Tag: featured

Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and director of the school’s Elections Research Center, said the latest extension was “yet another sign that the Cyber Ninjas are in over their heads and didn’t really have the experience or qualifications to do the review that they’re doing.”

In extreme heat, asphalt gets soft and behaves kind of like peanut butter, says Hussain Bahia, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin who heads the school’s Modified Asphalt Research Center. Put it in an oven and it will become a “slush fluid,” he says. Sustained heat on roads not built for heat can lead to potholes, pockmarks, and bumps.

But by those same parameters, if we were observing our own solar system from afar, we might think Venus should be Earth-like too. “If you can’t understand Venus, which is our closest Earth-like neighbor, what chance do you have of believing anything some astrophysicist tells us about exoplanets?” says planetary scientist Sanjay Limaye of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Limaye is part of a contingent of Venus researchers interested in finding out whether its cloud layer could still host microbial life. In 2020, investigators reported in the journal Nature Astronomy seeing signatures of phosphine—a chemical known thus far only to come from biological sources—in the atmosphere. Though claims about the possible discovery didn’t pan out, the news helped to spotlight the planet as an overlooked astrobiology target.

The move could be “a really big deal” for people with diabetes, said Dawn Davis, an associate professor and endocrinologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison agrees. “My opinion is that… this is more than likely Denisovan.”

“The Cyber Ninjas boondoggle deviates so substantially from a proper audit or recount that the results simply can’t be trusted,” Barry C. Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Insider. “The Cyber Ninjas firm is not only unqualified to be conducting the review, but they do not actually seem interested in following protocols that could enhance public trust rather than undermining it.”

Gregory Nemet, a University of Wisconsin solar specialist, says the Chinese successfully used a similar scheme in the early 2000s to boost their domestic wind-power industry, then dominated by European suppliers.

AnneMarie McClain, a children’s media and education researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Insider that inclusive shows are essential to kids across income differences.”Children might not have representation in their communities. They might not have representation in their schools. And so media is a source of representation that can help children know that they’re OK and that their identities are valid,” McClain said.

The main thing to consider, says Andrea Hicks, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin, is where you live and what the water situation is there. For example, in Wisconsin, where Hicks is based, there’s plenty of water to spare for butt-cleansing purposes, so if a bidet is something you’re curious about you should just go for it. But water availability simply isn’t an easy thing for every person across the country—just look at the drought plaguing the West Coast currently.

“His more than 40 years of teaching Dante gave him many insights into the poem which he incorporates into the commentary,” Christopher Kleinhenz, a professor emeritus of Italian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said in an interview. “He has made Dante accessible,” Kleinhenz continued, so that “we as contemporary readers can appreciate and can see how Dante was important in the Middle Ages and how he continues to be important today.”

Jordan Ellenberg Wouldn’t Have Given the Nobel Prize to Bob Dylan

The few scientists who did take up the inglorious mantle, however, quickly found a wealth of lore to uncover. Anna Huttenlocher, a rheumatologist and cell biologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has spent years watching the cells zoom through tissues and built structures in the lab.

“The fact that they used two different observational approaches and came up with the same trends is pretty remarkable,” said Elizabeth Maroon, a climatologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison unaffiliated with the study. “It lends a lot of confidence to the findings.”

“Policy makers have been dithering about climate change since 1988, and in the background you have this steady progression of technologies,” Greg Nemet, a public-affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. Foreign industrial policy has driven that progression, he said, although American tax rebates—and California’s economic planning—have also played a part. Those policies have allowed the entire world to decarbonize and led companies to support ever more aggressive carbon cuts. That, in essence, is the green vortex.

“In the U.S., death from Covid is almost entirely preventable,” said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, citing access to vaccines in the country. “Crossing the 600,000 milestone is a sobering reminder that the virus is still spreading and that there are still too many people unvaccinated.”

In addition to original ancestors, feral plants in other diversity hotspots should also be collected and conserved, adds Eve Emshwiller, an ethnobotanist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who coauthored the Brassica rapa study. Wild-growing varieties are often seen as weeds, and farmers are sometimes advised to eradicate them.

More recently, Chinese firms have emulated this technique in order to eat Japan’s share of the global solar industry, Greg Nemet, a public-policy professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of How Solar Energy Became Cheap, told me.

While it’s not unusual at this stage of life to weigh your family’s financial priorities, older millennials are being “crunched from both sides,” says Cliff Robb, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who studies financial decision-making.

“They are very active,” Monica Turner, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor, once told Wisconsin Public Radio. “They almost seem like worms that want to be snakes.”

Ajay Sethi, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, said a basic tenet of surveillance is to “do something,” and for a disease like Covid-19, real-time public-health data spurs action in ways that weekly or monthly reporting cannot.

“People trying to reduce confidence through misinformation — that’s unfortunate and it’s something that’s sort of hard to fight,” said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine who teaches a class to future doctors on conspiracy theories. He urges his students to be compassionate and not condescending, since all of us are vulnerable to misinformation when it seems to confirm our prior beliefs. “It’s all innuendo, but it’s wrong, and it does spread like wildfire.”

“The changes in the entire Earth system that take place as part of that changing geography are profound,” says Shanan Peters, a geoscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who specializes in the co-evolution of life and Earth’s systems.

“This is one more element in place that could lead to Bolsonaro’s downfall,” Jessica Rich, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, said. “I don’t think they are yet all in place. But this is a real escalation of the threat against him.”

“This is a moment when workers have leverage right now,” said Laura Dresser, a labor economist at COWS, a liberal think tank at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

David Danaher, professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, noted that similar proposals have failed in the past, but said that non-gendered last names aren’t necessarily new in the Czech Republic.

Scientists have only begun to study the chemical mechanisms by which the purifiers actually work indoors, says Timothy Bertram, a University of Wisconsin chemist leading a study of bipolar ionizers. Without that understanding, it’s hard to evaluate what, if anything, additive purifiers do when they’re installed inside an air vent or plugged in at the back of a classroom. So far, Bertram’s study has found no evidence of the ionizers reducing aerosols.

“Seditious conspiracy is a vague and overbroad statute that could be used to criminalize some legitimate forms of protest and much mundane criminal activity,” said Joshua Braver, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

“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.”