“These companies stand poised to break the link between commodity production and deforestation,” co-author and environmental scientist Holly Gibbs of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said in a statement. “To do that, more immediate action is needed to demonstrate commitment to change and to clear the haze surrounding these efforts.”
Murphy was apparently saddened at criticisms that Coming to America stereotyped Africans, says Tejumola Olaniyan, professor of African diaspora cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has written on how the movie “others” Africa. “It was actually meant to be a positive portrayal of Africa: they are rich Africans, not poor. They are noble, they are humble. He wanted to overturn Hollywood’s images. It was still a kind of romanticisation but the movie only happened at all because of Murphy’s power in Hollywood.”
As a University of Wisconsin-Madison computer and electrical engineering professor, Susan Hagness doesn’t typically field emails about cranberry farming. Her background is in cancer detection, not agriculture.
Change is afoot at University Research Park — at least, if the park’s leaders and tenants have their way — and it could urbanize the sprawling tech-transfer center into a place where you can buy a cup of coffee, grab lunch or play a game of racquetball.
Susan Paskewitz, the chair of the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Popular Science that cold is a limiting factor for the Asian tiger mosquito, which can carry the Zika virus.
University of Wisconsin campuses are updating or introducing new sexual harassment and sexual violence policies, following a mandate from the regents in December 2016 saying each campus needed its own, set guidelines.
“The NuScale reactor has crossed a very important safety threshold,” said Todd Allen, professor of nuclear engineering at University of Wisconsin. “It’s an inflection point for advanced reactor designs. The question we can’t answer yet is, will they make it work in the market?”
“These data show that was wrong,” says John Hawks, an anthropology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study. Today’s findings reveal that Levallois tools emerged in India roughly 385,000 years ago — right around the same time they started showing up in Africa and Europe. That means “India is part of this network of cultural innovation that included Neanderthals and Africans,” Hawks says. Michael Petraglia, a professor of human evolution at the Max Planck Institute in Germany who also did not participate in the research, agrees that the discovery is a key piece of the puzzle. “It fills an important gap in our knowledge of an important crossroads,” he says.
ST. PAUL, Minn. — The underdog theme has been embraced like no other by the Super Bowl-bound Philadelphia Eagles, and that continued into Monday’s Opening Night at St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center, where a handful of rubber dog masks surfaced among media and players.
Cough medicines that contain opioids like codeine should never be given to children, the Food and Drug Administration warned in early January.“Children should not take any cough or cold medications,” said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at the University of Wisconsin Health. “They are not beneficial and might be harmful.”
“These are very different cancers,” he told me. “It’s like saying a dog had an infection and then got another infection years later, so it’s a preexisting condition.”Dr. David Vail, an oncologist at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine, said he “would tend to agree that the two are unlikely to be related.”
“This would be the earliest modern human anyone has found outside of Africa, ever,” said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Wisconsin, Madison who was not involved in the study.
This new find adds another important clue towards solving the mystery of this earlier spread of humans out of Africa, write the authors of a commentary published with the study. “I think that’s pretty cool,” agrees John Hawks, an paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “You have a modern-looking upper jaw in Israel that was there much earlier than it was supposed to have been.” He cautions, however, against getting too attached to the label Homo sapiens: with only a small chunk of bone to go on, it’s hard to say for certain. It’s possible that it could be from another, unnamed relative of modern day people, for example.
A few years ago, in a laboratory at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, I walked into a mostly dark room, with a single light illuminating a plastic cup. Within the cup were dozens of tiny white blobs, each smaller than a pea. They were baby Hawaiian bobtail squid, and they were adorable. Their diminutive arms trailed behind them as they bobbed in the water, and the pigment cells that would eventually allow their adult selves to change color gave their infant faces a freckled appearance.
For the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Social Work, the call to reach out beyond the borders of campus comes not only from the Wisconsin Idea that animates the university community to public service, but also a professional code of ethics.
Another study – conducted by the University of Wisconsin and paid for by the Illinois Soybean Association and the U.S. Soybean Export Council – suggests that farmers can better compete with synthetic alternatives by planting beans with a specific amino acid balance.
The Patient Preferences Project at University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health has developed and is testing a list of useful questions for older patients. Even if your local hospital doesn’t have a program like those at Duke, Michigan Medicine or UCSF, you can ask your surgeon to address these questions.
Government money applied to things that we as a society think are important — from space travel to the internet — produces major results in every area, in the medical, mechanical, electric, and even retail space.To stay competitive in this global economy, we must value and support basic research. And that means allowing the “Ice Road Truckers of science” to pursue their curiosity in order to drive discovery.
Rebecca Blank is chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Brad Schwartz is CEO of the biomedical Morgridge Institute for Research in Madison.
African-Americans, who voted for Clinton over Trump by an 88-to-8 margin, were three times more likely than whites to be kept from the polls. “Thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of otherwise eligible people were deterred from voting by the ID law,” said University of Wisconsin political scientist Kenneth Mayer.
