Quoted: “There is evidence to suggest that vinegars can inhibit enzymes that break down food and change up how we digest carbohydrates,” Cassie Vanderwall, a nutritionist at University of Wisconsin Health, told TODAY. “(But) I don’t think the evidence is strong enough to recommend it (for weight loss.)”
Tag: featured
Ryan Zinke blames ‘environmental terrorist groups’ for severity of California wildfires
Quoted: But Monica Turner, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said this argument doesn’t address the bigger problem.“Making minor changes in the fuels [which] you then have to do repeatedly for many years is not going to solve the bigger problem of having to face climate change,” she told The Washington Post. “We cannot clear or thin our way out of this problem.”
Animals suffer in Europe’s summer of extreme heat
Quoted: “What we expect is more heat waves like this, and we expect that as the climate changes and heat waves become more common, species will experience heat stress, migrate away from periods of heat, or in the case of trees start dying,” said Jack Williams, a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin. “There’s a saying that species have opportunities of moving, adapting, persisting or dying out.”
A drug’s weird side effect lets people control their dreams
Noted: A small number of people naturally have lucid dreams, meaning they can recognise when they’re dreaming and steer the storyline they experience. Some others can learn to induce them using cognitive techniques.The practice is most commonly used to pursue fantasies like flying, but it may also help to overcome fears and nightmares, says Benjamin Baird at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Turnout in Minnesota, Wisconsin primaries surges to two-decade highs
Quoted: However, David Canon, professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said not too much could be read into Tuesday’s turnout given several hot contests in the state.
UW-Madison maintains high affordability ranking, Money Magazine says
The annual Money Magazine Best Colleges for Your Money list out on Monday puts UW-Madison at 48th overall and 30th among public universities, based on affordability, quality of education and outcomes.
Video game to improve empathy in school kids
“The realisation that these skills are actually trainable with video games is important because they are predictors of emotional well-being and health throughout life, and can be practised anytime–with or without video games,” said lead author Tammi Kral, graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US.
How a video game may improve empathy in middle schoolers
According to the researchers, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, empathy is the first step in a sequence that can lead to prosocial behavior, such as helping others in need.
Streaming Textbooks: Changing the Game
According to the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Other parts of the cost of attendance, including living costs, transportation, books and supplies, and personal expenses make up between 50 percent and 80 percent of sticker price. As a result, low-income students can be faced with making difficult financial choices. For example, tight finances among low-income students can lead them to sacrifice food and housing to stay in school.”
Video Game Designed to Boost Empathy in Kids Shows Good Qualities Can Be Taught: Study
Lead author Tammi Kral, graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, said: The realisation that these skills are actually trainable with video games is important because they are predictors of emotional well-being and health throughout life, and can be practised anytime – with or without video games.
Boost your gut health with crickets
A group of researchers led by Dr. Valerie Stull at the University of Wisconsin-Madison set out to see how eating crickets affects gut microbiota and if it functions as an anti-inflammatory. The resulting experiment showed that crickets are, indeed, very good for one’s gut health.
Here’s More Evidence Facebook Is Harming Democracy
Quoted: “On balance, the overall impact of social media on political knowledge appears to be negative,” write University of Wisconsin–Madison scholars Sangwon Lee and Michael Xenos. “Political social media use does not have a significant effect on political knowledge, while general social media use has a modestly negative effect.”
How Colleges Are Sparing Birds’ Lives and Conserving Energy
Aaron Williams was never a bird expert or even a bird enthusiast. But somehow, he’s found himself coordinating a flock of volunteers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as part of a large-scale effort to protect local and migrating birds.
The Mendocino Complex Fire is now the largest wildfire ever recorded in California
Quoted: “Extreme droughts and high winds are increasing as climate is warming,” said Monica Turner, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has spent three decades researching fires at Yellowstone National Park. “That’s the ultimate driver behind what’s happening in California.”
An Invasive New Tick Is Spreading in the U.S.
Quoted: “One tick can crank out females in fairly large numbers,” said Thomas Yuill, a retired pathobiologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was one of the first to raise alarms about the invaders.
Security Experts: Wisconsin Voting Systems Can Be Hacked
Noted: Wisconsin and other battleground states were targeted by a sophisticated social media campaign, according to a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison study headed by journalism professor Young Mie Kim.
Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and the war over change
A new report out of the University of Wisconsin Madison’s Applied Population Lab found that white births are now outnumbered by white deaths in 26 states, up from 17 in 2014 and four in 2004.
White House Report Claims ‘War On Poverty’ Is Over
Featured: According to the U.S. Census, more than 43 million Americans were living below the poverty line in 2016. But a recent report released from the White House says initiatives to reduce poverty in the United States over the last 50 years have largely been a success. Timothy Smeeding–Lee Rainwater Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics and former Director of the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty–joins us to talk about the report and what it could mean for social programs in the future.
Is there a right kind of screen time?
Featured: In the last installment of our series on the trade-offs of technology and what it means for our kids, Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talked with Dr. Megan Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin who studies how media use affects kids.
‘I Think All Those People Are Dead’: Laos Dam Survivors Seek Word of Neighbors
Quoted: “It’s hard to know if they were lying now or if they were incompetent before,” said Ian Baird, an expert on Laos at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, referring to Laotian officials. But he said the confusion was to be expected, with a risk-adverse authoritarian government in a poor country that is not accustomed to responding to disasters of this magnitude.
Weed Legalization Is Tearing This Neighbourhood Apart
But in Denver, pot businesses boosted property values in their host neighbourhoods, according to a report last year from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business. In other words, the business of weed can be both a boon to homeowners and a source of stress on local renters.
Dam Collapse in Laos Displaces Thousands, Exposes Dam Safety Risks
Featured: We’ll discuss what led to the tragedy and how it could’ve been prevented with Ian Baird, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s an expert on Laos and impacts of dams.
‘Battery of Asia’: Laos’s controversial hydro ambitions
Quoted: “Poor people in the project areas are worse off because of these dams, not better off,” said Ian Baird, assistant professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Locals reap little benefit in Laos’s controversial hydroelectricity ambitions
Quoted: “Poor people in the project areas are worse off because of these dams, not better off,” said Ian Baird, assistant professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
An Advocate’s Perspective on Patient-Centered Care
Attorney Meg Gaines found a calling to be a patient advocate after her own cancer experience. Gaines’ self-advocacy helped her through her extended and difficult diagnosis and treatment process in the 1990s. After her successful treatment, she wanted to empower other people with cancer to advocate for their care. Her first opportunity came unexpectedly, when her oncologist asked her to help cheer up a patient who was feeling down. “I jumped on the bus and really was there in about 25 minutes,” Gaines told me in a recent interview. “[I] sat for most of the afternoon with her—talking about life, and death, and mortality and what it’s like, and family, and fear, and cancer.”
America needs independent judges
Rather than enhancing the neutrality of administrative law judges, the executive order diminishes them by making their hiring subject to political considerations. It means that administrative law judges will be more akin to Roger Goodell than a Supreme Court justice, no longer bound by precedent and legal reasoning, but rather incentivized to decide cases to advance political, not legal, objectives. This calls for Congress to protect the continued independence of administrative law judges.
-Steph Tai is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin who represents amici in federal court and Supreme Court cases.
A Day Before Laos Dam Failed, Builders Saw Trouble
Quoted: Both South Korean companies mentioned heavy rains in their descriptions of the disaster. But Ian Baird, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who specializes in Laos and has studied the hydropower project, said he believed the problem was either faulty construction, or a decision to store too much water in the dam’s reservoir at a time when heavy rain should have been expected. “When at the end of July do we not get rain in this part of the world?” he asked.
Why are so many products being recalled over Salmonella concerns?
Quoted: “It’s an ingredient derived from the waste of cheese making,” Bradley Bolling, a food scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.
The weirdest things we learned this week: Curing syphilis with malaria, ejecting bears from planes, and discovering new beer yeasts
In 2009, a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, launched a five-continent search for the yeast mama. This portion of the genetics is what gives lager style beer its primary characteristic: the ability to ferment cold. The first hit came from Argentina, a 99.5 percent match from a growth on a beech tree. They named it Saccharomyces eubayanus.
New Emails Show Michigan Republicans Plotting to Gerrymander Maps
Quoted: “It looks like naked partisanship, and that might be permissible,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If it’s merely one party trying to harm the fortunes of the other, the court thus far has given that the green light, and it might continue to.”
