Tag: featured

“Everyone’s situation is different, but 529 plans for most people are an excellent choice,” says Cliff Robb, associate professor of personal finance at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “The most important benefits of 529s are the flexibility — flexibility in what you’re investing in within those plans and flexibility to pick any state’s plan — and the true benefit of tax-free growth upon withdrawal.”

“Nothing is yet known on whether the compounds found in onion would have protective or inhibitory effects on COVID-19,” Irwin Goldman, a professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, wrote in an expert opinion for the trade group.

Not all geographic names are stigmatizing, said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Here in Wisconsin, we have Lacrosse encephalitis virus, but no one ever stigmatizes Lacrosse, Wisconsin. And Norovirus is originally from Norwalk, Ohio, but people aren’t afraid of Ohio,” he said.

But for SARS-CoV-2, which has caused such global devastation, names can have serious consequences. “It’s always a good idea to have a name that is just a name,” he said.

“People continue to ask for proof that climate change is already affecting our health. This attribution study directly answers that question using state-of-the-science epidemiological methods, and the amount of data the authors have amassed for analysis is impressive,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin.

“Abandoning the desire for self-determination, something that has been the very raison d’etre of Palestinian nationalism since the 1960s and something that has actually been achieved by Zionists, is a steep demand to make of both,” Nadav Shelef, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies national identity and ethnic struggle, wrote in a recent essay applying academic research on how nationalist sentiment declines to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This was the “beginning of a 35-year period when Kerkorian would buy and sell MGM three times,” according to Tino Balio, professor emeritus of communication arts at UW-Madison, who also authored a book about MGM.

“The first recorded history of a Chinese woman in the United States tells the story of a ‘beautiful Chinese Lady’ transported into New York Harbor,” Leslie Bow Ph.D., professor in the Department of English and Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison, tells Bustle. This was Afong Moy, a 19-year-old Chinese woman who was coerced into traveling to the U.S. In the 1830s and ‘40s, Moy would tour the U.S. as an act, displayed for up to eight hours a day in private homes, and later in P.T. Barnum’s circus. “The spectacle of Afong Moy produced by Barnum and white traders unfortunately sutured American associations between race and exoticism that cling to Asian American women today,” Bow says.

Scientists have long speculated about why the 1918 pandemic’s second wave was deadlier than the first. Patterns of human behavior and seasonality could explain some of the difference—but the virus itself might have changed too. “And this starts to put some meat on the bone” of that hypothesis, Andrew Mehle, an influenza researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was not involved in the study, told me.

Pamela Oliver, a professor emerita of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has studied protest movements for 40-plus years, said the generations-old struggle for Black rights had gained significant momentum until the events of 9/11 diverted national attention. Activists have been trying to make up lost ground ever since, she said – including the additional loss of some white allies in 2016 after the fatal ambush of five police officers in Dallas by Micah Johnson, a Black man.

That subduction process operates like a “conveyor belt,” recycling and exchanging material and volatile chemicals between the surface of Earth and deep within it, says Ann Bauer, a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Mothers have suffered most. Ben Etheridge and Lisa Spantig of the University of Essex found that in the first months of Britain’s lockdown women’s well-being dropped twice as much as men’s. That some friendships have withered and others have never bloomed could have a lasting impact on new mothers in particular, predicts Margaret Kerr of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. James Conway, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health who oversees vaccination programs there, said vaccines will likely be available for 5- to 11-year-olds in late 2021, and for babies over 6 months, toddlers and preschoolers in early 2022.

“Police officers are trained that if somebody’s in a vehicle, you’re trying to stop them, and they’re noncompliant, the car is a weapon, and therefore this makes the person armed,” says John P. Gross, a clinical associate law professor at the University of Wisconsin who has written on police and vehicles.

So far, the actual growth in the price level has been temporary. Expectations of inflation remain muted because either the anticipated output gap or the responsiveness of inflation to the output gap are thought to be small, inflation expectations remain well-anchored, or all three.

Menzie Chinn is a professor of public affairs and economics at the Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research examines the empirical and policy aspects of macroeconomic interactions between countries.

“Allowing different properties operated by the same person or group to follow different rules opens a loophole that farmers can use to circumvent the soy moratorium,” said Lisa Rausch, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin.

While U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken draws attention to climate change in the Arctic at meetings with other national officials this week in Iceland, an even greater threat looms on the other side of the planet.

Typically the Great Lakes follow a specific seasonal cycle, said Adam Bechle, a coastal engineering specialist with the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute. The lakes bottom out in the winter when there’s more evaporation occurring as cold air moves in over the warmer water. Lake levels are highest during the summer, after snow melts and runs into them and rain falls.

