UW In The News
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Childhood poverty ticked up to 14%, latest Census data show
“So essentially when the cost of things go up, that reduces the amount of money that people have in their pockets at the end of the day,” said Michael Collins, a poverty researcher at the University of Wisconsin Madison. The biggest driver of the higher poverty rate is also the source of inflation the Fed has struggled with most: “Rent is more expensive, and so rent took away more money out of people’s budgets, and so — as a result — they had less money left over for everything else,” Collins said.
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August CPI shows inflation sticking around in service sector
The parts of the economy where inflation is taking a while to come down are in the services sector. For instance, inflation actually picked up last month in the food away from home category.“Which reflects what? Well, that’s, like, restaurants. And what’s a big component of restaurant costs is labor costs,” said Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin.
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Why Are US Agricultural Emissions Dropping?
‘There’s so much uncertainty in those predictions that I would hesitate to really read too much into any small variation from year to year, outside of demonstrable changes and practices out on the landscape,” said Steven Hall, a professor in the Department of Plant and Agroecosystem Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The emissions inventories published by EPA are subject to substantial uncertainty.”
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These Americans are trying to make ‘underconsumption core’ trendy
“It’s really pushing back against this idea that you need to constantly be buying things to have a happy and fulfilling life,” said Megan Doherty Bea, assistant professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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The debate elevates 2024’s central question: Who’s paying attention?
It’s also probably the case that viewership trended upward since 1996 in part because of increased partisan identification. The University of Wisconsin’s Barry Burden made this point before that Biden-Trump debate and it tracks: Higher investment in partisan success would suggest more interest in seeing how well each candidate does.
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Can chief heat officers protect US cities from extreme heat?
“There’s very little authority behind these positions,” said Richard C. Keller, a historian of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wrote a book about extreme heat in Europe. “They can issue recommendations, they can help establish policy, but they’re going to have a very hard time enforcing those policies.”
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Bat die-off led to more insecticide use and more infant deaths in US
“This study shows that bats can save human lives just by doing what they do best – eating insects,” says Jennifer Raynor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Many wild animals are important for human health and well-being, and we are now beginning to understand that technology cannot always replace these benefits when they are lost,” she says.
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A probiotic called Akkermansia claims to boost health. Does it work?
While there’s a “much larger body of evidence” suggesting beneficial metabolic effects of akkermansia, the studies pointing to potential downsides should not be ignored, said Federico Rey, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies the relationship between the gut microbiome and cardiometabolic disease. “The overwhelming data suggests that akkermansia is good for your metabolic health, but there’s also data suggesting that it might not be good for other conditions,” he added. “There’s a lot of moving parts we still have to understand before making general recommendations.”
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A Democracy With Everything but a Choice
“The distribution of offices does not align with the distribution of voters,” said Barry C. Burden, who heads the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny
Sarah Halpern-Meekin, a sociologist at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me that “the majority” of people with low incomes make cashless transactions — on apps like Cash App, for instance.
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Notes App Lists You Should Keep In Your Phone To Be Happier
“We have little insights and micro-epiphanies all the time, but we usually forget about them a few moments later,” Dahl, who is also a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, told HuffPost. “Taking a few moments to step back and make note of the ways we are learning and growing is a great way to build some muscle memory around self-discovery.”
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Detecting agricultural pests through sound
(Emily) Bick, an entomologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, researches ways to better detect the agricultural pests that drive serious economic losses worldwide. She says improving these methods could result in using pesticides more strategically — less often, at just the right time.
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How to be More Resilient, According to Experts
“We as humans are very social creatures,” said Kathryn Howell, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “So when bad things happen to us, we want to be together and connected to others.”
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For Two-Job Workers, There Aren’t Enough Hours in a Day to Stay Afloat
“One story is that people are short of cash, and they need extra hours and the only way to pick up extra hours is by picking up a short-term job,” said Christopher Taber, chairman of the economics department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Another story is that it’s easier to work two jobs now than it was before.”
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4 years into COVID, isolation continues for some disabled residents
Patients have been harassed or mocked for wearing masks in public, Dr. Jeannina Smith noted, despite international and national medical organizations emphasizing the importance of mask wearing as a mitigation tactic for illnesses. Hill has experienced this first hand.”You can’t look at someone and know that they’re receiving immunosuppression for an organ transplant or an autoimmune condition, and they remain at risk,” Smith said.
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Ultrasound Brain Stimulation Boosts Mindfulness
“I haven’t seen ultrasound technology used in this way, but this type of neuromodulation has significant potential to change how we think about and enhance mindfulness,” says University of Wisconsin–Madison social psychologist Hadley Rahrig, who also studies that state of mind.
