UW In The News
-
Biden campaign ramps up outreach to Black voters in Wisconsin as some organizers worry about turnout
“Even if only 85% of Black voters instead of 90% vote for Biden, additional turnout helps Democrats,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Concern No. 1 is just whether he will get a smaller share of the Black vote than he did last time around.”
-
‘Dancing’ raisins − a simple kitchen experiment reveals how objects can extract energy from their environment and come to life
Scientific discovery doesn’t always require a high-tech laboratory or a hefty budget. Many people have a first-rate lab right in their own homes – their kitchen.
-
Story by Rod Serling, Twilight Zone creator, published after 70 years
“I was writing a memoir, called As I Knew Him, My Dad, Rod Serling,” Anne Serling, one of two daughters, told the Guardian. “And another writer, Amy Boyle Johnston, who had been doing a lot of researching of my dad’s early work and wrote a book called Unknown Serling, sent me the story. She’d found it in the archives in Wisconsin,” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
-
How Loneliness Affects the Brain
“Small, transient episodes of loneliness really motivate people to then seek out social connection,” said Anna Finley, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But in chronic episodes of loneliness, that seems to kind of backfire” because people become especially attuned to social threats or signals of exclusion, which can then make it scary or unpleasant for them to interact with others.
-
Lawns Draw Scorn, but Landscape Designers See Room for Compromise
“Lawns seem to draw as much irrational hate as they do love these days,” said Paul Robbins, dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of “Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are.”
-
A short story by The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling is published for the first time : NPR
“First Squad, First Platoon” was discovered in a collection of Serling’s writings at the University of Wisconsin by Amy Boyle Johnston, author of a book about his career called Unknown Serling. She gave the story to Anne, who included excerpts of it in her memoir As I Knew Him.
-
How Bird Flu Caught the Dairy Industry Off Guard
“The dairy industry has never had to deal with something like this before,” says Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and a former dairy veterinarian. “This is probably going to be the most important outbreak in my professional career.”
-
What do cicadas sound like, and why are they so loud?
Cicadas are very loud indeed. Extension entomologist P.J. Liesch of the University of Wisconsin-Madison told CBS 58 in Milwaukee that a grove of trees with a bunch of singing and screeching cicadas could reach 70 to 80 decibels – a similar volume to a vacuum cleaner.
-
Genes known to increase the risk of Alzheimer’s may actually be an inherited form of the disorder, researchers say
Dr. Sterling Johnson, a study author who leads the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention at the University of Wisconsin, said it would be very important for clinical trials to start to take participants’ APOE4 status into account.
-
How to avoid buying and planting invasive species in your garden
If you find them, remove them before they start flowering or seeding, said Susan Carpenter, native plant garden curator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. Native plants should be your first choice to replace invasives, but you can also opt for noninvasive ornamentals, Carpenter said.
-
60 Minutes: Teens come up with answer to problem that stumped math world for centuries
Gloria Ladson-Billings, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, has studied how best to teach African American students. She told us an encouraging teacher can change a life.
-
Cicadas Are Here. Time to Eat.
“We still don’t fully understand some of the core aspects of their biology,” said PJ Liesch, an entomologist at the University of Wisconsin. Though there are theories about the insects counting the years through the compounds in tree sap, soil temperatures and their own underground communication, none manage to completely unravel the cicada’s mystery.
-
Why Venus May Be Our Best Bet For Finding Life In the Solar System
“If it had liquid water in the past, and if we can really confirm that, then yes – Venus would likely be the planet I would place my bet on,” University of Wisconsin-Madison planetary scientist Sanjay Limaye tells Inverse.
-
What are nanoplastics? An engineer explains concerns about particles too small to see
ssistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
-
Milk Has Lost Its Magic
If concerns around bird flu persist, milk’s relevance may continue to slide. Even the slightest bit of consumer apprehension could cause already-struggling dairy farms to shut down. “An additional contributing factor really doesn’t bode well,” Leonard Polzin, a dairy expert at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Division of Extension, told me. For the rest of us, there is now yet another reason to avoid milk—and even less left to the belief that milk is special.
-
Making Flying Cleaner
I spoke to Tyler Lark, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose 2022 study questioned ethanol’s climate credentials and concluded that it can be more carbon-intensive than gasoline. He told me that the margins on ethanol’s benefits are thin enough that, depending on the model you chose to calculate its effects, the results can be radically different. His paper prompted rebuttals from the Renewable Fuel Association, an industry group, and the United States Department of Agriculture.
-
Chimps are dying of the common cold. Is great ape tourism to blame?
