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UW student inspires thousands with raw vegan blog

NBC15

She’s a college student, member of a sorority, and social media superstar.

Online she’s known as “Raw in College,” but in real life her name is Ashley Hampton. The sophomore at UW-Madison originally aimed to educated college students on being a raw vegan, but now her message has reached a much larger audience.

Q&A: Karla Foster leads UW campus community in celebration of Black History Month

Capital Times

Q&A with Karla Foster, the Pathways African-American Campus and Community liaison, who created the Black History Month student planning committee in 2014, a student-led committee that plans events and programs for Black History Month. Since its implementation, black students on campus have had the opportunity to celebrate themselves, discuss issues surrounding their lives and college experience and make memorable friendships in the process. This year’s theme is called “In Living Color: An Exploration of Blackness and Intersectionality.”

Technology May Be Changing Way People Meet But Courtship Remains Same

Wisconsin Public Radio

Noted: Dating expert Catalina Toma studies online dating at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Initially, when online dating came to the scene it was regarded a crutch for the desperate,” said Toma. “It was really stigmatized initially. But the tool has proven to be quite useful for people looking to find partners in a more low-pressure environment.”

Famous scientist’s century-old fungi accidentally found at UW

Wisconsin State Journal

UW-Madison has one of the world’s largest and oldest collections of fungus, but it wasn’t until a week ago that fungi collected by one of America’s most famous scientists was accidentally rediscovered in decades-old cabinets on campus. George Washington Carver, an African-American scientist and educator best known for his research on peanuts, also studied and collected microfungi, a type of fungus that does not form a mushroom.

Scientists World-Wide Are Celebrating The Discovery Of Gravitational Waves

Wisconsin Public Radio

Researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory–or, LIGO–announced today that it has the first official detection of gravitational waves.  This discovery helps solidify Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Interviewed: Sebastian Heinz, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Zika is just one more way climate change is worse for women

Grist

Noted: According to Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, last year was one of the hottest, driest years in Brazil’s history. The country saw 500,000 cases of dengue; presumably, it was suffering from the silent outbreak of Zika at the same time, the effects of which are only being reckoned with now.

Grammy nod for the polka prof

Isthmus

When folklorist Jim Leary was growing up in Rice Lake, Wis., in the 1950s and ’60s, old-time ethnic music was everywhere. You could dial up the local radio station, WJMC, and hear live broadcasts of Scandinavian music by the Eric Berg Band. The nearby ski lodge was a venue for Slovenian accordion music. Polka star Whoopee John was a frequent visitor from his home base a few hours away in New Ulm, Minn.

UW-Madison picked as the site for first-ever organic research endowment

Wisconsin State Journal

The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences is the recipient of the nation’s first endowed chair focused on plant breeding for organic crops, representatives of Organic Valley and Clif Bar & Company said today at a ceremony at the State Capitol. The endowment will be funded in perpetuity with a $1 million gift from the companies and matched by a $1 million gift from UW graduates John and Tashia Morgridge.

Breakup Science Says You Should Never, Ever, Ever Get Back Together

Inverse

Noted: In the Journal of Adolescent Research, researchers from the University of Wisconsin and Bowling Green State University describe relationships as “intimate unions” that are “best conceived of as dynamic trajectories involving a heterogeneous and multi-directional array of transitions.” That’s academic for: you don’t really have a clue what’s going to happen. In a study of 792 young adults who were dating, about half of the respondents had tried to rekindle an old relationship; a few more, 57 percent, had at least had sex with an ex.

U.S. Supreme Court puts Obama’s climate plan on hold

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: Addressing the decision during a climate change forum in Madison on Tuesday night, Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at UW-Madison, emphasized the health benefits of tackling climate change, such as preventing 6,600 asthma deaths. “It’s not just energy policy and dollars. We’re talking about lives. We’re talking about people dying,” Patz said.

UW Health names UnityPoint Health executive as CEO

Milwaukee Business Journal

UW Health, a Madison health care system, said Tuesday that Dr. Alan Kaplan, executive vice president and chief clinical transformation officer for UnityPoint Health in West Des Moines, Iowa, has been named chief executive officer of UW Health.

Geography Plays Role in College Access

Education Week

The college frenzy obsesses on key hurdles students must clear to snag a spot in a good college: taking tough courses and getting good grades, building an impressive list of extracurriculars, gathering the financial resources to pay the bills. But the simple fact of a student’s street address can be as big a hurdle as any.

Do Woodrow Wilson’s racist views negate his progressive accomplishments?

Christian Science Monitor

Quoted: John Milton Cooper, a Princeton alum and Wilson biographer who taught history at University of Wisconsin-Madison, noted in his essay that the former president also supported minority rights, albeit perhaps in less significant ways, such as speaking out against lynchings and opening university positions for Catholics, Jews, and poorer students.

Southern Door Students Explore Great World Texts

Door County Daily News

English students at Southern Door High School are beginning to experience a Chinese literary classic in advance of this year’s Great World Texts In Wisconsin Conference. More than 1,200 students statewide including those at Southern Door High School have begun reading Journey to the West, Wu Cheng’en’s novel of sixteenth-century China.

