UW In The News

Patients Often Get Antibiotics Without a Doctor Visit, Study Finds

“Everybody knows it’s out there, we just didn’t know how big of a piece of the pie it was,” said Michael Pulia, whose research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison focuses on better use of antibiotics. Dr. Pulia wasn’t involved in the study. “It’s very, very problematic.”

California Is on the Brink of an Owl War

Quoted: “[The barred owl] is larger and more aggressive so it can directly out-compete spotted owls,” Connor Wood, a conservation biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Earther. “And they are also more flexible with what they eat and where they live, so the landscape can support more barred owls.”

Bizarre neutrinos detected in Antarctica could open the door to new physics discoveries

“It’s commonly said that neutrinos are ’elusive’ or ’ghostly’ particles because of their remarkable ability to pass through material without smashing into something,” Alex Pizzuto of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, one of the leads on this paper, said in a press release. “But at these incredible energies, neutrinos are like bulls in a china shop — they become much more likely to interact with particles in Earth.”

Read all about it: The ‘reading wars’ are back in America’s education salons

Quoted: Calkins’s approach “is a slow, unreliable way to read words and an inefficient way to develop word recognition skill,” Mark S. Seidenberg, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said in a blog post.

Prosecution in China of student for tweets he posted while studying in U.S. raises free speech concerns

Quoted: Kris Olds, a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on the globalization of higher education, said on Twitter that the case raises a number of questions for international universities hosting Chinese students.

Snow is the only thing keeping some plants and animals from freezing to death

Quoted: “It’s a warm, stable pocket,” says ecologist Jonathan Pauli, a professor of forest and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He coined the term along with his colleague Ben Zuckerberg in 2013.

You may have more Neanderthal DNA than you think

Quoted: Scientists have long speculated about Neanderthals’ relationships to modern humans. While the exact question shifted over the years, it’s a debate that goes back to Neanderthals’ initial discovery, says John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study.

Super Bowl ad: WeatherTech CEO buys ad to thank vets for saving dog

MacNeil’s family took Scout to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where an intense, experimental procedure consisting of chemotherapy, radiation and immunotherapy shrank the tumor to nearly nothing, according to the university.

Super Bowl Ad Thanks Veterinarians Who Saved Dog’s Life

WeatherTech CEO David MacNeil is grateful that veterinarians saved his dog from a deadly form of cancer. He bough a Super Bowl ad to thank the veterinary school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

WeatherTech CEO buys Super Bowl ad to thank University of Wisconsin veterinary school for saving his dog

After David MacNeil’s dog collapsed last July and was given a grim cancer diagnosis with a life expectancy of one month, he took the 7-year-old golden retriever named Scout to the University of Wisconsin at Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, hoping for a minor medical miracle.

Dog treated for cancer by UW vets to be in Super Bowl ad

“Scout’s illness devastated us,” MacNeil told WMTV. “We wanted this year’s Super Bowl effort to not only raise awareness, but also financial support for the incredible research and innovative treatments happening at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine, where Scout is still a patient,”Mark Markel, dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine says this is an incredible opportunity, not only for the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the School of Veterinary Medicine, but for veterinary medicine worldwide.

Grateful dog owner thanks UW vet school with multimillion dollar Super Bowl ad buy

Fact-checking Pete Buttigieg’s Fox News town hall in Des Moines, Iowa

Quoted: “Setting aside instances where an incumbent president is running for re-election, Democrats in the modern era have fared better when nominating new faces rather than Washington insiders,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

‘Blatant manipulation’: Trump administration exploited wildfire science to promote logging

Monica Turner, a fire ecology scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said “it is climate that is responsible for the size and severity of these fires”.

Greta Thunberg Turns 17: A Look Back at Her Year

Quoted: In sum, she has become “a symbol of future generations whose lives will be impacted by the failure of older generations to act today,” Connie Flanagan, a professor at the school of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert in youth politics, told Newsweek.

Panicking About Your Kids’ Phones? New Research Says Don’t

Quoted: Dr. Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin, said that in her own medical practice, she tends to be struck by the number of children with mental health problems who are helped by social media because of the resources and connections it provides.

