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
Khorana did stints in research institutions in Switzerland and Canada before landing at the Institute for Enzyme Research and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. There, he decoded how cells read the language of RNA written in structures represented by the letters A, C, U, and G. He did this by using enzymes to create sequences of these letters. Arranging them into distinct patterns, he and other scientists found that the genetic code comprised 64 three-letter “words,” known as codons.
After 16 years and more than $1 trillion, this Guardian piece argues western intervention has resulted in Afghanistan becoming the world’s first true narco-state. “Washington’s massive military juggernaut has been stopped in its steel tracks by a small pink flower – the opium poppy,” Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Alfred W McCoy, writes. “Throughout its three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium – and suffered when they failed to complement it.” In this piece, McCoy outlines how the heroin trade explains the US-UK failure in Afghanistan.
Researchers at UW-Madison (Natalie Guyette) are looking at how stress affects the symptoms of asthma in a four year study looking at how the mind and body communicate in stressful situations. We talk with one of the key professors about their findings.
YouTube star Logan Paul has been weathering a barrage of controversy following his video depicting an alleged suicide victim in Aokigahara, a forest in Japan. The video–coupled with others posted on his YouTube channel–highlights a growing concern over what is being produced on social media platforms. We speak with Kathleen Culver, assistant professor and Director of UW-Madison’s Center for Journalism Ethics, about the news and what these videos say about internet culture.
It’s called “digital self-harm,” and its rates are similar to traditional means of self-harm, such as cutting or burning, researchers say.The study, led by Justin Patchin, professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, found that 6 percent of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 engage in digital self-harm.
Neuroscientist Chiara Cirelli of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Sleep and Consciousness, who conducted the study, explained at the time, ‘I don’t think we know of any cognition function that isn’t affected by sleep deprivation.’
“It’s just inconclusive at this stage,” said the University of Wisconsin’s Martin. “I think the jet is getting wavier, I’m not sure it’s connected to the Arctic,” he added.
Alan Attie, whose University of Wisconsin lab studies the genetic and biochemical processes underlying genetics, called it “beautiful and elegant work.””An exciting development in the diabetes field is the discovery of extraordinary plasticity in alpha and beta cells,” he told Gizmodo. “Work such as that from the Gittes Lab demonstrates the way in which this plasticity can be harnessed for therapeutic purposes.”
“They’re going to get through this. They are going to make it because they have experienced these kinds of conditions before, and they don’t get wiped out. Maybe we’ll get a little suppression of the ticks, but we’ll see,” says Susan Paskewitz, the chair of the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Paskewitz’s research focuses on disease-carrying arthropods like mosquitoes and ticks, which tend to be the ones that we worry about most in the summer.
If you live in the eastern US, from northern Florida all the way to New England, you’re in for some nasty weather: a massive winter storm called a “bomb cyclone” is hammering the coast, bringing snow, ice, flooding, and strong winds. That’s not a made-up click-bait term; it’s actually used by meteorologists to indicate a mid-latitude cyclone that intensifies rapidly — or as meteorologist Jon Martin at the University of Wisconsin-Madison says, they “just kind of explode.”
Federal regulations affect everything from how much mercury dentists can pour down the sink to who’s allowed to drill on federal lands. There are thousands and thousands of regulations governing our lives, but since they’re not front and center in Congress, we rarely hear about them, even though regulations are really where the rubber hits the road. This hour, we’ll talk to Susan Yackee, professor of public policy and political science at the UW-Madison La Folette School of Public Affairs, about the mysterious world of federal regulations.
In a report published in 2012 by the American Geophysical Union, atmospheric scientists Jennifer A. Francis of Rutgers University and Stephen J. Vavrus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered evidence that the jet stream’s weaker winds and bigger wave amplitudes “may lead to an increased probability of extreme weather events that result from prolonged conditions.”
If you walk the trails of the UW-Madison Arboretum this winter, you may cross paths with Karen Oberhauser. The Arboretum’s new director is on a mission to get to know every inch of the 1,700-acre facility, which includes tall grass prairies, savannas, wetlands, forests and gardens.
But there are some really interesting things afoot. Usona is a medical research organization that is exploring the potential of psychedelic medication — psilocybin — in depression treatment. My hope in the coming year is that we continue to see exploration of the therapeutic use of psilocybin.