Rescuers Arrive for 3,000 Stranded After Laos Dam Collapse: Media
Quoted: “The roads are very poor,” Ian Baird, a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Laos expert, told Reuters by telephone.
BBC World Service – Newshour, Laos dam collapse: What went wrong?
Featured: Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Ian Baird disagrees with calling it a natural disaster and explains why it could have been prevented.
UW Study: Hormone Replacement Therapy Doesn’t Increase Risk Of Alzheimer’s Disease
There’s some reassuring news for healthy women taking hormone replacement therapy who are concerned about Alzheimer’s disease: University of Wisconsin-Madison research shows no increased risk for the most common type of dementia. But it also didn’t find any benefits to the brain.
Is it OK to exploit poor Indians in the name of photojournalism?
Quartz: “Journalists have obligations to relay information within real contexts. To put fake food—and what appears to be Western food and alcohol at that—in front of these subjects and staging them to cover their faces feels exploitative,” said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Paid internship program allows local high school students to explore careers
The Madison Metropolitan School District partnered with UW-Madison to give kids in high school a chance to explore a future career in health care and veterinary medicine.The LEAP Forward internship program is part of the district’s Personalized Pathways initiative, designed to let kids try out their interests through a summer internship at one of seven campus sites, including the School of Veterinary Medicine and University Health Services.
Women’s reproductive history may predict Alzheimer’s risk
Research at the conference also included updates to the associations between hormone therapy and Alzheimer’s risk. Previous studies had suggested that women who start taking hormones in their late 60s and 70s have a higher rate of cognitive decline, a paper out of the University of Wisconsin school of medicine and public health found that risk to be elevated specifically for women with diabetes.
Meet the Woman Who Rocked Particle Physics—Three Times
One of the many women who, in a different world, might have won the physics prize in the intervening 55 years is Sau Lan Wu. Wu is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an experimentalist at CERN, the laboratory near Geneva that houses the Large Hadron Collider.
Wisconsin researchers study genetic screening for Amish
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are working to expand newborn genetic screening for Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities in the state.
Wisconsin researchers study genetic screening for Amish
“We want to be able to offer very rapid, low-cost confirmatory testing of genetic disorders,” said Dr. Christine Seroogy, a pediatric immunologist and associate professor at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. “Additionally, it could be cost-saving, in that we are diagnosing the disorders early, which saves the families lots of diagnostic testing.”
Childhood trauma leaves scars that are genetic, not just emotional, study affirms
Neglect, abuse, violence and trauma endured early in life can ripple directly into a child’s molecular structure and distort their DNA, according to a new study this week from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Report: Critical Communications Infrastructure Could Be Under Water in 15 years
Thousands of miles of buried fiberoptic cable in densely populated coastal regions of the United States may soon be inundated by rising seas, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Oregon, reports news.wisc.edu.
Trevor Matich goes fishing with Wisconsin Badgers’ offensive line
Trevor Matich chats and breaks down film with the Wisconsin Badgers’ offensive line while fishing. (Video.)
Paul Fanlund: Five years in, Rebecca Blank sees UW ‘at a good place’
This Sunday, Rebecca Blank will mark the fifth anniversary of her starting date as Madison chancellor. That matches Shalala’s tenure, but maybe we should look at Blank’s as a de facto 10 years, because for all of her time here, Blank has essentially held two jobs.
UW Madison addresses acceptance and affordability concerns over ice cream
The University of Wisconsin at Madison is the largest and best known of Wisconsin’s 13 public universities, but over the past decade it has earned a reputation among some Wisconsinites for being expensive, liberal and hard to get into. The Wisconsin Alumni Association, equipped with a refurbished dairy van and gallons of ice cream, is trying to change that.
Monarch butterfly ‘way station’ feeds migrating insects in Duluth
Noted: Karen Oberhauser, who directs the University of Wisconsin Arboretum and is the former head of the Monarch Lab at the University of Minnesota, says the loss of breeding habitat also is a huge problem in the Upper Midwest where milkweed used to grow between rows of crops like corn and soybeans.
Mindfulness y meditación: un experto explica el trasfondo de esta práctica milenaria
Dr. Charles L. Raison speaks with CNN Español about the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. (In Spanish)
Elitist? Callous to state students? UW-Madison tries to smooth image
If you’ve heard it’s next to impossible for Wisconsin kids to get into the University of Wisconsin-Madison, here’s the scoop.
