UW In The News
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Inside the epic quest for a more perfect taffy
If you’re hitting the beach this August, you may find yourself indulging in one of those characteristic treats of America’s boardwalks: saltwater taffy, made by a process conventionally known as “pulling” taffy. But if you’re a fluid dynamics professor at the University of Wisconsin, you might prefer to characterize it as “mixing” — mixing air with sugar, essentially. And you might start to get curious about the mesmerizing spirograph patterns traced by the rods on those taffy machines, and wonder, above all else, if there isn’t a more efficient way to achieve that silky result.
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UW-Madison lab partners with teachers to create educational video games
Field Day Lab, a team of developers, researchers and engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, wants to change that. By working with middle school science teachers across the state, the team developed nine video games, released this week, that better suit student and teacher needs.
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Olympics: Former UW runner Evan Jager earns silver medal in steeplechase with ‘perfect race’
Evan Jager knows steeplechase history about as well as anyone.
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ESPN GameDay to kick off at Lambeau Field
ESPN College GameDay will kick off the 2016 season at Lambeau Field.
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D’Amato: Ex-Badger Evan Jager wins steeplechase silver
The steeplechase has carried the stigma of being a last resort for American distance runners who can’t quite cut it in the faster 1,500 meters or the nobler 5K. Few actually aspire to run the 3,000-meter race, with its 28 leg-sapping barriers and seven water jumps. It’s always tough. It’s seldom pretty.
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Why making a backup plan may set you up to fail
Landing your dream job is a daunting prospect for anyone. So you might be forgiven for thinking that the smartest thing to do when pursuing an ambitious career is also thinking up a Plan B, in case your Plan A goes wrong. Right?
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Random Lake lawyer to feature in UW campaign
Come Sept. 5, a billboard featuring attorney John Hawley will be erected on 14th Street and Niagara Avenue in Sheboygan.
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UW-Madison study looks at concussions effect on academics
A new study being conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nurses and the School of Medicine and Public Health will look at how concussions affect student athletes when they return to the classroom.
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Fontes: The Demise of a Prison Lord
On July 18, Guatemala’s most infamous — and powerful — prisoner, Byron Lima Oliva, was shot to death in the Pavón prison outside Guatemala City. While it was a fellow prisoner who, the authorities said, put two bullets in Mr. Lima’s head, in all likelihood the intellectual authors of the killing hail from the highest echelons of the state and the moneyed elite. In Guatemala, it is often impossible to tell where the state ends and the underworld begins.
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How to Ease the Tensions in Milwaukee
Noted: Fascinating research by psychologist Patricia Devine from the University of Wisconsin deals with breaking the prejudice habit. She explains how even people who hold beliefs and attitudes that are opposed to prejudice can act in discriminatory ways. This essentially happens because of implicit biases, automatic processes we all hold.
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Wisconsinites Know More Than They Think About Financial Issues
In recent years, communities, schools and families have sought to help people be better able to avoid money troubles by promoting financial literacy and, in turn, financial capability. A new national study shows these efforts are finding success in Wisconsin.
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Sotomayor coming to Madison
Sonia Sotomayor grew up in a housing project in New York City. The daughter of native Puerto Ricans, her father died when she was just 9 years old. He never learned English. Her mother, an orphan, raised Sotomayor and her brother in the Bronx, in a neighborhood plagued by poverty and violence. Nevertheless, Sotomayor was always at the top of her class. In 2009, she became the first Latina and the third woman to be confirmed as an associate justice to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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A Look At Student Moving Days Past
When it opened on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus in 1851, North Hall contained classrooms, offices, and housing; for four years, it was the entire university in a single building. About 30 students lived there with three faculty members and a janitor.
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Can curiosity help us make healthier choices?
Noted: With fortune cookies in hand, American researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University approached 100 people and offered them the choice between the plain cookie and the chocolate-dipped one, at first without the promise of a revealing fortune. In this control group, the less-healthy cookie was far more tempting — with around 80 per cent of participants picking it.