Maureen Durkin, one of the authors of that study and a population health researcher at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, told Spectrum that differences in socio-economic status may be one reason why children who are black and Hispanic are less likely to get screened for autism spectrum disorders—leading to relatively lower diagnosis rates.
Sleep-inducing substances may come from the process of making new connections between neurons. Chiara Cirelli and Giulio Tononi, sleep researchers at the University of Wisconsin, suggest that since making these connections, or synapses, is what our brains do when we are awake, maybe what they do during sleep is scale back the unimportant ones, removing the memories or images that don’t fit with the others, or don’t need to be used to make sense of the world.
Alisa Sunness, a nutritionist at University of Wisconsin Health, who was not involved in the ranking, said that highest rated diets encourage the same types of eating habits.“They all support a higher intake of fruits and vegetables, lean protein and heart healthy fats and whole grains,” she said. “The diets are using foods with minimal added fats and sugars and using foods in the natural form, and naturally those foods are going to be nutrient dense.”
“Sleep is the price we pay for learning,” Giulio Tononi, a psychiatry professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison tells New Scientist. Tononi and his team conducted experiments on sleeping mice and found that, after sleep, synapses were significantly smaller than those before sleep.
But Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the up-tick in slaughter numbers doesn’t mean herds are growing smaller.”If we see cow slaughter numbers being up a little bit, I don’t think you can necessarily read anything into that because we’ve got plenty of animals to replace them,” Stephenson said.
“There are a lot of people who really want to argue the science with me, and I feel like the science has been settled a long time ago,” says Noelle LoConte, M.D., an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the lead author of the statement, recalling the influx of emails she has received.
Four years ago, Inda Lampkins, a 42-year-old Milwaukee mother diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, took one of the most difficult and most important steps to improve her health. She quit smoking.
“I gave the (sculptural) piece to a student to fire, because I didn’t even really care” about it, said the German-born Gerit Grimm, who was teaching in California at the time and now heads the ceramics program at UW-Madison.
“This is the culmination of decades of thoughts, wishes to have him have a proper burial,” said Dr. Ryan Wubben, a member of UW-Madison’s Missing in Action Recovery and Identification Project and director of UW Med Flight. “It was an incredibly powerful and meaningful moment.”
Wisconsin will be well-represented on the other side of the world next month, when the U.S. men’s and women’s hockey teams compete in the Winter Olympics in South Korea.
Since time immemorial, humans have had a knack for being complete and utter dicks to the other animals we share our planet with. Often, we even manage to screw things up for other species without meaning to. A study published earlier this month in the journal of Emerging Infectious Disease has retroactively uncovered one such incident: That time we gave a town of chimpanzees a cold bug that ultimately left five dead, including an adorable 2-year-old baby named Betty (pictured above).
The end of the year is a time of holiday gift giving, and finding just the right gift can sometimes feel like an impossible task. But folks at an animal eyeball lab say that a gift they’ve just received, partly thanks to NPR, has made this the “best Christmas ever.”
Basically, though, keeping the UW-Madison strong is a key element in producing new generations of tech-savvy students and in playing a role in developing new technology, (Jeff) Naughton, the emeritus professor, said.
“The difference in carbon isotope ratios correlate with their shapes,” said John Valley, professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the study. “Their C-13-to-C-12 ratios are characteristic of biology and metabolic function.”
Jordan Ellenberg, a University of Wisconsin-Madison math professor, co-organized one of Duchin’s conferences in Madison in October 2017, and has written a New York Times op-edon the science of gerrymandering. He sees a high efficiency gap as a “red flag.” But he doesn’t see the test as a basis for a constitutional standard that guides when courts can send state legislators back to the drawing board.
“The difference in carbon isotope ratios correlate with their shapes,” said John Valley, professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the study. “Their C-13-to-C-12 ratios are characteristic of biology and metabolic function.”
Noted: In fact, poverty rates accelerate as people reach their early 80s, says Pamela Herd, Professor of Public Affairs & Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Some of what’s going on is that people are losing other sources of income,” Herd explains. “So when you hit 85, you may have run through private savings at that point. Social Security becomes your financial lifeline.”