Confronting Implicit Bias in the New York Police Department
Noted: But Patricia G. Devine, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin who runs a research laboratory on prejudice, said she was troubled by the spread of such training in the absence of probing, objective research. She said more study of officers’ unintentional biases is necessary to evaluate how training can impact their behaviors. Additional data is needed, she said, to determine if officers retain what they are taught and if civilians are benefiting from fairer policing.
UW-Madison-led team and Antarctic observation led to discovery from galaxy far, far away
The scientific question eluded researchers around the world for more than a century.
Astronomers trace cosmic ray neutrino back to remote blazar
The initial detection by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica, and subsequent observations of high energy radiation from the same source by space telescopes and ground-based observatories, indicate such black holes act as the particle accelerators responsible for at least some of those cosmic rays.“The evidence for the observation of the first known source of high-energy neutrinos and cosmic rays is compelling,” said Francis Halzen, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor of physics and the lead scientist for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.
What’s a Blazar? A Galactic Bakery for Cosmic Rays
Scientists have finally located a source of the most energetic rays. Starting with a single signal—a flash of light in a detector at the South Pole—and combining it with telescope data from a collaboration of over a thousand people, astrophysicists have traced the origin of some of Earth’s cosmic rays to a blazar, a type of galaxy, 4 billion light years away. “We’ve learned that these active galaxies are responsible for accelerating particles and cosmic rays,” says physicist Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Origin of Mystery Space Radiation Finally Found
Quoted: “It’s exciting, no doubt, to have finally nailed the cosmic accelerator,” says the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Francis Halzen, lead scientist with IceCube. The results are reported today in three papers appearing in Scienceand the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Tracing the Source of Cosmic Rays to a Blazar Near Orion
Astronomers said the discovery could provide a long sought clue to one of the enduring mysteries of physics and the cosmos. Where does the rain of high-energy particles from space known as cosmic rays come from?
Scientists link record heat and power outages in Southern California to climate change
“Air conditioning saves lives from heat waves,” Jonathan Patz, who directs the University of Wisconsin’s Global Health Institute, told Earther. “But if the electricity to run air conditioners requires coal-fired power plants, then we have a problem.”
Preparing your teen for college dorm life? Don’t over-pack
Quoted: “Sometimes we don’t know what to do with emotions,” so parents channel them into packing and shopping to feel productive, said Beth Miller, a coordinator for residence life at University of Wisconsin-Madison who has been involved in campus life for the past 17 years. “But sometimes parents are purchasing things based on emotion and not necessarily based on need.”
Why the warming planet and increased air conditioning use could cause future deaths
According to new research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, increased use of air conditioners may only be making a bad problem even worse.
Emotional support from families makes a difference for low-income students
Roksa and her co-author, Peter Kinsley, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin Madison, surveyed 728 students in their first year at a two- or four-year institution and who had applied for financial aid in Wisconsin. Roksa asked each student about the financial and emotional support they received from their families and how engaged they were on campus and collected information about their academic success to determine how the three measures were related. The results were recently published in Research in Higher Education. The abstract is available here.
A true wildfire ‘fix’: End bad incentives that nudge people into harm’s way
Noted: In research published in March, scientists with the Forest Service and University of Wisconsin-Madison reported that 43 million homes now lie within the so-called WUI. After decades of new housing additions, the WUI footprint has swelled to 190 million acres — an expanse 10 percent larger than the state of Texas. Based on those trends, the U.S. wildfire problem could have as much to do with people’s preferences to live near forests and nature as it does a changing climate.
What parents should know to prevent, and deal with, bug bites
Column by Dipesh Navsaria, associate professor of pediatrics: For children, summer brings the delight of endless hours outdoors, enjoying nature in full flourish. But that natural world includes insect life, some of which bite humans — including our children. While most are harmless, there are several issues that can cause concern. Let’s explore briefly the world of insect bites — when to worry, and when not to.
An Astrophysics ‘Breakthrough’ Will Be Unveiled Thursday. Here’s How to Watch.
An international team of astrophysicists will reveal a “breakthrough” discovery Thursday (July 12), and you can watch the announcement live.The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced in a statement that it will host a news conference Thursday at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) to unveil new “multimessenger astrophysics findings” led by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an NSF-managed facility at the South Pole.