UW In The News
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The Relationship Between Stress And Asthma
Researchers at UW-Madison (Natalie Guyette) are looking at how stress affects the symptoms of asthma in a four year study looking at how the mind and body communicate in stressful situations. We talk with one of the key professors about their findings.
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What Logan Paul Says About Internet Culture
YouTube star Logan Paul has been weathering a barrage of controversy following his video depicting an alleged suicide victim in Aokigahara, a forest in Japan. The video–coupled with others posted on his YouTube channel–highlights a growing concern over what is being produced on social media platforms. We speak with Kathleen Culver, assistant professor and Director of UW-Madison’s Center for Journalism Ethics, about the news and what these videos say about internet culture.
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Experts concerned over kids posting ‘digital self-harm’ on social media
It’s called “digital self-harm,” and its rates are similar to traditional means of self-harm, such as cutting or burning, researchers say.The study, led by Justin Patchin, professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, found that 6 percent of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 engage in digital self-harm.
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Are you getting enough sleep?
Neuroscientist Chiara Cirelli of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Sleep and Consciousness, who conducted the study, explained at the time, ‘I don’t think we know of any cognition function that isn’t affected by sleep deprivation.’
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How climate change could counterintuitively feed winter storms
“It’s just inconclusive at this stage,” said the University of Wisconsin’s Martin. “I think the jet is getting wavier, I’m not sure it’s connected to the Arctic,” he added.
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Could Gene Therapy One Day Cure Diabetes?
Alan Attie, whose University of Wisconsin lab studies the genetic and biochemical processes underlying genetics, called it “beautiful and elegant work.””An exciting development in the diabetes field is the discovery of extraordinary plasticity in alpha and beta cells,” he told Gizmodo. “Work such as that from the Gittes Lab demonstrates the way in which this plasticity can be harnessed for therapeutic purposes.”
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Does all this cold weather mean there will be fewer mosquitoes next summer?
“They’re going to get through this. They are going to make it because they have experienced these kinds of conditions before, and they don’t get wiped out. Maybe we’ll get a little suppression of the ticks, but we’ll see,” says Susan Paskewitz, the chair of the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Paskewitz’s research focuses on disease-carrying arthropods like mosquitoes and ticks, which tend to be the ones that we worry about most in the summer.
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What’s unusual about the ‘bomb cyclone’ headed toward the East Coast
If you live in the eastern US, from northern Florida all the way to New England, you’re in for some nasty weather: a massive winter storm called a “bomb cyclone” is hammering the coast, bringing snow, ice, flooding, and strong winds. That’s not a made-up click-bait term; it’s actually used by meteorologists to indicate a mid-latitude cyclone that intensifies rapidly — or as meteorologist Jon Martin at the University of Wisconsin-Madison says, they “just kind of explode.”
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Federal Rulemaking 101
Federal regulations affect everything from how much mercury dentists can pour down the sink to who’s allowed to drill on federal lands. There are thousands and thousands of regulations governing our lives, but since they’re not front and center in Congress, we rarely hear about them, even though regulations are really where the rubber hits the road. This hour, we’ll talk to Susan Yackee, professor of public policy and political science at the UW-Madison La Folette School of Public Affairs, about the mysterious world of federal regulations.
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Bomb cyclones, polar vortexes – global warming in winter
In a report published in 2012 by the American Geophysical Union, atmospheric scientists Jennifer A. Francis of Rutgers University and Stephen J. Vavrus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered evidence that the jet stream’s weaker winds and bigger wave amplitudes “may lead to an increased probability of extreme weather events that result from prolonged conditions.”
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The citizen scientist
If you walk the trails of the UW-Madison Arboretum this winter, you may cross paths with Karen Oberhauser. The Arboretum’s new director is on a mission to get to know every inch of the 1,700-acre facility, which includes tall grass prairies, savannas, wetlands, forests and gardens.
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Bright Ideas 2018: Use psilocybin in treating depression by UW’s Charles Raison
But there are some really interesting things afoot. Usona is a medical research organization that is exploring the potential of psychedelic medication — psilocybin — in depression treatment. My hope in the coming year is that we continue to see exploration of the therapeutic use of psilocybin.
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White Children Are Still Diagnosed More Often With Autism Spectrum Disorders
Maureen Durkin, one of the authors of that study and a population health researcher at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, told Spectrum that differences in socio-economic status may be one reason why children who are black and Hispanic are less likely to get screened for autism spectrum disorders—leading to relatively lower diagnosis rates.
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Why Do We Need to Sleep?
Sleep-inducing substances may come from the process of making new connections between neurons. Chiara Cirelli and Giulio Tononi, sleep researchers at the University of Wisconsin, suggest that since making these connections, or synapses, is what our brains do when we are awake, maybe what they do during sleep is scale back the unimportant ones, removing the memories or images that don’t fit with the others, or don’t need to be used to make sense of the world.