UW Health names new CEO

Channel3000.com

UW Health has named Dr. Alan S. Kaplan as its new chief executive officer. According to a release from UW Health, Kaplan is a nationally known health care leader with a track record of leading large-scale clinical and cultural transformation with a focus on care coordination.

Kaplan currently serves as executive vice president and chief clinical transformation officer for UnityPoint Health in West Des Moines, Iowa.

Staying Sober After Treatment Ends

New York Times

Noted: Apps, by themselves, are not a continuing care program. But since they are used on phones, they are a logical tool to help people stay connected to their programs. David Gustafson, the University of Wisconsin professor who led A-Chess’s development, said that the evidence is that people in recovery need three things: social connection, motivation (“the desire to keep on keeping on”) and confidence that they know how to cope with their struggles. Apps can help with all three.

Team of UW-Madison researchers one of eight nationwide chosen for new concussion study

WKOW TV

Hundreds of teams applied, but a team of UW-Madison researchers was one of only eight teams that were chosen in the Mind Matters Challenge co-sponsored by the NCAA and U.S Department of Defense.

Together these two entities have contributed more than $40 million towards the study of concussions. The UW-Madison team consists of Assistant Professor of Human Ecology Dee Warmath and Athletic Training and Kinesiology Professor Dr. Andrew Winterstein.

Over the next two years the team will work with some of the 2,500 student and club team athletes on UW-Madison campus. These students will help them test out new strategies for getting the word out on how dangerous ignoring a concussion can be.

How Much Should We Worry About Zika Virus?

Wisconsin Public Radio

The spread of mosquito-born Zika virus, which has been linked to birth defects in children of infected women, has led to travel advisories for pregnant women and, in some countries, advice that women delay pregnancy entirely. What is Zika, and how can countries fight it? Joy Cardin talks to UW-Madison’s Kristen Bernard about how Zika is spreading, the challenges it poses, and how big a problem it may become in the U.S.

Goodness gracious, fireballs in February

New York Times

Hundreds of fireballs streak across Earth’s atmosphere every day, said Jim Lattis, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but people witness few of them. The majority fly over uninhabited areas, and many also occur during daytime when the sun’s glare makes them hard to detect.

Why You Should Never Buy Bagged Greens

Men's Journal

Noted: Bagged greens are usually washed thoroughly (some packages boast that their contents are “triple-washed”) with a little bleach, but that unfortunately doesn’t make any difference if the produce carries disease-causing bacteria. “Listeria is a natural soil inhabitant, and spinach commonly comes in contact with the soil,” says Jeri Barak, associate professor of plant pathology and executive member of the Food Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Listeria, like Salmonella and E. coli, can’t be rinsed or washed from leaves even if the dirt is, she says.

Brazil’s sprawling favelas bear the brunt of Zika

The Guardian

Quoted: “It could be that Zika is causing [microcephaly] with another factor, which is definitely possible. There could be other environmental factors, there could be co-infections that cause the unfortunate microcephaly, and at this point there is just not enough evidence to say it is causing it,” said Kristin Bernard, a mosquito-borne virus researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

What Lessons Will We Learn From Zika?

Discover Magazine

Quoted: Overall, infectious disease researchers are pushing toward a more interdisciplinary approach to predict outbreaks. Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at UW-Madison, is doing research to connect the dots between climate change and global health, offering a glimpse into the ways differing scientific fields can combine to build a proactive approach to mosquito-borne disease. His research has revealed a link between dramatic climactic shifts and the occurrence of viral outbreaks.

Behind the Scenes at SpaceX’s Hyperloop Pod Competition

Popular Science

Noted: Badgerloop, the University of Wisconsin’s largely undergraduate team, laid claim to one of the event’s most impressive booths. Throughout the weekend, team members, who were clad in matching red-and-black polo shirts and khakis, built an Oculus Rift-like headset out of cardboard to help explain their pod’s unique technology to the steady throng around their eye-catching display.

12th annual ‘Read Your Heart Out Day’ expands to 3 days

Madison365.com (via Channel3000.com)

Noted: As “Read Your Heart Out Day” added more schools, they began to add more community readers. “Pastors joined The 100 Black Men and we had community representation from sororities and fraternities and high school students and athletes,” Belnavis said. “We just grew and grew and embraced the UW sports – some of our UW basketball players and football players came to join in.”

Health officials warn Zika virus spreads through blood transfusion

Channel3000.com

Quoted: “What they’re recommending is that if you traveled to a place where Zika virus is, which is an ever-changing thing, that you avoid donating blood, if you’ve traveled there within 28 days,” said Dr. Daniel Shirley, a clinical professor of infectious disease at UW Health.

Shirley said that right now there is not a test to screen for the Zika virus in donated blood.

“Each test that they run on transfusion blood is a big process to institute that across the board, and so it would take some standardization and some testing before that ever happened,” Shirley said.