“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.
The international community must affirm that there are universal values. It must support Ukraine and call out Putin’s lies. It must act to prevent the destruction of the Ukrainian nation.
Francine Hirsch is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg.”
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.
But most simulations of our climate’s future may be overly sensitive to Arctic ice melt as a cause of abrupt changes in ocean circulation, according to new research led by scientists 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.”
A Harvard study last year showed the use and production of ethanol emits up to 46% fewer greenhouse gasses than gasoline. A University of Wisconsin study has challenged that finding, saying ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline, based on changes in how land is used to grow the corn used to produce it. But the Argonne National Laboratory disagreed with the Wisconsin study last month, saying the group overestimated carbon loss from soil and double-counted some emissions, among other concerns.
“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.
About half of those students who were lucky enough to snag internships during the pandemic had to complete them remotely, according to a 2021 workforce study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Remote interns reported lower satisfaction in part because managers were less likely to assign them “high-skill supervised work,” according to the study.
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.
After surgery to remove tumors, some cancer cells can be left behind where they can grow back or spread to a new part of the body. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have now developed a hydrogel that can be applied post-surgery to prevent or slow tumor regrowth
“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.”
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.”
“We’re talking about offsetting about 10% of our emissions,” said Gregory Nemet, a public policy researcher who studies energy and climate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a lead author of the report. “The rest of the work, that’s 80 or 90% of the emissions reductions, has to be done elsewhere.”
That type of response is common these days among Russians, said Anton Shirikov, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies Russian state propaganda. The Kremlin’s misinformation “might not work in the sense that people believe everything, but people who are on the side of the government think that some of it must be true,” he said. Or they think, “We, the Russian army, cannot be that bad, so the other side must be bad.”
Serrano and Arce said dog owners should make sure their dog is up to date on its vaccines. There isn’t a vaccine dedicated to preventing illness from CIRDC as it is “not a vaccine-preventable condition” according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine.
Over the past semester, University of Wisconsin-Madison dance professor Chris Walker worked with freshmen and alumni of First Wave — a scholarship program for hip hop and urban arts — to bring Danez Smith’s poem “summer, somewhere” to life, fusing dance, theater and music.
Gary Grossen talks about cheesemaking poetically, even almost romantically. “Copper vats have a special place in my heart,” he said, arm extended toward some machinery in Babcock Hall on the UW-Madison campus.
Whether the 2022 avian flu will affect the price of eggs and poultry depends on how widespread it becomes, says Ron Kean, a poultry science expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences.
Today, there are strict rules and laws that separate recreational and medical drug use. There are also plenty of drugs that are legal, and others that are illegal. But in Regency England, these boundaries didn’t exist. “The legal structures just weren’t in place,” says Lucas Richert, PhD, a historian of drugs and medicines at the University of Wisconsin—Madison School of Pharmacy.
Nor did things change when the Bolsheviks surged to power a century ago. As scholar Francine Hirsch notes in her seminal work on the creation of Soviet republics, the Bolsheviks swiftly realized they’d be better off maintaining the tsarist-era empire, even if in “many regions … the Bolsheviks had no indigenous support whatsoever.”
Diplomats and lawyers have been talking in recent days about convening an international tribunal on the Nuremberg model or something akin to it to try Russian President Vladimir Putin and those in his inner circle for waging a war of aggression against Ukraine. And rightly so.
“There have been swastikas found in ancient civilizations from the Americas to Greece and the Mediterranean, in China, even in ancient synagogues,” said Brandon Bloch, an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies religion, politics and 20th-century Germany.
“It’s a purple state, as purple as you get. The Republican party has managed to lock in a very large and durable majority in the state legislature that is unmovable,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
You might be able to feel on your face if air is coming out of any gaps. “When you exhale, you can feel the jets of air coming out” if the mask doesn’t fit well, says Scott Sanders, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
“People hunger for the narrative that the toad was used ancestrally by the Indigenous people of Sonora,” said Ana Maria Ortiz, a doctoral student who is carrying out a population study of the toad at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Human Ecology. “There’s an appeal to that narrative, and even I believed it at the onset.”
“We do have to try anything,” said Gregory Nemet, who studies how public policy can spur climate-friendly technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If we want to deal with the climate problem and make it safe, we have to get to net zero emissions by 2050, and that’s not that far away.”
Propaganda is a powerful tool. For years, Russian officials and state media have “pre-conditioned” Russian people to treat Ukraine with some suspicion, said Anton Shirikov, a disinformation researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
“Not a good sign when you see that sort of thing happen,” said University of Wisconsin meteorologist Matthew Lazzara.Lazzara monitors temperatures at East Antarctica’s Dome C-ii and logged 14 degrees (-10 degrees Celsius) Friday, where the normal is -45 degrees (-43 degrees Celsius): “That’s a temperature that you should see in January, not March. January is summer there. That’s dramatic.”
Toad venom proponents are divided between those who insist that “milking” straight from the source is the only way to smoke up, and those who advocate for a synthetic version of the venom. “Synthetic 5-MeO-DMT is just as good,” said Ana Maria Ortiz, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin studying the species. “People need to leave the toads alone.”
Biofuels trade group Growth Energy is calling on Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to “correct the record” on a recent peer-reviewed study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison that said the carbon intensity of corn-based ethanol is likely at least 24 percent higher than gasoline. Proponents of ethanol have pushed back against the study, but critics of the Renewable Fuel Standard program have pointed to it as evidence that ethanol has worsened the climate crisis.
It’s important to understand what’s contributing to the high prices of oil in the first place. Gregory Nemet, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Energy Institute, pointed out that the cost of oil has steadily increased since last fall, when it was around $70 a barrel, to more than $130 last week before settling back at around $100 a barrel on Tuesday. That initial jump in the cost of crude was driven by the ongoing economic recovery, which boosted demand by consumers and businesses that had been dampened by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dan Phaneuf, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s unclear whether we would be better off operating on daylight saving time vs. standard time year-round.
It’s important to understand what’s contributing to the high prices of oil in the first place. Gregory Nemet, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Energy Institute, pointed out that the cost of oil has steadily increased since last fall, when it was around $70 a barrel, to more than $130 last week before settling back at around $100 a barrel on Tuesday. That initial jump in the cost of crude was driven by the ongoing economic recovery, which boosted demand by consumers and businesses that had been dampened by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the past two weeks, it has become increasingly dangerous for Russian citizens to participate in anti-war demonstrations, to express opposition to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, or to share true information about the military campaign. The Russian State Duma has introduced legislation that threatens fines, forced military conscription and prison sentences for speaking the truth.
Francine Hirsch is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal After World War II (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Yoshiko Herrera, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Russia expert, noted that the Ukrainian president has an important role to play in maintaining support among the public in Western nations.
There are other problems for Russia, such as finding replacement switches, routers and other hardware. At least one bank began stockpiling equipment before sanctions hit. The typical life cycle for such parts is two to three years, said Paul Barford, a computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin.
According to Jeffrey Sindelar, meat extension specialist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison: “The primary reason most bacon is not lower sodium is due to consumer preference. A majority of consumers expect bacon to have a certain amount of saltiness. So unless all bacon is lower in salt, some companies will lose market share if they reduce sodium (while others do not) since the majority still prefer ‘regular’ salt bacon. It’s all consumer driven.”
But what makes the mutation “weird and unique” is that it appears to set the stage for other variants, says Kyle Wolf, a biophysicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. SARS-CoV-2 infects cells faster when it has more RBDs flipped up—but that also makes its spikes more likely to fall apart before they find their target. A virus with DOUG appears to be more stable: When its RBDs up, they wedge together, holding the spike proteins together until it finds a host, Wolf explains. The mutation could be required for other variants, which opened the spike even further, but needed a way to stabilize the package, says Sophie Gobeil, a structural biologist at Duke University.