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Editorial: UW System budget request reasonable
Years of budget cuts under both Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his predecessor, Democrat Jim Doyle, have made for a lean UW System.
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If You Rely Too Much On Plan B, It Might Ruin Your Plan A
It’s good to have backup plans in case your goals don’t work out in your career or life. However, if you spend too much effort on figuring out the details of your backup plans, it can make you less likely to really pursue your first plan.
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UW ranks 7th worldwide in US patents issued to universities, report says
UW-Madison is one of the top universities in the world when it comes to getting patents for the work done here, according to a report released Friday.
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Finding treasures among the discarded
For those in the midst of moving days in downtown Madison, there is a place where one person’s junk can become another person’s treasure. That place is the UW-Madison We Conserve program’s temporary drop-off donation site located on Lot 45 at 165 N. Mills Street.
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Wisconsin ranked 24th all-time among college football programs
It’s a good day to be a Badger.The University of Wisconsin-Madison football team was recently ranked 24th in the Associated Press’ all-time Top 100 rankings. The AP has been ranking college football teams since 1936 and determined its top 25 of all time by counting how many times a team appeared on the poll (one point), the number of No. 1 rankings (two points) and AP championships (10 points).
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Daily Beast Removes Article on Gay Olympians in Rio
Quoted: Robert Drechsel, who retired last week as the James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics and director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, described the article as “thoughtless, insensitive and unethical.”
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Legal Help for Returning Wisconsin Veterans
Veterans coming home from overseas wars face challenges in adapting to life as a civilian, and many of those challenges involve legal questions. That’s why the UW Law School opened the Veterans Law Center in 2012. Today, at the Appleton Public Library, the Center has a mobile unit staffed with attorneys, paralegals, and volunteers to help veterans with their legal questions.
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UW research fuels mini solar cells
Imagine a smartwatch that’s powered by the sun rather than a lithium-ion battery. Or a contact lens that taps solar energy to adjust its focus automatically to help you see better.
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Search for sterile neutrino goes dark
On the frigid central plain of Antarctica, where the sun rises only once a year, a set of 5,160 light sensors encased in a cubic kilometer of crystal clear ice sits poised to register the flash of passing quantum particles.
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Homelessness on College Campuses
On a frigid seven-degree night last year, Brooke Evans, 23, entered the University of Wisconsin library in Madison, stomping her feet in her worn Adidas to get the feeling in her toes back.
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UW-Madison to include digital records in national online library
About 400,000 records kept by UW-Madison Libraries will be available online to students, genealogists and researchers as part of a nationwide digital collection.
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Merging Medicine and Entrepreneurship: UW Health Docs Share Lessons
By the time Hans Sollinger helped launch a company for the first time, in 2004, he had performed hundreds of pancreas transplants. In the process, he had built a reputation as a prolific surgeon whose experience few of his peers could match. Sollinger, who practices at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, also known as UW Health, said that the high demand for his services over the years made his first foray into entrepreneurship somewhat jarring.
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New fish virus found in Forest County
But samples from Pine Lake’s dead fish led to a scientific discovery in Goldberg’s laboratory at UW-Madison.
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The downside to being prepared for failure
New research suggests that having a Plan B is not necessarily a good idea. In the study “How backup plans can harm goal pursuit: The unexpected downside of being prepared for failure,” Jihae Shin and Katherine Milkman, researchers at the University of Wisconsin Madison and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, found that backup plans diminish the desire to achieve the primary goal in the first place.
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Regent: Wisconsin ‘Has To Get Serious’ About Investing In UW System
A former lieutenant governor of Wisconsin and a member of the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents is calling on the state to take a no-nonsense approach to funding the UW System.
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Laos’ thirst for Mekong River dams imperils fishing, farming
Quoted: “We don’t know what the claims that things will be fine are based upon. This is unacceptable considering the high stakes,” said Ian Baird, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies Mekong fisheries. “If the measures don’t work well, it will be too late to undo the damage and there will be regional implications for food security and biodiversity.”
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