UW In The News
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Wisconsin researchers land NIH dementia grant
Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin- Madison have received a four-year, $5.5 million grant to better understand how communication between parts of the brain changes as the result of normal aging or of dementia.
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Mike Leckrone defines leadership
UW-Madison marching band director Mike Leckrone said he’s often compared to a coach. It’s a parallel he agrees with.
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UW Researchers Are Exploring The Link Between Climate Change And Zika Virus
University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists are looking into whether climate change may lead to the faster spread of diseases like the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus.
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UW-Madison Researchers Are Making Progress In The Hunt For New Antibiotics
As more infections become resistant to antibiotics, a University of Wisconsin research team’s search for new ways to knock down bad bacteria and fungi has become increasingly urgent.
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How the Other Fifth Lives
Noted: Timothy Smeeding, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin, has explored how the top quintile is pulling away from the rest of society. In an essay published earlier this year, “Gates, Gaps, and Intergenerational Mobility: The Importance of an Even Start,” Smeeding finds that the gap between the average income of households with children in the top quintile and households with children in the middle quintile has grown, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $68,600 to $169,300 — that’s 147 percent.
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Researchers discover ‘tsunamis’ on Great Lakes
They may not wipe out entire cities or occur after earthquakes, but two University of Wisconsin researchers say the Great Lakes have tsunamis that can wreak havoc of their own.
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Wonkblog: The sinister, secret history of a food that everybody loves
Noted: Increasingly, anthropologists say that the key to understanding the rise of civilization is to study political and religious institutions. Many now believe that societies took up farming not out of necessity but for cultural reasons — to please a king or to satisfy their religion. T. Douglas Price, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the origins of agriculture, argues that farming was a conscious choice made by societies with pre-existing levels of political sophistication.
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Hyperloop and UW-Madison’s BadgerLoop Team
Hyperloop is the name of a potential transport system, with the idea of shooting people in pods through a tube at speeds of over 700 mph. Does this sound like a pipe dream straight out of science fiction? Not for Elon Musk. You know him – he’s the owner and innovator of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. But for Hyperloop, he invited over 100 teams from around the world to a competition to present their ideas on how to make Hyperloop work. Well, a team from UW-Madison made the cut.
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With Deflategate Ruling, Roger Goodell Is Firmly in Control
Quoted: Linda S. Greene, the Evjue-Bascom law professor at the University of Wisconsin, draws a sharp distinction between how Goodell successfully handled the Brady case and how he mishandled the Ray Rice investigation, protecting a star player and his team in a clear case of domestic abuse.
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The ‘nasty effect,’ and why Donald Trump supporters mistrust the media
People are less receptive to new information when they are offended. That was one of the key findings of a 2013 study by communication scientists at the University of Wisconsin. Researchers tested the effect of “uncivil” reader comments appended to online articles — remarks like, “You must be dumb if you think X.””The results were both surprising and disturbing,” study co-authors Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele wrote in a summary published by the New York Times. “Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.”They called this phenomenon the “nasty effect.”
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If you’re a distracted media multitasker, take a few deep breaths to get your focus back
Do you text while watching TV, or listen to music while reading? Media multitasking is known to distract people not only when they are doing it, but when they aren’t consuming media – which is detrimental to performance at school or work, for maintaining relationships and for general well-being. A new study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States shows that a short meditation exercise involving counting one’s breath – inhaling and exhaling nine times – can sharpen one’s focus, and especially so for heavy media multitaskers.
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UW-Madison student activist Deshawn McKinney awarded Truman Scholarship
UW-Madison junior Deshawn McKinney has been selected to receive the prestigious national Truman Scholarship. The Harry S. Truman Scholarship, created by Congress in 1975 as a memorial to the former president, is intended to support the next generation of public service leaders.
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I Saw the Future of Netflix in a Japanese Reality Show
Quoted: Michele Hilmes, a professor emeritus of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, points out that the DVD market went a long way toward breaking language barriers by providing subtitles and dubbing. What Netflix can do that DVDs can’t is provide an instantaneous global push.
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Scientists design fast, flexible transistor for wearables
A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have devised a cheap method to make impressively fast and flexible silicon-based transistors. Their technique involves using beams of electrons to create reusable molds of the patterns they want, as well as a very, very tiny knife to etch minuscule trenches into those patterns. The result is a small, bendy transistor — though not as small as a the Navy’s single-molecule design — that can transmit data wirelessly and has the potential to operate at a whopping 110 gigahertz. In other words, it’s capable of some extremely fast computing and could lead to wearables a lot more powerful than those available today.
