UW In The News

The Riveting and Murky Quest to Hack the Meditating Brain

Much of what scientists have found so far isn’t so surprising, but it does confirm long-held associations about what parts of the brain fire up during meditation. One meta-analysis of 110 studies showed the imprint mindfulness can have on the brain, such as increased activation in areas associated with focused problem-solving, self-regulation, self-control. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been able to teach machines how to recognize meditative states in humans through measurements of brain patterns. We are not far from a reality in which researchers could teach people how to mirror a mindful brain state through a process similar to Powers’ Decoded Neurofeedback.

Are Colleges Discriminating Against Asian Applicants?

It’s not even a question. Students for Fair Admissions revealed the discrimination against Asian-Americans with their lawsuit against Harvard. In their petition to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, they documented how Asian students who were academically in the top 10% of Harvard applicants were accepted at a rate of 12.7%, white applicants at a rate of 15.3%, black applicants at a rate of 56.1%, and Hispanics at a rate of 31.3%.

—Jonathan Draeger, University of Wisconsin Madison, economics

‘Pretty appalling’: Asian scientists rarely awarded top science prizes

In 2020, in conversations stimulated directly by the racial unrest of the time, ASCB leaders decided to systematically examine the awards process. “Forty years is a long time to go without thinking hard from the outside about what’s going on,” said Bill Bement, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who volunteered to lead a task force on the issue. “There was a lot of dust that had to be shrugged off.”

Inside UW-Madison’s new Chemistry Tower: modern labs, study spaces and a ‘library of the future’

Experts question unusual plan to clear Covid vaccine for kids under 5

Malia Jones, an epidemiologist who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and who specializes in vaccine hesitancy, said it has been clear for a while that getting children vaccinated against Covid is going to be an uphill battle. She worries that the low level of confidence in Covid vaccines for children will erode parental support for other vaccines. “This is the thing that keeps me up at night,” she said.

What Is a Bomb Cyclone? A Winter Storm Explained

If traveling by vehicle, pack a winter survival kit, and in the event of getting stranded in the snow, stay with the vehicle. Laura Albert, an industrial engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies emergency response and preparedness, recommends packing such a kit with jumper cables, a small shovel, a flashlight, warm clothes, blankets, bottled water and nonperishable snacks, and a bag of sand or cat litter to regain traction on snow or ice.

New Reports Shine a Light on Rural Colleges

What is a rural college? And where can such institutions be found? The questions seem simple, but in higher education, the answers are surprisingly complex. Now two new reports aim to clarify them.

The first, released in December, comes from the University of Wisconsin and is titled “Mapping Rural Colleges and Their Communities.” Nicholas Hillman, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin who spearheaded the report, says the research was born out of the question “Where are rural colleges located?”

It won’t be easy to prove Oath Keepers committed seditious conspiracy

“The idea of being branded a traitor to your country, of committing sedition, stands out,” said Joshua Braver, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin. “It sends a certain political message.”

What Does Endemicity Mean for COVID?

Pretty much all we can say for sure about the flu is that—as Malia Jones, a population-health expert at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told us—it is “a huge pain in the butt, but also not a global pandemic, most of the time. Unfortunately, there is not a single word for that.”

Will Delta Survive the Omicron Wave?

In a “worst-case scenario,” Gostic said, Delta could transform into something capable of catching up with Omicron, and the two would tag-team. Dual circulation doesn’t just double the number of variants we have to deal with; it “leaves open the possibility for recombination,” a phenomenon in which two coronavirus flavors can swap bits of their genomes to form a nasty hybrid offspring, Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. (Delta’s brutality + Omicron’s stealth = bad-news bears.) Alternatively, a daughter of Delta may totally overtake Omicron, exacting its ancestor’s sweet, sweet revenge. Or maybe the next variant that usurps the global throne will be a bizarro spawn of Alpha … or something else entirely. In the same way that Omicron was not a descendent of Delta, the next variant we tussle with won’t necessarily sprout from Omicron.

Tennessee school board votes unanimously to ban book about the Holocaust

Simone Schweber, Goodman Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says there are already so few living Holocaust survivors left, and few teachers have the resources or the time to teach historically and emotionally complex topics.

Is ‘Fully Vaccinated’ ‘Up-to-Date?’ Experts Are Worried Americans Are Too Confused to Care

Part of the problem, David O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin, said, is that the CDC may have painted itself into a corner by initially describing those who went through a two-dose mRNA vaccine course as “fully vaccinated,” despite not knowing the long-term efficacy of the vaccines against new variants.

Seditious conspiracy is rarely proven. The Oath Keepers trial is a litmus test | US Capitol attack

But because sedition charges so rarely go to trial, there isn’t a great deal of precedent for how such trials proceed, experts say. And US prosecutors have a checkered history in securing sedition convictions. “It’s been used in ways that have been absurd and has been used in ways that were slam dunks,” said Joshua Braver, an assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin.

Giving Poor Families Cash Like CTC Leads to Better Brain Function in Children

That’s because cash payments “help stabilize and support the children’s home environment by paying bills that keep the lights on, or buying cleaning products to keep the home safe and clean, or paying rent,” Dr. Katherine Anne Magnuson, a social policy professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who helped lead the study, told Insider.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink Inches Closer to Human Trials and Experts Are Ringing Alarms

“I don’t think there is sufficient public discourse on what the big picture implications of this kind of technology becoming available [are],” said Dr. Karola Kreitmair, assistant professor of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

When Should You Get a COVID Test?