A supermoon is when these two cycles match up and we have a full moon that’s near its perigee. The result is that the full “super” moon appears slightly larger and slightly brighter to us in the sky. This occurs about one in every 14 full moons, Jim Lattis, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin Madison, notes.
The bald eagle population is still rebounding in the United States. But a new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the National Park Service and the U.S. Geological Survey found that protecting eagle nests from humans can help aid in their reproduction. We talk with one of the researchers about what this means.
Last month, researchers lobbed another salvo in the decades-long debate about the nature of these forms. They are indeed fossil life, and they date to 3.465 billion years ago, according to John Valley, a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin. If Valley and his team are right, the fossils imply that life diversified remarkably early in the planet’s tumultuous youth.
I perfectly understand that I live in a fantasy world, but I hold out hope that, as John Keating desires in “Dead Poets Society,” culture will again teach people to think for themselves, take agency, and carpe diem. If a missile alert came in on my phone, I’d keep doing what I already am: reading a good book and listening to Robert Schumann’s “Träumerei.”
-Mr. Schmiege teaches Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
With annual harvests of more than 5 million barrels — each barrel is 100 pounds of fruit — Wisconsin grows more than half of all commercial cranberries on the planet.
Professionals take an oath to serve people who are sick, Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison explained. They are also the only ones licensed to provide those services and must do so without discrimination, she said.
Riverside’s death rates from cancer, liver disease, and heart disease are well above the state average, for example. In 2016, the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ranked each California county by overall health outcomes, and pegged Riverside at 40th out of 57. (Fellow Inland Empire counties San Bernardino and Imperial counties fared even worse.)
A new startup project out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Discovery to Product program sees maps as storytelling. We speak with LifeMapping founder and UW-Madison grad Dean Olsen about how the twists and turns in his own life inspired him to create the software.
Since the 1960s, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been studying how plants will grow in space. We talk with a Professor of Botany at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who has been leading a research team to study the effects of growing plants in a zero gravity environment.
The push for more diverse characters in children’s book has been a slow climb. Only 14% of kids books published in the US had black, Latino, Asian or Native American main characters featured, according to a 2015 study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What’s more, around 80% of the people in editorial — authors, illustrators, editors — are white, according to industry data from publisher Lee and Low.
Would you consider yourself middle class? Chances are, whether you’re wealthy, lower income, or actually somewhere in the middle, you still identify as middle class. There are plenty of reasons why that is–“middle class” might be the most used word in modern politics–but a new University of Wisconsin study posits that it could also be because ads are telling us we’re middle class.
A 2014 study by University of Wisconsin pediatrician Barbara Knox and colleagues found that in 38 cases of severe child abuse, 47 percent of parents had never enrolled their children in school or pulled their youngsters out when abuse was suspected and told authorities they were home schooling.
Democrats won Wisconsin in every presidential election from 1988 to 2012, but Hillary Clinton’s strategists made the mistake of taking the state for granted in 2016. What they missed were trends brilliantly analyzed by Katherine J. Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, in her prophetic book, “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.” It was published eight months before the 2016 vote.
Jerry O’Brien, director of the Kohl’s Center for Retailing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told CNBC the tax cuts could result in a bigger gap between luxury retailers (i.e. Tiffany, Hudson’s Bay, Neiman Marcus and Tapestry) and other players, though he said off-price brands will continue to outperform in 2018. This leaves the “middle ground” of the industry at risk, he added.
At the time of Mr. Ross’s suspension, Kathleen Culver, the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that the president was likely to use the mistake as ammunition against his political opponents — an observation that seemed borne out by the “Fake News Awards.”
When we think about presidents losing their mental grip, we generally go back to Woodrow Wilson, who had a stroke in 1919 that left him bedridden and pretty much off the playing field. “Wilson was the worst case of presidential disability,” said John Cooper, a Wilson expert at the University of Wisconsin. The stroke was followed by other physical ailments and a long period of isolation under the protection of his wife, who some claimed was taking over the presidency. It left Wilson’s cognitive function unimpaired, Cooper said, “but it warped his judgment horribly.”
“Without being tremendously well organized, it can be easy to fail,” said Donald Moynihan, a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is writing a book on the effects of administrative burdens. Researchers have studied the ways complexity can reduce sign-ups for workplace pension plans, participation in food stamps and turnout in elections, he noted. “These sorts of little barriers are ways in which humans get tripped up all the time when they’re trying to do something that might benefit them.”
New research suggests warmer water in Lake Michigan could mean more bird deaths along the shoreline. The study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and U.S. Geological Survey found warmer water could favor the growth of algae with toxins that are killing off birds.
“From a gut instinct I would suspect there were multiple agents involved in that epidemic,” says Caitlin Pepperrell, a researcher who studies infectious diseases at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved with the study.
Raised as part of a prominent, groundbreaking family on Chicago’s South Side (her father, a successful real estate broker, was dubbed “The Kitcheonette King”), Hansberry spent a brief period at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before moving to New York in 1950 where, before turning to the theater, she worked as a journalist and political activist. Along the way she would cross paths with everyone from Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Energy Institute and a national nonprofit called The American Jobs Project have issued the look at job growth in what’s called the advanced energy sector — think of products like energy-conserving water heaters and thermostats.