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US News & World Report ranks DASH, Mediterranean diet best
Alisa Sunness, a nutritionist at University of Wisconsin Health, who was not involved in the ranking, said that highest rated diets encourage the same types of eating habits.“They all support a higher intake of fruits and vegetables, lean protein and heart healthy fats and whole grains,” she said. “The diets are using foods with minimal added fats and sugars and using foods in the natural form, and naturally those foods are going to be nutrient dense.”
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It’s 2018. Here Are Six Scientific Mysteries We Still Haven’t Solved.
“Sleep is the price we pay for learning,” Giulio Tononi, a psychiatry professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison tells New Scientist. Tononi and his team conducted experiments on sleeping mice and found that, after sleep, synapses were significantly smaller than those before sleep.
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Dairy Cow Slaughter Increases As Farmers Focus On Profitability
But Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the up-tick in slaughter numbers doesn’t mean herds are growing smaller.”If we see cow slaughter numbers being up a little bit, I don’t think you can necessarily read anything into that because we’ve got plenty of animals to replace them,” Stephenson said.
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The Benefits of Giving Up Alcohol in January: Better Sleep, Fancy Mocktails, and More
“There are a lot of people who really want to argue the science with me, and I feel like the science has been settled a long time ago,” says Noelle LoConte, M.D., an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the lead author of the statement, recalling the influx of emails she has received.
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UW wins $7 million grant to study ways to improve the odds of quitting smoking
Four years ago, Inda Lampkins, a 42-year-old Milwaukee mother diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, took one of the most difficult and most important steps to improve her health. She quit smoking.
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UW professor’s fairytales in clay are from then and now
“I gave the (sculptural) piece to a student to fire, because I didn’t even really care” about it, said the German-born Gerit Grimm, who was teaching in California at the time and now heads the ceramics program at UW-Madison.
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UW-Madison team helps find remains of U.S. fighter pilot shot down in France during WWII
“This is the culmination of decades of thoughts, wishes to have him have a proper burial,” said Dr. Ryan Wubben, a member of UW-Madison’s Missing in Action Recovery and Identification Project and director of UW Med Flight. “It was an incredibly powerful and meaningful moment.”
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U.S. Olympic hockey teams have a Wisconsin flavor
Wisconsin will be well-represented on the other side of the world next month, when the U.S. men’s and women’s hockey teams compete in the Winter Olympics in South Korea.
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A 2-Year-Old Chimp Named Betty Died From Common Cold Virus We Didn’t Even Know Chimps Could Catch
Since time immemorial, humans have had a knack for being complete and utter dicks to the other animals we share our planet with. Often, we even manage to screw things up for other species without meaning to. A study published earlier this month in the journal of Emerging Infectious Disease has retroactively uncovered one such incident: That time we gave a town of chimpanzees a cold bug that ultimately left five dead, including an adorable 2-year-old baby named Betty (pictured above).
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A Whale Eye Gift Makes For The “Best Christmas Ever”
The end of the year is a time of holiday gift giving, and finding just the right gift can sometimes feel like an impossible task. But folks at an animal eyeball lab say that a gift they’ve just received, partly thanks to NPR, has made this the “best Christmas ever.”
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Madison’s tech economy fares well in nationwide survey
Basically, though, keeping the UW-Madison strong is a key element in producing new generations of tech-savvy students and in playing a role in developing new technology, (Jeff) Naughton, the emeritus professor, said.
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Oldest fossils ever found suggest life in the universe is common
“The difference in carbon isotope ratios correlate with their shapes,” said John Valley, professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the study. “Their C-13-to-C-12 ratios are characteristic of biology and metabolic function.”
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Gaps, Guardrails And The Fast-Advancing Math Of Partisan Gerrymandering
Jordan Ellenberg, a University of Wisconsin-Madison math professor, co-organized one of Duchin’s conferences in Madison in October 2017, and has written a New York Times op-edon the science of gerrymandering. He sees a high efficiency gap as a “red flag.” But he doesn’t see the test as a basis for a constitutional standard that guides when courts can send state legislators back to the drawing board.
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Life in the Universe Is Common, Oldest Fossils on Earth Suggest
“The difference in carbon isotope ratios correlate with their shapes,” said John Valley, professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the study. “Their C-13-to-C-12 ratios are characteristic of biology and metabolic function.”
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When Is the Best Age for Americans to Claim Social Security?
Noted: In fact, poverty rates accelerate as people reach their early 80s, says Pamela Herd, Professor of Public Affairs & Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Some of what’s going on is that people are losing other sources of income,” Herd explains. “So when you hit 85, you may have run through private savings at that point. Social Security becomes your financial lifeline.”
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UW-Madison Scientists Help Confirm Oldest Fossils
Some scientists have questioned whether the fossils were just minerals. But researchers from UW-Madison and the University of California, Los Angeles have used a hi-tech device called a secondary mass ion spectrometer (SIMS) to determine the fossils are indeed ancient bacteria and microbes.John Valley. Image courtesy of William Graf/University of Wisconsin-MadisonUW-Madison geology professor John Valley co-led the study.
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