Led by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the disease was reported on February 3rd in the journal Nature Communication.The study suggests that the disease is caused by a newly discovered bacterium that comes as the world struggles with the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A new and always fatal disease that has been killing chimpanzees at a sanctuary in Sierra Leone for years has been reported for the first time by an international team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A professor of psychiatry and human ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Raison believes depression isn’t a single thing but a cloud of related mental and physical states unique to each person; there is no one symptom that every depressed person experiences. “It’s all kind of hunt-and-peck,” he says. “We have an array of treatment options that we just start throwing at people because we don’t know why, biologically, they’re depressed.” Meanwhile depression is growing to epidemic proportions in the United States, with few truly novel treatments approved over the last three decades.
Disease ecologist Tony Goldberg was stunned in 2016 when he learned that a mysterious infection was swiftly killing chimpanzees at a lush sanctuary in Sierra Leone’s rainforest. “It was not subtle—the chimpanzees would stagger and stumble, vomit, and have diarrhea,” recalls Goldberg of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Sometimes they’d go to bed healthy and be dead in the morning.”
In 2016, Dr. Goldberg, an epidemiologist and veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and head of the Kibale EcoHealth Project, was approached by the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance to try to solve the mystery. He and his colleagues at Wisconsin joined forces with other veterinarians and biologists in Africa and elsewhere to undertake a comprehensive analysis of blood and tissue from the dead chimps that had been frozen at a nearby hospital.
But cases kept coming. In 2016, the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance, an umbrella organization for the continent’s primate sanctuaries, reached out to epidemiologist Tony Goldberg, Owens’ advisor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Goldberg was immediately intrigued. “This is an unknown infectious disease that poses a serious risk to the health and survival of an endangered species, which happens to be our nearest relative,” he says.
Over 200 University of Wisconsin nursing and pharmacy students have volunteered to help administer COVID-19 vaccines at statewide mobile clinics in local high-need areas.
Feature billing goes to researchers like Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute, a pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial civilizations; Natalie Batalha of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a leader of the Kepler mission who is now planning Webb observations; Margaret (Maggie) Turnbull, an expert on habitable planets at the University of Wisconsin, and a former candidate for governor of that state, whom Mr. Kahn interviewed as she tended her backyard beehives; and Amy Lo, a Northrop engineer who works on racecars when she is not working on making all the Webb pieces fit together.
“A lot of what he has done has been unwinding what Trump had done,” said Kenneth Mayer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist and expert on presidential powers and executive actions. “Virtually all presidents push the envelope and do things that expand the scope of executive authority.”
Christina Koch, a research computing facilitator at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, works at a computing centre that provides remote access to some 14,000 nodes and terabytes of memory. Suppose, Koch says, that a bioinformatician has a computational workflow for analysing gene-expression data sets. Each data set takes a day to process on their computer, and the researcher has 60 such data sets. “That’s two months of non-stop running,” she says. But, by sending the job to a computer cluster using the ‘secure shell’ command, ‘ssh’, which opens an encrypted portal to the remote system, the researcher can parallelize the computations across 60 computers. “Instead of two months, it takes one day.”
“A lot of what he has done has been unwinding what Trump had done,” said Kenneth Mayer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist and expert on presidential powers and executive actions. “Virtually all presidents push the envelope and do things that expand the scope of executive authority.”
Today, in the era of a 78-year-old president, a veritable Rip Van Biden, Americans and the rest of the world are, it seems, waking up in a new age. It could well be a daunting one.Invest your way with Schwab.From automated investing to financial consultants, get tools and resources that match your needs.
-Alfred McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power and Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State.
When public servants face a challenge, AAAS Member and newly elected 2020 AAAS Fellow Dr. Laura Albert finds solutions. Whether helping police tackle the opioid crisis, or assisting election officials in protecting voters during a deadly pandemic — which was one of her most recent feats — the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor uses mathematical models and analytics to recommend safe, economical and often innovative remedies.
“It told mapmakers you can do whatever you want,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “All of the guardrails are off.”