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Photographer’s Crusade to Save a Bumble Bee
The rusty-patched bumble bee used to be abundant, including in Wisconsin. This story starts at UW-Madison’s Arboretum.
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Dealing with epidemics
When the United States took the global lead in combating the world’s deadliest Ebola epidemic in 2014, the White House and public and private organizations sent out an all-call for assistance in equipping health care workers on the front lines with better weapons to battle the disease.
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UW-Madison Researchers Develop Lab Mice To Study Zika Virus
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine have developed lab mice that can be used for testing vaccines and antivirals against the Zika virus.
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UW researchers simulate Zika virus in mice, a key step in developing treatments
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine have found a way to simulate the Zika virus in mice, a step that should help researchers better understand the disease and even gain a foothold in the effort to develop vaccines and antivirals.
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Now teaching at UW, former commissioner, Brewers owner Bud Selig fondly recalls his impact
Bud Selig is just not the retiring type.So even though it’s been 15 months since he stepped down as commissioner of Major League Baseball after nearly 23 years on the job, it would be a stretch to say he’s retired.
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Spring Forward? Get Tips To Avoid Sore Muscles As Outdoor Activities Pick Up
Noted: According to Jill Thein-Nissenbaum, an associate professor in the Doctor of Physical Therapy Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a staff physical therapist for UW Athletics and Badger Sportsmedicine, said that even people who regularly exercise have this problem. She said she knows someone who was in great shape — playing indoor soccer three times a week during the winter — but on his first day back on the golf course, he was left feeling stiff and sore.
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With An Even Number Of Justices, U.S. Supreme Court Has Some Options To Avoid Deadlock
Noted: Ryan Owens, a professor of political science at University of Wisconsin-Madison and an honorary fellow at the Institute for Legal Studies, said when the court is at its usual state of nine sitting justices, the judges try hard to avoid a situation where there is a chance of a deadlock.
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Can Facebook Influence Results Of 2016 Elections?
Noted: A University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor in Journalism Ethics, Robert Drechsel, adds that Facebook, while not necessarily a media company, has the same responsibilities like those of media outlets and should provide content that is “thorough, fair, accurate, complete, and contextual.”
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Michel: UW takes a stand against racism
Another academic year draws to a close this month, and as it ends I have mixed emotions. I’m certainly happy for the graduates, as well as the students who’ve just completed a year of outstanding education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. At the same time, I’m concerned about the racially charged incidents that were reported on the UW–Madison campus this past semester.
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Do Honeybees Feel? Scientists Are Entertaining the Idea
Noted: Christof Koch, the president and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, and Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin, have proposed that consciousness is nearly ubiquitous in different degrees, and can be present even in nonliving arrangements of matter, to varying degrees.
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Ask the Weather Guys: What connection does UW-Madison have with the National Weather Service?
Last week, the director of the National Weather Service (NWS), Louis W. Uccellini, visited his alma mater as the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences inaugural Distinguished Alumni Award winner. Uccellini presented the story of the intellectual and professional journey that led him to the leadership of this extraordinarily important government agency … Uccellini’s visit reminded us all, we strive to do great things at Wisconsin and we usually succeed.
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University of Wisconsin Band rocks packed house at Mauston High School
Members of the University of Wisconsin Band played to a packed gym on Saturday at Mauston High School.
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BTN LiveBIG: Wisconsin engineers fish for inspiration on artificial-eye development
If you don’t already, odds are that someday you’ll hold a newspaper at arm’s length to read it more clearly. This incredibly common eye condition, called presbyopia, generally affects those in their 50s and older. It occurs when eye muscles begin to age and harden, making it more difficult to focus on nearby objects.
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UW-Madison scientists let crowds tell the New Yorker what’s funny
University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists have developed a way for New Yorker magazine to use crowd-sourcing to judge captions in its weekly cartoon caption contest.
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How to Not Fight with Your Spouse When You Get Home from Work
Noted: Different recovery times. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, has spent decades studying the relationship between our emotions and various brain structures and neurological systems. In his 2012 book The Emotional Life of Your Brain, Davidson notes that people vary widely with regard to the speed with which we recover from adverse experiences. (Davidson calls this quality “resilience,” but I prefer “recovery time,” as I use the former term more broadly when discussing our overall response to stress and challenges.) Davidson’s research demonstrates that people with different recovery times even show different patterns of activity in their brains.
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The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War
While it wasn’t written about the Vietnam War, the song “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” by The Animals became an iconic song at the time, and now signifies the era.
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