Months later, molecular testing revealed the culprit: human metapneumovirus (HMPV), one of a collection of viruses that presents in people as a common cold but is “a well-known killer” in our closest primate relatives, says Goldberg, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. More than 12% of the community that Stella belonged to died in the outbreak. Others were lost as a result of being orphaned. “Stella had a baby that was clinging to her body for a while after she died,” Goldberg says. “The baby subsequently died.”
-
Third parties will affect the 2024 campaigns, but election laws written by Democrats and Republicans will prevent them from winning
rofessor of Political Science, Director of the Elections Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
-
Ecstasy’s bid for FDA approval reveals challenges of psychedelic trials
“It’s very kind of New Age with spiritual components,” said Bruce E. Wampold, a counseling psychology professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has studied the effectiveness of psychotherapy in clinical trials. “It’s on the periphery of what I would say evidence-based treatments would be.”
-
Why Your Voice Sounds Older As You Age
These changes happen to about 1 in 5 of us as we age, according to Lisa Vinney, a speech-language pathologist and faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Age-related voice changes happen to everyone to some degree,” she said. “But those changes can occur more rapidly or be more pronounced thanks to genetic, lifestyle and health factors.”
-
Scientists debate adding a Category 6 for mega-hurricanes
In their paper, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Wehner and co-author James P. Kossin of the University of Wisconsin–Madison did not explicitly call for the adoption of a Category 6, primarily because the scale is quickly being supplanted by other measurement tools that more accurately gauge the hazard of a specific storm.
-
Fragments of Bird Flu Virus Discovered in Milk
Finding viral fragments in milk from the commercial supply chain is not ideal, but the genetic material poses little risk to consumers who drink milk, said David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
-
As bird flu spreads in cows, fractured U.S. response has echoes of early covid
“Lots of farms aren’t raising their hands to be tested because they don’t want to be known as having an infected herd,” said Keith Poulsen, director of the veterinary diagnostic lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
-
U.S. births fell last year, marking an end to the late pandemic rebound, experts say
But “the 2023 numbers seem to indicate that bump is over and we’re back to the trends we were in before,” said Nicholas Mark, a University of Wisconsin researcher who studies how social policy and other factors influence health and fertility.
-
Do implicit bias trainings on race improve health care? Not yet – but incorporating the latest science can help hospitals treat all patients equitably
ssociate professor of Population Health Sciences and Obstetrics and Gynecology, UW-Madison.
-
Inside Wildlife Services, USDA’s program that kills wildlife to protect the meat and dairy industries
Adrian Treves, an environmental science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the origins of today’s rampant predator killing can be found in America’s early European settlers, who brought with them the mentality that wolves were “superpredators,” posing a dangerous threat to humans. “We’ve been fed this story that the eradication of wolves was necessary for livestock production,” he said.
-
A Passover Pleasure: Matzo Pizza
Ancient matzo wasn’t as crackerlike as it is today. It was likely similar to a pita, said Jordan Rosenblum, a religious studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There’s a 2,000-year history of putting stuff on matzo and eating it,” he said.
-
A Dentist Found a Jawbone in a Floor Tile
It’s “clearly hominin,” John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who also blogged about the discovery, told me in an email.
-
America’s child care crisis is holding back moms without college degrees
Women like Slemp challenge the image of the stay-at-home mom as an affluent woman with a high-earning partner, said Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The stay-at-home moms in this country are disproportionately mothers who’ve been pushed out of the workforce because they don’t make enough to make it work financially to pay for child care,” Calarco said.
-
Dentist finds ancient human jawbone embedded in his parents’ tile floor
John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, titled his blog post on the matter: “How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?”
Featured Experts
Keith Poulsen: California declares H5N1 emergency on dairy farms
The spread of H5N1 avian influenza among dairy farms in California has prompted state authorities to declare the situation an emergency.… More
Peter Halfmann: Human H5N1 cases
Wisconsin health officials confirmed the first human infection with H5N1 avian influenza in the state on the same day that… More
John Gross: Wisconsin gun laws and safe storage laws
John Gross is an expert in criminal defense practice and public defense systems. He is available to discuss Wisconsin gun… More
Travis Wright: Helping kids and communities process trauma
Wright is a nationally recognized expert on resilience and emotionally responsive teaching, especially for children developing in the midst of… More
Janet Hyde: Gender and gun violence
Police say a teenage girl shot eight members of her school community and herself Monday, a departure from gender roles… More
Katie Eklund: School mental health before and after crisis events
Eklund is an expert on school mental health assesment and intervention in pre-K-12 schools. She can discuss methods for talking… More
Richard Davidson: Processing traumatic events
Traumatic events like the deadly shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison can elicit complex emotions, even among those… More