At this point in the pandemic, it has become more difficult for epidemiologists to say with certainty whether one variant reaches a higher viral load or how that viral load correlates with infectiousness, notes Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. That is because so many people have now been infected with COVID or received different numbers of vaccine doses, meaning that their immune systems respond differently to the newer variant. “It’s too complicated to say one variant will produce a higher viral load,” Sethi says.

Can giving parents cash help with babies’ brain development?

“We cannot do an apples-to-apples comparison because we do not have brain waves data for other interventions,” Katherine Magnuson, a professor in the school of social work at the University of Wisconsin and another co-author on the study, told me. Lisa Gennetian, a professor of public policy at Duke and another co-author, chimed in after Magnuson: “There isn’t another apple. There isn’t even an orange.”

Giving low-income families cash can help babies’ brain activity 

“The power of cash is that it can be used as the family needs it in the moment, to fix the car or buy diapers. It’s a powerful way to empower people to take care of themselves and that’s critical when it comes to taking care of kids,” said Katherine Magnuson, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who also co-authored the study.

Cash for Low-Income Moms May Boost Babies’ Brains: Study

The findings build on evidence that cash support can improve outcomes for older children, said co-author Katherine Magnuson, director of the National Institute for Research on Poverty and Economic Mobility, based at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Why I’m Staying Angry About Climate Change

“There is such a thing as righteous anger, because that is not about you and your personal ego; it really is the anger you’re feeling on the behalf of the vulnerable,” Dekila Chungyalpa, the director of the Loka Initiative at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. The initiative is a home for faith leaders who want to engage with climate change. Chungyalpa herself learned about transforming anger into love from her upbringing as a Tibetan Buddhist, as well as from Black women leaders such as the late bell hooks. “That kind of anger can galvanize and create change,” she said. “And the trick is to figure out how to direct it in a way that is productive.” If you ruminate on your anger without doing anything with it, it can make you snappish and irritable with those you love; it can boil inside you. It needs an outlet, and what better outlet than activism and advocacy?

How young people can make effective change in the climate crisis, according to experts

But beware of the “false dichotomy” between collective action and individual action, Morgan Edwards, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a leader of the university’s Climate Action Lab told ABC News, adding that reducing personal emissions or shaming others’ lifestyles is not fulfilling or effective.

Cataract Surgery May Reduce Your Dementia Risk

“The authors were incredibly thoughtful in how they approached the data and considered other variables,” said Dr. Nathaniel A. Chin, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin, who was not involved in the study. “They compared cataract surgery to non-vision-improving surgery — glaucoma surgery — and controlled for many important confounding variables.” Dr. Chin is the medical director of the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

COVID’s Turbo-Mutation Is Killing This Vax Dream, So What’s Next?

Haynes stressed his team is trying to get to large-scale human trials “as quickly as possible.” But in the worst-case scenario, it could take years to develop, test and deploy a pan-COVID vaccine, warned Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is working on his own universal jab.

Republicans Want New Tool in Elusive Search for Voter Fraud: Election Police

Bids to curb so-called fraud are becoming standard for Republican candidates who want to win over voters, Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview. “Whoever is the nominee in 2024, whether it’s Trump or anyone else, it will likely be part of their platform,” Mr. Burden said.

How the Beef Industry Is Fueling the Destruction of the Amazon

Legalizing suppliers by helping them file paperwork is at the crux of JBS’s strategy to clean up its supply chain. That’s not the same as eliminating deforestation. “Consumers and governments coming together don’t want zero illegality—they want zero deforestation,” said Holly Gibbs, who runs the land-use lab at the University of Wisconsin. “There’s a big difference.”

Vaccine Hesitancy Comes for Pet Parents

Pet owners who are concerned about regular vaccines can opt for titer testing, which can measure whether animals have sufficient antibodies from previous core vaccines. Animals with high enough antibody levels don’t need booster shots, said Dr. Laurie J. Larson, director of the Companion Animal Vaccines and Immuno-Diagnostics Service Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine.

What types of mental health apps work? New study examines the evidence

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have spent years making sure that their meditation app, called the Healthy Minds Program, passes clinical muster and delivers positive outcomes. Designing studies to test the app’s efficacy led Simon Goldberg, an assistant professor at UW, to confront the mountain of thousands of studies of different mobile mental health tools, including apps, text-message based support, and other interventions.

This Is No Way to Be Human

In a remarkable study several years ago, Selin Kesebir of the London Business School and the psychologist Pelin Kesebir of the University of Wisconsin at Madison found that references to nature in novels, song lyrics, and film story lines began decreasing in the 1950s, while references to the human-made environment did not.

New Zealand sends flight to Tonga to assess damage from massive volcanic eruption

The ash cloud was drifting westward and aircrafts will be likely diverted around its periphery as a precaution, said Scott Bachmeier, a research meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

How the Post Office Could Sabotage Biden’s Billion-Test Goal

“Besides keeping them in cold cars while moving them around, we don’t have any experience testing in extreme cold or extreme heat,” said Dave O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin. “My guess—but it is purely a guess—is that freezing of the liquid could cause performance issues if it thaws and isn’t mixed thoroughly.”