Elliot Tebbe, a University of Wisconsin assistant professor with a Ph.D. in counseling psychology and a trans man, said he and other trans people feel “a sense of exhaustion (from feeling) constantly under attack by different legislators and all these different policy initiatives.”
“It’s been shown that infected butterflies have lower flight ability and suffer from all of these fitness ramifications, but this is the first time it’s really been shown on a population level that a really important feature of monarch biology is affected by the rate of infection,” says Karen Oberhauser, director of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum.
Ellen Zweibel, professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Wisconsin, explained why the findings could rule out the starburst model. She said the typical duration of a nuclear starburst, and therefore the length of time into which a starburst would inject the energy that forms the bubbles, is about 10 million years.
But Thomas O’Guinn, a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Business who specializes in political branding, said…(behind paywall.)
According to Enno Siemsen, a professor of operations management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, if the conflict is short and companies want to reopen their operations, “all the investments you’ve made over years are basically gone. If you want to reenter the Russian market, you’re starting more or less from scratch.”
According to Enno Siemsen, a professor of operations management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, if the conflict is short and companies want to reopen their operations, “all the investments you’ve made over years are basically gone. If you want to reenter the Russian market, you’re starting more or less from scratch.”
Federal income tax forms offer taxpayers the option to check a box to give to a fund for presidential campaigns. NBC News’ Joshua Johnson speaks with Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, about how many candidates are avoiding the fund as it comes with strings attached.
“Because of our over-dependence on the private motorized vehicle, we are leading sedentary lifestyles,” said Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “According to several reports from the World Health Organization, because of that increase in sedentary lifestyles there are almost four million premature deaths every year.”
The pollutants driving the climate crisis are also making people sick, and as the crisis worsens people are getting sicker. That’s the bad news.Now the good: Mitigating the climate crisis, according to a global health expert, would eliminate nearly half of the world’s premature deaths.“When you think about what it means to get to a low-carbon economy, and what it could mean for our health, this is an amazing opportunity,” said Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Solving the global climate crisis is the greatest health opportunity of our times, and a low-carbon future could improve global health and achieve economic benefits.”
The United States banned beef imports from Brazil because of unsanitary conditions found in some of the country’s meatpacking plants and animal health concerns in 2017, but the Trump administration reversed the measure in February 2020. Holly Gibbs, a land use scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, explained the move came after on-site inspections by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service found improvements in practices at six Brazilian beef production plants. Since then, she says, exports to the United States have been climbing to pre-ban levels. Calls for a ban were renewed recently in response to a reported outbreak of mad cow disease in Brazil.
Richard Keller, a medical historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says that much of the current pandemic rhetoric—the premature talk of endemicity; the focus on comorbidities; the from-COVID-or-with-COVID debate—treats COVID deaths as dismissible and “so inevitable as to not merit precaution,” he has written. “Like gun violence, overdose, extreme heat death, heart disease, and smoking, [COVID] becomes increasingly associated with behavioral choice and individual responsibility, and therefore increasingly invisible.” We don’t honor deaths that we ascribe to individual failings, which could explain, Keller argues, why national moments of mourning have been scarce.
Aaron LeBeau regularly visits a local grocery store’s seafood department to stock up on tuna, salmon and octopus. But LeBeau isn’t shopping for himself: He has hungry sharks to feed at his laboratory.
Though they might look mean, “sharks are, to put it lightly, misunderstood,” says LeBeau. He’s a professor of pathology (the study of diseases) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Nurse sharks — the kind he studies — are “probably the most docile sharks in nature. Pretty much all they do is sleep and eat.”
In general, there’s strong evidence that mindfulness-based interventions, including MBCT, are an effective treatment for depression. A meta-analysis of conducted by Dr. Simon Goldberg, an assistant professor in the department of counseling psychology and faculty at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, indicates that such programs are as effective as psycho- and behavioral therapies.