“The more you’ve allowed your grassland to invest in its roots, the better off it is going to be during a drought,” said Randy Jackson, a grassland ecologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Perennial plants—which stay in the ground year in and year out—continue to “photosynthesize and put their carbon and nutrients below ground, which is really their savings account.” In times of drought, it will draw more on the savings in the ground.

Provisions that target heavily Democratic areas — like Georgia’s limits on drop boxes — are particularly blatant. “The typical response by a losing party in a functioning democracy is that they alter their platform to make it more appealing,” Kenneth Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, has told The Times. “Here the response is to try to keep people from voting. It’s dangerously antidemocratic.”

Jeremy Stoddard, a professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, surveyed more than 1,000 middle and high school teachers in 2018 to find out how they approached teaching about Sept. 11 and the war on terror. About 130 history, government and social studies teachers said they had never taught students about Sept. 11.

Barry Burden, professor of American politics and political methodology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told USA TODAY the discrepancy is “not a sign of fraud,” just a result of sampling error.

Leslie Bow, English and Asian American Studies professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, says, “It’s important to expose children to racial diversity in children’s books because studies have shown that familiarity with children of color in stories reduces negative biases against racial groups.”

According to 2019 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, people younger than 18 account for about 22 percent of the American population. That’s why “it is really important for kids to be included” in vaccination efforts, says Malia Jones, an associate scientist in health geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Applied Population Laboratory. Their inclusion is “good news for herd immunity.”

Jeremy Stoddard, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, has studied since 2003 how 9/11 and its aftermath are taught in middle and high schools around the country.“There hasn’t been a lot of good data on that, it’s very anecdotal,” Stoddard said.

Andrea Dutton, an expert in sea level rise at University of Wisconsin–Madison, who was a co-author, said the paper “addresses an important and pressing question” of what the Paris climate targets will mean for future sea level rise.

What they’re saying: “This study is a stark reminder that the fuse is short for deep and sustained cuts to greenhouse gas emissions,” study coauthor Andrea Dutton of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said via email.

“Once you hit this threshold, you can’t go back,” says study co-author Andrea Dutton, a sea level researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “You’re committed. That’s the big takeaway.”

The Amynthas species we have in the US (most commonly Amynthas agrestis and Amynthas tokioensis) are primarily from Japan and the Korean peninsula. In their home habitats, they evolved along with the local ecosystems — and the ecosystems along with them. But here, “just like any other invasive species that are displaced into a brand new habitat that might not have controls, they’re able to take advantage of that and go gangbusters,” says Brad Herrick, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.

“The finding that growth and carbon uptake are higher in bacteria that may have predatory lifestyles than in other bacteria is interesting, and supports the idea that bacterial predators can play meaningful roles in the soil food web,” wrote Thea Whitman, a soil ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the study, in an email to Popular Science

Alhaji N’Jai left Sierra Leone to pursue a scholarship in the US, which also served to get him out of the country during its civil war, but in recent years he has been able to return, both to study Ebola and help educate the next generation of STEM talent there.

The experience taught camps “what you don’t want to do,” said Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, a pediatrician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health who has been working to develop Covid-19 protocols for camps, including one in Wisconsin.

“A massive vaccine rollout certainly creates new jobs — from clinic clerks and managers to nurses, medical assistants/techs and pharmacists,” said Dr. Christine B. Whelan, a clinical professor in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin. “There are the truck drivers to transport the vaccines and the computer folks to create the sign-up portals.”

This idea is controversial. “I’ve always felt that people don’t do enough to prevent cold and flu, and so in a sense many of these changes have been healthy,” says Jo Handelsman, an infectious-disease researcher and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She says it’s unclear whether shaking hands or spending time in crowded places meaningfully contributes to microbiome health, and so avoiding such risky practices may be all upside — a view that many infectious disease experts share.

“It’s one case out of thousands of cases involving police use of force, so we shouldn’t read too much into it,” said Keith A. Findley, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin. “But it’s nonetheless very important, because it is one in which, with the whole world watching, the justice system stepped up and acted to hold the police officer responsible for an unlawful use of deadly force.

But research suggests that even if you don’t actually meet up with someone or send them an email or text, it can be enough to simply send good thoughts their way. “You can start with a simple appreciation practice,” Cortland Dahl, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, previously told HuffPost. Just bring a friend or loved one into your mind, then consciously focusing on the things you really cherish about them.

Advocates for reopening have pointed to data showing significant learning losses during the pandemic, particularly for students of color. But parents of color are far more concerned with loss of life, said John B. Diamond, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.