaviors are happening, they are unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” she said.

“The good part of the story is that we can do this,” said Andrea Dutton, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We know what to do – we just have to decide to do it.”

Ted Gerber, director of University of Wisconsin’s Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia, told USA TODAY that ostracizing historical figures doesn’t really help or hinder the situation in Ukraine either way.

In its latest report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we need to cut emissions immediately and use technology to suck CO2 from the atmosphere. One of the authors, Gregory Nemet, tells Lewis Goodall that there’s reason to be optimistic.

“Paper was a very precious material in the pre-Industrial era, when it had to be made by hand,” said Beverly Gordon, professor emeritus of design studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“We can’t kick this can down the road any longer,” said Andrea Dutton, a geoscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Such countries “can export a model that shows we can reduce emissions and still have high levels of well-being,” said Greg Nemet, a professor of energy and public policy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs. ”We can export policies that have played a role in achieving that.”