Tag: featured

“This is a climate we want to change,” said Erika Marin-Spiotta, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, at the American Meteorological Society’s 100th annual meeting, held last January in Boston.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has estimated 6 hectares are required for monarchs to stay afloat in the long run. “Current monarch numbers are not sustainable,” says ecologist Karen Oberhauser of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“The era of landslide elections appears to be behind us,” said Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist. “The strengthening of partisanship in the electorate has dampened the magnitude of swings from one party to the other.”

“It’s relatively easy for folks to rally behind species with a cute appearance, a charismatic name or a compelling story,” says Patrick “PJ” Liesch, entomologist and director of the Insect Diagnostic Lab at the University of Wisconsin Madison. “However, for every cute or charismatic species in existence, there are many more species threatened with extinction that don’t get their moment in the spotlight. We should be concerned about all of those species as well — not just the ones catching the most headlines.”

Voting by mail may seem more convenient, but it also requires the voter to act much earlier than they would if they went to the polls, said Barry Burden, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. You have to make sure to request your ballot early, and in some states, make sure you have a valid ID to do so.

Malia Jones and “Dear Pandemic”: Jones is a researcher who works at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work centers on infectious disease and social epidemiology, demography and geography, and she is also a creator of the project “Dear Pandemic.”

Does that mean this particular storm has been fueled by climate change? Jonathan E. Martin, a professor in the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, cautioned against drawing quick conclusions.

“While all of these people that care about monarchs are doing a lot of positive things, there are a lot of negative things happening at the same time,” said Karen Oberhauser, a conservation biologist at the University of Wisconsin who has studied monarchs since 1985. “We’re running as fast as we can to stay in the same place.”

“Finding a virus in a wild mink but not in other wildlife nearby likely indicates an isolated event, but we should take all such information seriously,” said Tony L. Goldberg of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. He added, “Controlling viruses in people is ultimately the best way to keep them from spreading to animals.”

There’s also an element of uncertainty about what the monarch numbers collected by surveyors really mean. “The year-to-year fluctuation in monarch numbers makes it difficult to put an exact number on the degree to which monarch populations have declined,” says Karen Oberhauser, a conservation biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has studied monarchs since 1985. Data from as far back as the 1950s show “it is very clear that monarch butterflies are a very high fluctuation species in terms of their population dynamics,” Agrawal agrees. Populations that crash can recover. Females lay hundreds of eggs, only two of which need to survive for the population to survive. And because four generations occur per year, even if most of the butterflies in Mexico die one year, “there is opportunity for the population to recover.”

“There’s no such thing right now as the national popular vote. It’s just a bunch of 50 state races that get added together,” explained Barry Burden, political science professor and founding director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Research would confirm again and again, when people feel that what’s asked from them is not actually followed by those in power, there’s a sense of betrayal that will occur,” said Dominique Brossard, professor and chair of the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“But a lot is happening that’s taking away habitat at the same time,” said Karen Oberhauser, a restoration ecologist and arboretum director at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “It’s like we’re running fast but staying in the same place.”

Research from the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin Madison has shown that killing gray wolves actually leads to three times more livestock attacks, a finding supported by behavioral studies elsewhere. “The wolf pack is a family,” says Adrian Treves, who runs the lab. They cooperate to defend territory and raise pups. When one is killed, the destabilizing effect ripples through the pack. Reproductive age goes down, and naive juvenile attacks on livestock go up, according to Colleen St. Clair, a biologist at the University of Alberta.

Bob Jeanne, a wasp expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says the authors are “correct in calling this the first example of tool use by a honeybee… I think they’re applying a reasonable definition.”

The new fusion road map identifies technological gaps and nearer-term facilities to fill them (see partial list, below). “By identifying [a power plant] as a goal, that can trigger more research in those areas that support that mission,” says Stephanie Diem, a fusion physicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. For example, in a fusion power plant a barrage of energetic neutrons would degrade materials, so the report calls for developing a particle-accelerator–based neutron source to test new ones.

“This is a short-lived nuclide that only exists in the early solar system,” says Noriko Kita, an expert in meteorite aging from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That advanced vintage makes chondrules the second-oldest recognizable objects in our solar system, after calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs), specks of white in meteorites that are thought to have formed one to three million years earlier by condensing out of the gas that surrounded our young sun.

As President-elect Joe Biden continues his transition to the White House, House Democratic progressives and centrists are fighting over how to frame the party’s agenda for the public. For instance, progressive Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said “I can’t be silent” and will continue speaking about policy goals ranging from defunding police departments to passing the Green New Deal. But centrist Democrat Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) argues that if party members keep using such language, Democrats will get “torn apart in 2022.”

-Jianing Li, Mike Wagner, Lew Friedland, Dhavan Shah

“Baltimore never really wrestled with the demons of segregation,” said Lawrence Brown, a visiting sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

“I am always a bit suspicious of silver bullets in public health,” Michael Fiore, one of the country’s leading experts on tobacco use and smoking cessation, told me. “Things are rarely silver bullets. But reducing the nicotine in cigarettes to near-zero is as close to a silver bullet as you get.”

Craig Roberts, epidemiologist emeritus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said that “bubbles sound good in concept but are difficult to pull off, especially at this scale.”

“The key, he said, “is the degree to which the community stays in the bubble, of course, and nobody violates the rules” — sneaking into town, for example. But staff members could be potential problems if they’re coming and going from the community. That makes it more like a long-term care facility, he said, where only residents are on lockdown.

Biden’s platform states that “student debt both exacerbates and results from the racial wealth gap.” Of the 1 in 5 Americans with student loan debt, a disproportionate number are Black. Nick Hillman, associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at University of Wisconsin-Madison, points out that data shows in communities of color, 17% of borrowers are in default and their median loan is $9,067.

Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the recount effort is clearly not actually about changing the election result given the margin.

Katherine J. Cramer is professor of political science and chair of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.

The past few years have taught me just how removed the cultural elite in the United States is from many of the other people in this nation. By cultural elite, I mean those of us who create the knowledge and the media content people consume, as well those of us in positions of political and other decision-making power. There is a deep well of people in this country who are sure the system is not working for them, and we seem to be only coming around to recognizing how deep it goes.

Although the neuroscience of video gaming is not conclusive, there may be evidence that the benefits are not (pardon the phrase) just in your head. Recently, a group of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, Irvine developed Tenacity, a game with the goal of increasing mindfulness.

“From a partisan perspective, Trump’s vilification of cities makes no sense,” Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an email. “It has little to do with his loss in Wisconsin, which resulted mostly from small shifts in the white vote outside of the city, particularly the suburbs, Dane County, and other parts of Milwaukee County.”

“It culminates in having designated state officials provide a formal stamp of approval for the election,” said Robert Yablon, associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and expert on election law. Depending on the state, that official could be the secretary of state, an elections commission or a board of canvassers created for this purpose.

“Direct appointment of electors by state legislatures is being discussed in some circles as an extreme measure, but is not actually a plausible scenario,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The research team, led by two experts in the genetics of viruses — Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — studied the so-called D614G version of the coronavirus.

“If you’re a rural resident, you’re seeing that economically, your type of community is struggling,” said Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“This is what exponential math looks like,” Malia Jones, a social epidemiologist with the University of Wisconsin Applied Population Laboratory and the UW-Madison Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, told MarketWatch.