Goodwill Sparks Deep Division, at Least on Balance Sheets

Quoted: Thomas Linsmeier, a former member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, said he thinks there is “momentum on the board to move toward amortization.” A “driving factor of concern … is the amount of cost in the impairment test,” Mr. Linsmeier, a professor of accounting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.

Should We Alter the Human Genome? Let Democracy Decide

Humankind needs greater scientific and moral clarity on germline genome editing. Achieving it requires inclusive, international, democratic deliberation, supported by our democratic institutions.

We’re trying to keep the Galapagos pristine. That might destroy them.

Visiting the Galapagos Islands — which have long been considered Charles Darwin’s natural laboratory — is like stepping into a nature documentary. You can snorkel with playful sea lions, watch “Darwin’s finches” feed and inch up to ancient giant tortoises.

Elizabeth Hennessy is an assistant professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the author of “On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden.”

Brain Parasite Strips Rodents of Fears of Felines—and So Much More

Quoted: If confirmed, the findings widen the scope of Toxoplasma’s effects. Just because the parasite isn’t as targetted as previously thought, doesn’t mean it’s no longer considered a master manipulator, says Laura Knoll, a parasitologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who wasn’t involved in the study,

How sports fans respond to their teams’ wavering odds of winning

Quoted: Sundays, then, are spent watching win probabilities bounce around like an errant onside kick. This made me and my colleague Evan Polman, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wonder about how people interpret predictions that change.

How The ‘Phase 1’ US-China Trade Deal Will Affect Wisconsin Agriculture

Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Jon Pevehouse said even if all tariffs are lifted, there’s no guarantee Wisconsin farmers will get their Chinese markets back.

‘How can we compete with Google?’: the battle to train quantum coders

This quantum bottleneck is only going to grow more acute. Data is scarce, but according to research by the Quantum Computing Report and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, on one day in June 2016 there were just 35 vacancies worldwide for commercial quantum companies advertised. By December, that figure had leapt to 283.

Hay tainted by toxic beetles kills 14 horses in Wisconsin

Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab director PJ Liesch said blister beetles comprise an entire family of beetles that can be found worldwide, including nearly 30 species in Wisconsin that aren’t typically on hay and alfalfa during harvest.

Winter is missing from much of the Northern Hemisphere this year. When will it show up?

Although the cold lodged over the frozen north is intense, it covers a historically small area for this time of year. Jonathan Martin, a professor of meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, wrote in an email that the size of the “cold pool” over the Northern Hemisphere, which is indicated by temperatures of 23 degrees or lower a mile above ground, ranks as the smallest on record for December and early January.

With many bird populations under threat, high-tech bioacoustics are being used to track birds and their songs.

Connor Wood, a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, joined a grant to study the endangered spotted owl across California’s 38,000 square-mile Sierra Nevada range. He was stumped by the assignment until he heard about bioacoustics.

Cambridge Analytica used these 5 political ads to target voters

Quoted: “Facebook allowed [Cambridge Analytica] to combine different data sources in a way that allowed them to understand voters maybe better than voters themselves did,” Dietram Scheufele, a science of communication professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Quartz when the scandal first broke.

The Virtuous Midlife Crisis

Quoted: “The midlife journey will be more difficult for a good chunk of them because of heightened problems of inequality,” says Carol Ryff, director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and principal investigator of a large study on midlife in the U.S. She pointed to a recent rise in “deaths of despair” among middle-aged adults driven in part by drug overdoses, alcohol abuse and suicide.

Meditation can better the brain. Are we morally obligated to meditate?

Quoted: “A little bit of empathy is important, because we need to be able to detect another person’s suffering in order to be helpful,” Richard Davidson, a prominent University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientist who’s spent decades studying meditation in the lab, told me. “But empathy by itself can be toxic.”

Yes To recalls unicorn face masks after complaints of burns

Quoted: “They can look very similar,” Dr. Apple Bodemer, an associate professor of dermatology at The School of Medicine and Public Health at University of Wisconsin-Madison, told TODAY. “With an irritant reaction that can happen to anybody who puts the product on their skin.”