A new student recreation facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will be known as the “Nick” when it opens next fall on the site of the former SERF.
“It’s OK to be wrong. Until you acknowledge what you don’t know, you cannot progress,” said the North Carolina native who, at age 23, received her Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison last month.
Over two-and-a-half decades later, it’s being hailed as an unqualified success. On Tuesday, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey announced in the Journal of Applied Ecology that bald eagle populations at Voyageurs have been tremendously rehabilitated to stable numbers thanks to nest protection. Collected data in reveals that the breeding population of these birds has risen from 10 pairs in 1991 to 48 pairs in 2016.
Their finding that the intensity of Arctic cold is easing in a warming world is supported by many other studies. For example, Jonathan Martin, a meteorology researcher at the University of Wisconsin, has documented considerable shrinkage of the pool of frigid air surrounding the Arctic in recent decades.
Make sure the quick win isn’t too hard or too easy, adds Alex Stajkovic, assistant professor of management and human resources at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin. “Easy goals are not motivating, and goals perceived to be beyond our ability may cause cessation of effort,” he says.
Scientists at the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies looked at 230 verified wolf attacks on livestock in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan from 1998 through 2014.
According to David Fields, Center for East Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Korean-American complex is like a precarious iron tower, which is strong but brittle, ready to collapse from any unexpected action like a preemptive strike of North Korea by the Trump administration.
“We’re monkeying with the very chemical foundation of these ecosystems,” said Emily H. Stanley, a limnologist (freshwater ecologist) at the University of Wisconsin — Madison. “But right now we don’t know enough yet to know where we’re going. To me, scientifically that’s really interesting, and as a human a little bit frightening.”
Amy Gilman has lived in Madison only a few months — but will likely become one of the more visible faces in the city’s art world.
Noted: According to Daniel Fields, Center for East Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Korean-American complex is like a precarious iron tower, which is strong but brittle, ready to collapse from any unexpected action like a preemptive strike of North Korea by the Trump administration.
More than four decades ago, a crowd estimated at almost 3,000 packed the Stock Pavilion on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus to listen to the wisdom of the most recent Nobel Peace laureate.
A new plan proposed by the Department of Interior would open some federally protected waters to off-shore oil drilling. We speak Steph Tai of the University of Wisconsin Law School about the news and what the law says.
A different approach to the universal vaccine is under way at FluGen, a biotech firm in Madison, Wisconsin. Backed by both government and VC funding, the company is working with technology first discovered at the University of Wisconsin-Madison by Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka and Dr. Gabriele Neumann and exclusively licensed to FluGen. “Our vaccine, called RedeeFlu, is based on a premise that says what happens if you take a [naturally occurring] ’wild type’ of flu virus and modify it to infect the human body but don’t allow it to replicate and cause illness,” said Boyd Clarke, executive chairman of FluGen. (Coincidentally, his maternal grandfather died in the 1918 pandemic.)
In 1960, he move to the US for a role at the Institute for Enzyme Research in the University of Wisconsin. It was there that he made his Nobel-worthy discovery and became a naturalized American citizen. In 1970, Khorana joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Alfred P. Sloan professor of biology and chemistry, the position he held until he died on Nov. 9, 2011 at age 89.
In the words of Alfred W McCoy, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of a new book, In the Shadows of the American Century, “Afghanistan is the world’s first true narco-state – a country where illicit drugs dominate the economy, define political choices and determine the fate of foreign interventions.”
It celebrates the 96th birthday of Har Gobind Khorana, an Indian-American biochemist whose passion for science started under a tree in the small village of Raipur, India, and grew into Nobel Prize-winning research on nucleotides and genes while at UW-Madison.
“The growth is really in the medium- to large-size dairy operations,” said Steven Deller, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The growth in those sectors and the increase in productivity of being a bigger operation, the volume of milk is actually not being affected by this.”
Born in 1922 as the youngest of five children in a rural village that is now part of eastern Pakistan, Khorana learned to read and write with help from his father, according to the Nobel Prize’s biography of the biochemist. With a number of scholarships, Khorana went on to earn a doctorate in organic chemistry in 1948. He conducted his Nobel Prize-winning research on nucleotides at the University of Wisconsin, and he later became the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“When we’re throwing down road salt, we might be thinking about the fact that we’re putting salt into the water, but we’re not thinking that it may also mobilize lead,” says Hilary Dugan, a limnologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was not involved in the study. Dugan has studied lakes in North America, which she also found to be increasing in salinity.
Lastly, purpose. Longitudinal research tracking people for years shows that purpose in life in the latter decades of life can predict whether a person will be alive 10 years later. Identifying your purpose, your larger aspirations in life, and aligning your everyday behaviour and experiences with that core purpose, is something we know can promote well-being and motivate you to do things that are meaningful to you.Take time daily to think about what you care about most in life. Create reminders to connect to your larger purpose, and question whether your actions that day contribute or are in conflict with your purpose. And ask yourself how your activities can be reframed to support your larger purpose. Richard J. Davidson is the director and founder of the Centre for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry
