UW In The News
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We Are in a Big Covid Wave. But Just How Big?
Wastewater testing works at all because “everybody poops,” said David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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These Satellite Maps Reveal Rampant Fishing by Untracked ‘Dark Vessels’ in the World’s Oceans
“These previously invisible vessels radically changed our knowledge about the scale, scope and location of fishing activity,” writes Jennifer Raynor, an author of the study and a natural resource economist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in the Conversation.
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Sludge Videos Are Taking Over TikTok–And People’s Mind
This is because the brain has to switch back and forth to give each one attention, says Megan Moreno, an adolescent medicine physician who studies media and digital health at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Over time, too much stimulation may be detrimental to your ability to concentrate on any one task. “We are in this world with lots of little micro interruptions,” Moreno says. “It is hard to piece together the stories, and it’s harder to retain them, because you have to do so much work to put them together.”
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To Fight Absenteeism, Schools Turn to Private Companies
By the 1890-91 school year, more than 200 of Massachusetts’s 351 towns had an average daily attendance of 90%, and only 11 were below 80%. During the following decades, mandatory schooling spread nationwide. William Reese, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, found that just 6% of adolescents were in high school in 1890 but that by 1930 half of them were.
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Earth Could Outlive the Sun
In 5 billion years, our sun will balloon into a red giant star. Whether Earth survives is an “open question,” Melinda Soares-Furtado, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says. Sure, Earth could be swallowed by the sun and destroyed. But in some scenarios, Earth escapes and is pushed farther out into the solar system.
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Carla Vigue on supporting Indigenous students at UW-Madison
UW-Madison is going to start providing broad financial support to students who are enrolled members of federally recognized tribes in the state – Carla Vigue, the UW’s director of tribal relations, considered the significance of this initiative.
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Army’s Blast Safety Limit May Miss Risks From Powerful Weapons Like Tanks
“It’s basically a place holder, because no one knows what the real number should be,” said Christian Franck, a professor of biomechanics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is part of a team that is modeling the effects of blasts on the brain for the Defense Department. He echoed the assessment of many other researchers.“If the right kind of wave hits brain tissue, the tissue just breaks — it literally gets torn apart,” Dr. Franck said. “We see that in the lab. But what kind of blast will do that in real life? It’s complex. The work takes time. There is a lot we don’t know.”
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A 4-year-old went fishing with her dad. They found a shipwreck from 1871.
He sent them photos and the coordinates. From there, the Wisconsin Historical Society and the state’s Department of Natural Resources began to investigate. They took their own sonar images of the wreck and compared the information with a shipwreck database the historical society runs with the University of Wisconsin’s Sea Grant Institute, said Tamara Thomsen, a Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archaeologist.
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Jails offer video visits, but experts say screens aren’t enough : NPR
Julie Poehlmann at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studies families of incarcerated people. She says research has shown the value of in-person visits, both to the incarcerated person and family members. But she says a lot depends on the quality of the visit. In jails, she says, “in-person visit” often means the family is still separated by a glass partition or in-house video.
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The Winds of Change: Foehn Drive Intense Melt
“But nobody has really dug into those effects in Greenland where we expected it might be happening,” said University of Wisconsin–Madison atmospheric scientist Kyle Mattingly.
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Schools shut down some students, teachers who comment on the Gaza war
In K-12 schools, the outlines of the battle are different because speech is more circumscribed, especially for teachers, said Suzanne Eckes, a University of Wisconsin at Madison professor who studies education law. Teachers do not have First Amendment rights in the classroom and must stick to teaching the curriculum their district mandates, she said.
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The seven counties that will help explain the 2024 election
Dane County, Wis: Home to Madison and the University of Wisconsin, this county is all about the Democratic intensity in highly educated college towns. Biden netted 181,327 votes over Trump here in 2020 — up from Clinton’s 146,422 in 2016. And that Dem gain helped the party flip battleground Wisconsin in ‘20, given that Biden won the state by just 20,000 votes.
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Tantalum cold spray boosts potential of fusion reactor chambers
“These hydrogen neutral particles cause power losses in the plasma, which makes it very challenging to sustain a hot plasma and have an effective small fusion reactor,” said Mykola Ialovega, a postdoctoral researcher in nuclear engineering and engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW–Madison). Ialovega has led research on a coating that has demonstrated the ability to line fusion reactor chambers and capture this rogue hydrogen.
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Why is the US far right finding its savior in Spanish dictator Francisco Franco?
Stanley Payne, a revisionist historian of Spanish fascism at the University of Wisconsin Madison until his retirement in 2004, has penned a string of recent articles in rightwing outlets like First Things which invite readers to compare the US with Spain in the 1930s. He has reiterated a line that Franco’s hand was forced by leftist violence and promoted the work of other revisionist historians like Pio Moa, who many professional historians dismiss as a “pseudo-historian”.
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Opinion: Why your chain-store pharmacist is so unhappy
Editor’s Note: David Mott is the William S. Apple Distinguished Professor in Social and Administrative Sciences at the University of Wisconsin. CNN — Pharmacists swear an oath upon entering the profession to “assure optimal outcomes for all patients.” But current working conditions are making it nearly impossible to live up to this oath.
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Anyone can help monarch butterflies. All you need is a yard.
Karen Oberhauser, the director of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum and the founder of the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, advises against rearing monarchs in captivity on a large scale or for more than a single generation, since captivity may disrupt the development of their navigational abilities and, over time, can alter their genetic makeup.
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Hunting Ghosts in the Sky and Finding What Makes Their Colors
“The metallic traces are interesting, but I’ll caution that this was only a single event,” said Chris Vagasky, a lightning researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the new work. To see if all ghosts are iron-fueled spooks, he added, “it would be nice to see the results from multiple ghosts.”
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Experts in concussion, NFL leaders gather to identify gaps in knowledge, offer guidelines on preventing brain injuries
Dr. Julie Stamm, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the summit, says it’s exciting to see a lineup of experts coming together to discuss not just CTE but other conditions related to traumatic brain injury.
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One product, so many prices: Unit price, list price, ‘MSRP.’ Which one do shoppers actually pay at checkout?
“For a retailer, they’re primarily a tool to incentivize people to make a purchase,” said Laura Hensen, executive director of the Kohl’s Center for Retailing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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How to forgive someone and the benefits that come with it
If the incident in question causes you continued distress and negatively impacts your life, that’s where the f-word — forgiveness — may have a role to play, said psychologist Robert Enright, a pioneer in the field of forgiveness science and professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Renewables’ growing price advantage over fossil fuels paves way for industry dominance
And installing technologies to capture greenhouse gasses on fossil fuel power plants would further raise prices for a sector already struggling to compete with renewables, as Gregory Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies the public policy of technology change, told The Hill.
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World’s Stinkiest Cheese Hits Supermarket Shelves in Britain
“I think that there are a small group of people out there that just love it,” said Dr. Mark Johnson, a scientist at the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s almost like an ‘I dare you to eat it’ kind of thing, like hot peppers.”
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How Much Can Forests Fight Climate Change? A Sensor in Space Has Answers.
“Nearly all protected areas are becoming much more accessible and much more vulnerable,” said Lisa Naughton, a researcher who studies protected areas at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Not just to local subsistence hunting and illicit timber extraction, but to things like artisanal mining and road penetration.”
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Couples Are Embracing Joint Custody. American Policy Isn’t.
Although the increase is steepest among high-income couples, it’s happening across the socioeconomic spectrum, Daniel Meyer, a social-work professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies child custody, told me.
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2023 Hurricane Season Ends: A Recap of This Year’s Storms
“Such warm water ‘sets the stage’ for these events,” James P. Kossin, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote in an email.
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COP28 president draws fierce backlash with attack on climate science
“Cheap renewables have killed the economics of gas and coal power generation with carbon capture — and even more so going forward,” Gregory Nemet, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies the public policy of technological change, told The Hill.
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Wisconsin veterinarian gives insight into unusual dog respiratory illness
To learn more about the unusual disease, Lake Effect spoke with Dr. Keith Poulsen, a veterinarian and director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory.
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Russia Issues Ominous Warning About ‘Next Victim’
Mikhail Troitskiy, professor of practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek that Lavrov’s comments “double down” on Russia’s view that it was encouraged or forced to invade Ukraine because that nation was moving closer to NATO admittance.
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A 4-second power nap? These penguin parents survive on ‘microsleeps.’
Anyone who has ever nodded off briefly while on the subway or watching TV has experienced a microsleep, says Chiara Cirelli, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin who wasn’t involved in the study.
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More States Now Require Financial Literacy Classes in High Schools
But a recent study she wrote with Melody Harvey, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found no impact on eventual retirement savings. Perhaps, she said, for teenagers heading to college or just entering the work force, the idea of retiring is too distant.
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