Food packaging films that contain several layers of different plastic are particularly tricky to take apart. Every year, 100 million tons of these multilayer films are produced worldwide. When thrown away, those plastics go to landfills, says chemical engineer George Huber of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Unfortunately, other social media outlets—where 55 percent of Americans often or sometimes get their news, according to a Pew Research study—were bereft of such information. So Ritter, Buttenheim and Malia Jones, a former Penn epidemiologist now at University of Wisconsin-Madison, started a Facebook page called Dear Pandemic, a source for easy-to-understand, science-backed Covid information written by a volunteer team of 12 women scientists from around the country and England, including five in Philly. (The team is supported by a project coordinator and a team of experts, translators, student employees, and interns.)
“Essentially, the huge number of cumulative infections worldwide provides a large number of opportunities for viruses to acquire beneficial mutations and then spread preferentially,” said Thomas Friedrich, a vaccine expert at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “This is kind of like playing an evolutionary slot machine. One individual slot may be unlikely to hit the jackpot — but if you are able to play millions of slots in parallel, hitting the jackpot on a few becomes much more likely.”
“Fathers say it means a lot to them to see their baby on the screen and have an unmediated experience with the baby,” explains Tova Walsh, PhD, MSW, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies the transition to fatherhood.
Dr. Patrick Remington, a professor emeritus in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, previously worked as an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He says a career spent studying public health policy has taught him that laws are typically only effective for the people already inclined to follow a given health recommendation, like wearing seat belts in cars or not smoking indoors.
Not all of Biden’s economic agenda hinges on Congress. He has asked the requisite agencies to extend the federal moratorium on evictions and foreclosures through March 31, and the pause on federal student loan payments through Sept. 30. But there’s ultimately a limit to what the Executive Branch can do on its own. “There’s no set of buttons and levers the President can push and pull to generate the optimum mix of economic growth, unemployment and inflation,” says Kenneth Mayer, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor who studies Executive Orders.
Jonathan Senchyne, an associate professor of book history and print culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he thinks a price might have been listed because this type of book would have been put on display at a holiday fair.
Laura Dresser, a labor economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said at that hiring pace, it’ll be a long time before Wisconsin makes up the hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in April.
Biden was able to make so many changes so quickly because of the precedent set by his predecessor, Donald Trump, says University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Kenneth Mayer, author of the book “With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power.”
“Every president looks for ways to use the powers of the office to accomplish their goals, and Trump was unusually aggressive about it, finding things that really broke the norms,” such as declaring a national emergency on the border to redirect money to build a wall Congress refused to fund, he said.
Rebecca Blank, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that Madison’s thriving industries, such as biotechnology, software and gaming, are “areas that are basically all very much rooted in both the students who graduate from here and the faculty and the research work that we do here”.
“It’s a recognition of Chicana and Latina talent in acting and representation,” said Theresa Delgadillo, a Chicana and Latina studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “and a woman innovator in music at the center of it.”
That’s partly because these tools are free, Rasband says. But it’s also because it’s easy for users to customize the tool to their needs, says Kevin Eliceiri, a biomedical engineer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, whose team has taken the lead on ImageJ development since Rasband’s retirement. ImageJ features a deceptively simple, minimalist user interface that has remained largely unchanged since the 1990s.
Trade policy is where the president wields the most economic power, as Congress has over the years delegated negotiating authority to the president’s office, according to Menzie Chinn, professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Chinn documented the trade war saga on his macroeconomic policy blog Econbrowser.
Another key point? It doesn’t make sense to be happy all the time. “The goal isn’t to be happy 24/7,” Richard Davidson, founder and director of the Center For Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told HuffPost.
Hallmark having its own PAC may come as a surprise to some, but these days, a major company not having a PAC is more of an anomaly, said Eleanor Neff Powell, an associate professor of American politics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Hallmark having its own PAC may come as a surprise to some, but these days, a major company not having a PAC is more of an anomaly, said Eleanor Neff Powell, an associate professor of American politics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The financial aid office is your friend in this process,” explains Karla Weber, who works in the financial aid office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I think sometimes we get made out to be the ones that are hiding or hoarding this money from students, where it’s really just the opposite.
In that test, the children correctly identified the emotional expression on uncovered faces about 66% of the time, well above the odds of just guessing, psychologist Ashley Ruba at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said. Looking at faces in surgical-type masks, however, the children were only able to correctly identify sadness about 28% of the time, anger 27% of the time, and fear 18% of the time.
“For very young children, I think it is still an open question as to how they’ll navigate these situations,” said Dr. Ruba, who studies how children learn to understand other people’s emotions. “Infants can use all these other cues, like tone of voice.”
“The fact that gorillas are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 should come as no surprise,” says disease ecologist Tony Goldberg of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Fortunately, gorillas at zoos have excellent medical care, and most will likely pull through due to the efforts of dedicated veterinarians. That’s not the case for gorillas in the wild, though.”
Thomas Friedrich, professor of virology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says a new, more transmissible variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 could have big implications for the pandemic in the U.S. if its starts spreading widely in the country.
“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.”
This new study, led by Fanny Mofette, a postdoctoral researcher in applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, looked at the effects of these alert messages on deforestation. Mofette and their team observed an 18% drop over two years in 22 African countries. The carbon emissions avoided with this reduction could be saving anywhere between $149 million and $696 million in economic damages, University of Wisconsin-Madison officials said in a statement.
Created by a nonprofit affiliated with the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the totally free Healthy Minds Program app has meditations, exercises, and podcast-style lessons designed to build foundational mindfulness skills. Not only that, but you’ll have the opportunity to learn how and why meditation works, which might just be compelling for skeptics and enthusiasts alike.
Over time, Corona cameras and film improved in quality. With an archive of almost one million images, the program detected Soviet missile sites, warships, naval bases and other military targets. “They counted every rocket in the Soviet Union,” said Volker Radeloff, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin — Madison whose lab has used the images in its studies. “These images kept the Cold War cold.”
“This is really a small revolution,” said study lead Fanny Moffette, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“In the last 10 to 15 years, there has been an explosion of research linking well-being in its many forms to numerous indicators of health. When that work [began], we didn’t know that purpose in life would emerge as such an important predictor of numerous health outcomes,” says Carol Ryff, psychologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and director of the MIDUS (Midlife in the United States) national study of Americans. Research has shown that people who have high levels of purpose in life spend fewer nights in hospitals, have lower odds of developing diabetes, and over two times lower risk of dying from heart conditions than do others.
British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, which has enrolled at least 23,000 so far in its ongoing U.S. study, recently decided to offer individual participants the opportunity to be unmasked as they become eligible for the approved vaccines.
“You never really want to unblind,” said Dr. William Hartman, a researcher for AstraZeneca’s trial at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Our brains, generally speaking, operate qualitatively, not quantitatively, explains Dominique Brossard, a professor and chair in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who focuses on risk communication. In short, that means we tend to think in terms of emotion, not numbers.
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.
Bennett worries that Black kids aren’t afforded the same opportunities to imagine their way into mischief that white kids are. Surveying the children’s-entertainment landscape, he sees stories in which Black characters either don’t exist or exist merely to satisfy some goal of representation. Black authors are rarer still: According to data collected by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, less than 5 percent of children’s books published in 2019 were written by Black authors.
“Imagine that the patient, who has some degree of cognitive impairment, says ’yes’ to the vaccine but the surrogate says ’no’ and tells the nursing home, ’How dare you try to do this?” said Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School.
The lead researcher of the study at Wisconsin, Tim McGuine, said in an interview in August that “the greatest risk [to student-athletes] is not covid-19. It’s suicide and drug use.” The study caught the eye of the organization overseeing high school sports, the National Federation of State High School Associations, which was already dealing with an uptick in reports from state athletic directors about mental health concerns for teen athletes whose seasons were in flux.
“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.”
It’s time for federal and state legislators to work together to make targeted public investments, close resource gaps, and address structural barriers to opportunity that have plagued the higher education system for decades and that have been made only more urgent by the COVID-19 pandemic and our national reckoning on racial justice. It’s time for a real conversation about equity-based funding in U.S. higher education.
Nick Hillman is associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Follow him on Twitter: @n_hillman
On the day U.S. deaths from COVID-19 surpassed 300,000, respiratory therapist Tina Schubert became the first UW Health employee and one of the first Wisconsinites to be inoculated with the vaccine made by Pfizer and the German biotechnology firm BioNTech.
Noted: The new Harris Poll was commissioned by DailyPay, the Bipartisan Policy Center Funding Our Future campaign, and The Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin. The survey was conducted online from Nov. 17-19 and surveyed 2,075 U.S. adults ages 18 and older, among whom 593 are millennials between the ages 24-39.
“This data shows the resilience of younger generations in the face of the second major economic shock of their financial lives,” added J. Michael Collins of the Center for Financial Security, referring to this year’s pandemic and the Great Recession of 2007-2009.