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Are You Sure Your House Is Worth That Much?
“Homeowners, whether they know it or not, definitely are taking on more risks,” says Philip Mulder, an assistant professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin’s business school. A 2023 paper, for instance, found that U.S. residential properties are overvalued by $121 billion to $237 billion for current flood risks alone.
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Can Thousands of Huge Machines Capture Enough Carbon to Slow Climate Change?
The U.S. plans to draw down and store more than a billion tons of CO2 annually by 2050, more than one fifth of what it currently emits. For that to be possible, carbon removal would have to become one of the world’s largest industries in just a few decades, expanding by more than 40 percent each year. That’s far faster than most technologies develop—although it is comparable to the pace of solar panels and electric vehicles. “It’d be one of the biggest things humans have ever done,” says Gregory F. Nemet, a professor of public policy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who wrote a book called How Solar Energy Became Cheap. “One of the hardest things we’ve ever done. But not unprecedented.”
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Study: JD Vance Couldn’t Have Been More Wrong About “Childless Cat Ladies”
To experts, the findings are not surprising. “It makes sense that women without children would support policies like affordable childcare and paid family leave because they recognize that care links all of our fates,” said Jessica Calarco, professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the book Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.
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Why Hurricanes And Tropical Storms Spawn Tornadoes
Let’s dig deeper to explore why tropical cyclone tornadoes can happen. Most explanations mention “frictional effects,” so I will start there. The Weather Guys blog is a legendary and informative platform administered by my colleagues Jonathan Martin and Steve Ackerman (retired), professors at the University of Wisconsin. They write, “When a hurricane makes landfall, the winds near the ground slow down, while the upper-level winds keep their momentum. This change in the wind speed — and sometimes direction — with height is called wind shear.” There’s more to the story, however.
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How Venezuela’s opposition proved its election win: ‘A brilliant political move’
“It has been a brilliant political move by the opposition, an extremely impressive logistical achievement”, said Andrés Pertierra, a PhD candidate in Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Basically, the opposition is forcing Chavismo to own up to the fact that they’re stealing the election.”
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The previously stuck A23a iceberg is trapped again, spinning in a rare ocean vortex
Till Wagner, a professor in University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies how ice interacts with climate, said he has never seen a real-life example of this phenomenon on such a massive scale.
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Biden administration takes another crack at student debt relief
Without fundamental changes to the student debt system, “it’s like it’s groundhog day,” remarked Nick Hillman, an expert on student loan policy at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
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Antarctic temperatures soar 50 degrees above norm in long-lasting heat wave
“With global temperatures increasing, that raises the potential ‘baseline’ for the average temperatures,” said David Mikolajczyk, a research meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a result, “strong warming events such as this one can occur more frequently and have a bigger impact.”
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As North American bats face an existential crisis, a new study offers hope for a ravaging disease
“We created a cell line from an endangered bat species (little brown bat) to create a model for the disease in animals that are not available to be studied,” study co-author Dr. Bruce Klein — a professor of Pediatrics, Medicine, and Medical Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison — told Salon. “We created a model of hibernation, which is so critical to understanding of the pathogenesis of the infection.”
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Could Trump Replace JD Vance? Experts Explain How It Would Work
Crucially, the rule explicitly applies to a scenario in which Vance voluntarily steps aside, says Kenneth Mayer, a recently retired political-science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He told BI there was no precedent for forcibly ripping the nomination away from a vice-presidential candidate after the convention.
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The backlash to Butler: Who will pay for the attempted assassination attempt on Trump?
Dr. Nathan P. Kalmoe, the executive administrative director of the University of Wisconsin — Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, explained to Salon that groups which are told they are under attack — much as Trump told his audience that the person who tried to shoot him was really attacking all of them — are more likely to commit violence.
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With bird flu spreading, here’s what worries scientists : Shots
The latest research, which comes from a team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shows the virus can be transmitted by respiratory droplets in ferrets, but inefficiently. Amie Eisfeld, an author of the study, says their lab has not seen this kind of transmission event with any other version of highly pathogenic avian influenza that they’ve isolated from the natural world and tested in ferrets.
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‘My Property, My Trees’: New Tree-Cutting Law Divides N.Y. Town
The debate over how to balance environmental concerns and property rights is becoming more common, said Max Besbris, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in housing and climate change. “There’s a very real anxiety” over best practices, he said, especially since a house is the biggest purchase many people will ever make.
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Union workers at downsizing tractor factory weigh Biden vs. Trump
It was once easier for unions to influence how their members voted, because unions played a bigger role in their social lives, said Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin.”But that’s a thing of the past in Wisconsin, as elsewhere,” she said.
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