Some scientists have questioned whether the fossils were just minerals. But researchers from UW-Madison and the University of California, Los Angeles have used a hi-tech device called a secondary mass ion spectrometer (SIMS) to determine the fossils are indeed ancient bacteria and microbes.John Valley. Image courtesy of William Graf/University of Wisconsin-MadisonUW-Madison geology professor John Valley co-led the study.
Just look at the work done by Badgerloop, a student-run hyperloop team out of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The group’s maglev design uses Halbach arrays in a novel fashion, says technical director Justin Williams, allowing for passive movement, as opposed to superconducting magnets that require a flow of electricity to work. It could significantly reduce the amount of energy required to propel a levitating train. The team won an innovation award at Elon Musk’s hyperloop competition in January.
If humans eventually travel to Mars and beyond, scientists must figure out how to feed them.
University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists have helped confirm that tiny fossils detected in an Australian rock are the oldest fossils ever found.
Virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, whose lab did one of the flu experiments that caused such controversy, said his work convinced government agencies that they needed to spend the money to replenish the emergency vaccines that have been stockpiled for this particular bird flu virus, because it does indeed seem capable of mutating in ways that could start a pandemic. “This information is important for policymakers,” he said, adding that such experiments allow scientists “to obtain information that we could not obtain by other methods unless it actually occurred in nature.”
“People are really interested in when life on Earth first emerged,” John W. Valley, a professor of geoscience at University of Wisconsin-Madison and author on the study told said in a statement. “This study was 10 times more time-consuming and more difficult than I first imagined, but it came to fruition because of many dedicated people who have been excited about this since day one … I think a lot more microfossil analyses will be made on samples of Earth and possibly from other planetary bodies.”
UW-Madison could receive another $20 million for student scholarships and faculty support thanks to mega-donors John and Tashia Morgridge.
Last month, the International Criminal Court opened two investigations, including a sensitive one in Afghanistan, and a call has been made to allow it to intervene in Myanmar. But such a flurry of announcements mainly testifies to the impasse at which the court finds itself.
–Thierry Cruvellier is the author of “Court of Remorse: Inside the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda” and “Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer Rouge Torturer,” and a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
To the PI, failure is the albatross that hangs around one’s professional neck. The PI in this case is Francis Halzen, of the University of Wisconsin, an “oracular” presence, Mr. Bowen tells us, whose formidable intellect gushes forth in scientific forums: “Ideas splashed across his mind so fast that his mouth couldn’t keep up.”
“There are not many techniques, even though we’ve been working on this for 3,000 years. So whenever anyone comes up with an authentically new way to do things it’s a big deal, and Minhyong did that,” said Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
The industry’s economic side is “where all the questions are these days,” said Hart Posen, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of business who tracks sharing economies. It’s still too early to know whether bike-sharing businesses can be profitable, Posen said.
More than 1,100 UW-Madison students walked across the stage to pick up their diplomas at Sunday’s commencement ceremony. But for one student, that moment was 50 years in the making.
One morning seven years ago, Tony Goldberg was working in the tropical forests of Uganda’s Kibale National Park, when a colleague arrived at his research station with two students in tow. They were searching for bats. Goldberg, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of epidemiology, had been visiting the station for several years, long enough to have noticed the jet-black figures that fluttered away from the kitchen building whenever he disturbed their daytime sleep.
But two journalism experts we interviewed said if unnamed sources are used too frequently or unnecessarily, journalists risk losing the trust of audiences. Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told us stories targeting President Donald Trump’s inner circle that deal in “palace intrigue” and utilize unnamed sources to tell lurid tales of strife within the White House may be wearing on readers’ credulity for such stories.
Derrick Barnes: The Cooperative Children’s Book Center School of Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, puts out a staggering report on the dearth of characters of color in children’s books every year. There has been a gradual increase in books written by and about black people. I love that. But there needs to be diversity on all levels of publishing.
The most incredible and uplifting and inspiring football season of my life began in a way that I would’ve never expected. It started with a scream.
After earning his doctorate in agricultural economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Luciano Barraza could not stick around for graduation ceremonies.
Dr. Chin is a University of Wisconsin Health Geriatrician who works with the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center on the new podcast “Dementia Matters.”It’s a podcast that offers basic information about Alzheimer’s disease.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is recognizing one graduate 50 years after he received his degree.
If you’re reading this story on a cell phone, tablet or laptop, the technology in your hand is thanks to the University of Wisconsin alum’s startling invention 70 years ago Saturday.
