Much-anticipated COVID-19 vaccines are being distributed across Wisconsin starting in mid-December. Though widespread availability of the vaccine is still months away, we know you may have questions.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has assembled a panel of experts from the University of Wisconsin to help answer questions from readers.
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.”
Some scientists believed from the start that it would be possible to repurpose this basic cellular function for medicine. In 1990, a Hungarian-born scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, Katalin Kariko brashly predicted to a surgeon colleague that his work would soon be obsolete, replaced by the power of messenger RNA therapies. That same year, a team at the University of Wisconsin startled the scientific world with a paper that showed it was possible to inject a snippet of messenger RNA into mice and turn their muscle cells into factories, creating proteins on demand.
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.
Days after millions of Americans ignored health guidance to avoid travel and large Thanksgiving gatherings, it’s still too soon to tell how many people became infected with the coronavirus over the course of the holiday weekend. But as travelers head home to communities already hit hard by the disease, hospitals and health officials across the country are bracing for what scientist Dave O’Connor called “a surge on top of a surge.”
“It is painful to watch,” said O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Like seeing two trains in the distance and knowing they’re about to crash, but you can’t do anything to stop it.”
Only 46 out of 4,035 books for children and teens reviewed in 2019 were by Indigenous authors, according to data compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
No longer sequestered in an aging building in a space that was about equal to a garage with a few chest freezers, Bucky’s Varsity Meats, formally Bucky’s Butchery, has a shiny new home with a glistening meat counter, several glass doors for refrigerated and frozen products and bunkers filled with hot dogs, snack sticks and tubes of summer sausage.
The discovery is especially surprising because the ants are well known. “There are thousands of papers on leaf-cutter ants,” says study co-author Cameron Currie, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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.
“The top line is this is more great news,” said Dave O’Connor, a vaccinologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is a volunteer in the AstraZeneca trial. (He believes he received the placebo, because he had no side effects after either dose.)
Maybe, says Douglas Deboer, a dermatologist at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There has been some research and experiments that suggest the possibility that pets can be allergic to humans, but nothing conclusive. If there are cats or dogs with these allergies, they are extremely rare.
“Anything’s possible,” Deboer says. “But it seems clear that it is not very common, if it exists at all.”
Fungal infections affect hundreds of millions of people globally each year. “They’re particularly a problem for people whose immune system is suppressed,” says David Andes at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. This includes people being treated for cancer, organ transplant recipients and premature babies.
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.
In another of the studies released earlier this year, researchers at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health found that, based on autopsies, people who lived in the poorest neighborhoods at the time of their death were about twice as likely to have brain changes typical of Alzheimer’s disease as people who lived in the wealthiest neighborhoods. Researchers used the Neighborhood Atlas, a map developed by the University of Wisconsin that charts neighborhoods by socioeconomic status.
“We are in the baby steps of trying to understand what is driving this,” says Ryan Powell, a scientist who helped lead the study.
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.”
“If we’d had a little seismometer on there, we probably would have seen the same types of things you see on seismometers placed on a real glacier,” said Luke Zoet, a glaciologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and lead author of the new research. The results were published in AGU’s journal Geophysical Research Letters.
“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.
“Surfaces can occasionally be a source of transmission,” said Dave O’Connor, an expert on the genome of the virus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “They do not appear to be a major, or the major, source of transmission in areas where the virus is already endemic. If you have otherwise eradicated the virus, such as New Zealand or this region of China, vigilance will be required to prevent reintroductions by both goods and travelers.”
One researcher whose work is compatible with a pond environment is Lena Vincent of the University of Wisconsin-Madison – although she prefers to keep an open mind. She is trying to create sets of chemicals that copy themselves as a group. The simplest example would be a pair of chemicals A and B, where each has the ability to make the other, so A makes B and B makes A. Such a pair of chemicals would be able to self-replicate, even though neither could do so alone. In practice the sets of chemicals are more complicated than that, but the principle is the same.
Professor Robert Yablon, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison law school, told Checkpoint Trump has the same power he always has had as president, and can do what he wants, “within the standard bounds of the US Constitution and the law.
“We’re shedding farms,” Randy Jackson remarks grimly one autumn day over video conference. A professor of grassland ecology in the department of agronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jackson points to the fact that a record 10 percent of dairy farms in his state of Wisconsin shuttered in 2019, another milestone for a local economy that led the nation in farm bankruptcies last year.
David Canon, chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s political science department, said allegations of fraud are a “complete fabrication”. He said he expects little, if anything, to come from the Trump campaign’s attempts at litigation across the country.
While Hantz Farms didn’t dispossess anyone’s land, the threat is real, said Monica White, author of “Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement.”
“There has been a historical dispossession of land from Black farmers, and redlining is a part of that history,” said White, an associate professor of environmental justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The current legal maneuvering is mainly a way for the Trump campaign to try to extend the ball game in the long-shot hope that some serious anomaly will emerge,” said Robert Yablon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. “As of now, we haven’t seen any indication of systematic irregularities in the vote count.”
President Trump’s campaign said it has filed lawsuits to stop counting ballots in Michigan and Pennsylvania to increase access to observe the tallying process. Franciska Coleman, assistant professor of constitutional law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, says stopping ballot counts is an ‘extraordinary’ remedy. She joins ‘Closing Bell’ to discuss.
Hunting also increased in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan after wolves in those states were federally delisted, adds Adrian Treves, an ecologist who leads the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Nancy Wong, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s because stockpiling items, like we had seen earlier in the pandemic, serves as a security blanket.
“People feel assured and soothed by something that is concrete,” she said.
Neuroscientist Richard Davidson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds, has helped create a series of meditative soundtracks to cope with the anxiety of the election.
Broad-based shutdowns in March and April brought economic worries to places such as the rural upper midwest long before the virus was widespread there. Political scientist Kathy Cramer, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said this was certainly the case in Wisconsin, where an edge-of-your-seat finish is now playing out.
“There is no doubt that, in general, people were experiencing economic effects more than the health effects of the pandemic,” especially in the spring and summer, said Cramer. Cramer is also author of the Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.
Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said earlier on Wednesday that Trump appeared to be trailing Biden by about 22,000 to 23,000 votes in the state, which would amount to less than one percentage point.
“I wouldn’t want to speculate on how the Court would rule, but the argument that voters relied on the rules in place on and before Election Day – and should therefore have their votes counted – is very strong,” said Dan Tokaji, dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School.
The fear created by threats and violence has a chilling effect on the nation’s political process, said Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
“The almost daily increases in cases, deaths, and hospitalizations in Wisconsin keep voters’ attention on the pandemic and that attention does not help Donald Trump,” said Barry C. Burden, the director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Aaron Sojourner at the University of Minnesota and Menzie Chinn at the University of Wisconsin have constructed the graph below which projects the size of the economy based on various September quarter growth rates vs. the December 2019 quarter.
And while many of Wisconsin’s small towns and cities in its southwestern corner drove up Mr. Trump’s margins, most had not voted for Republicans in decades, says Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Things are really running rampant, so there is a lot of discontent,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As a result, public safety measures have been largely left up to municipalities and individuals, said Patrick Remington, former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Other wrinkles of our current political moment could further explain why so many Trump supporters approve of the president’s pandemic response. Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says the most consistent theme on the right-wing talk-radio shows she’s been listening to is a desire to trust people to make their own decisions, rather than trusting the government to make decisions for people.
“The question is not so much what policy needs to be enacted, but what are people willing to embrace?” said Ajay Sethi, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “A policy is only as effective as people will follow it.”
Some researchers will focus more on what happens after the election. University of Wisconsin, Madison Professor Young Mie Kim studied Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and continues to monitor for Russian-linked accounts in 2020. She leads research called Project DATA, or Digital Ad Tracking and Analysis. It tracks digital political ads to learn how parties, organizations and candidates target potential voters.
“It is absolutely exhausting right now,” said Dr. Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer at UW Health, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s hospital and medical arm. Nearly a third of its COVID-19 patients are in intensive care, filling all three wings of the ICU, he said. Some require one-on-one care around the clock.
“Those ballots would not have been counted,” Mayer told FRONTLINE. “And now, no ballots that arrive after elections will be counted, and it is a certainty that there will be some.”
“Things are really running rampant, so there is a lot of discontent,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It’s going to be volatile control of Congress in the near term,” said University of Wisconsin Professor Barry Burden. To keep or gain an edge, partisans “want states like Wisconsin where one party seems to have really baked in its power in the legislature, but it’s still a purple state.”
“If they aren’t confident that they believe the result, some legislatures will be tempted to take the authority and appoint electors directly,” said Barry Burden, founding director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Kidney disease is often hidden but quite pervasive. According to 2019 data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one in seven Americans—37 million adults—have some chronic form of the condition. This means these vital organs aren’t filtering toxins and waste out of the blood as well as they should, but they haven’t completely failed. Although simple blood tests can identify kidney deficiencies, explains Fahad Aziz, a nephrologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, these cases rarely develop symptoms.
“There’s almost no daylight anymore between what happens in the presidential race and what happens in the Senate race,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin and the author of a book on ticket-splitting.
Young Mie Kim studied Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and continues to monitor for Russian-linked accounts during the 2020 presidential election cycle. Kim is a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she is part of a research project called Project DATA, or Digital Ad Tracking and Analysis. The project focuses on the 2020 election and tracks digital political ads to learn how parties, organizations and candidates target and speak to potential voters.
