UW In The News
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The problem of pain
Noted: But paltry prices can work against developing countries, says James Cleary, a palliative-care specialist at the University of Wisconsin: they mean drug firms have little incentive to bring them to new markets. Tariffs, import licences and high costs for small-scale local production mean that morphine can cost twice as much in poor places as rich ones. Some countries, such as Jamaica, subsidise opioid painkillers. Many others do not.
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Infections resist ‘last antibiotic’ in US
Noted: Commenting on the reports Dr Nasia Safdar, from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said: “The results are very concerning.
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Spring Comes Earlier to Urban Environments
Spring comes earlier to dense cities, and while that might be great for city gardeners and outdoorsy types, it might be bad for native birds and insects.
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UW-Madison Professor: Why I’m Staying
Amid budget cuts, weakened tenure protections, and a chilly atmosphere between UW faculty and staff and Governor Walker, some of the UW System’s faculty have been looking for jobs elsewhere or receiving offers from other universities. We hear from a professor and department chair who makes the case for staying at the UW.
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Badgers’ Nigel Hayes stops by Boys & Girls Club the day after big decision
A day after announcing his return to the University of Wisconsin, Nigel Hayes is giving back in a big way.
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Laura Schwendinger pens an opera about a neglected female painter
“Official” artistic canons have historically recorded a greater number of men than women among their ranks. But that discrepancy is shifting in both the present and the past, as female artists in the modern era stake their claims and female artists from the past are honored by research and scholarship.
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Lending in China Is So Risky That Cows Are Now Collateralized
Quoted: “The environment just isn’t right for the practice with low interest rates, balance sheets generally in good shape, plenty of heifers and milk prices are low,” said Mark Stephenson, director of Dairy Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin, who said it was more common in the 1990s. “Why would anyone want to lease what they could own?”
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Turfing lawn for lettuce, micro-clover or even polypropylene greens
Noted: “Suddenly people were homeowners like never before … so these landscapes and suburbanization just mushroomed,” said Paul Robbins, author of Lawn People: How Grass, Weeds and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are.
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NASA and Wisconsin are covering the state with wildlife cameras
NASA’s next search for life is headed somewhere close to home: into the woods of Wisconsin, where the space agency is partnering with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to create “one of the richest and most comprehensive caches of wildlife data for any spot on our planet.”
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Stem cell scientist says industry poised to boom
Twenty years after UW-Madison scientist Jamie Thomson began work to isolate human embryonic stems, research has advanced so far that the field is now poised to boom and create Wisconsin companies that could rival Epic, the Verona-based electronic healthcare records company with more than 9,000 employees.
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Meet the expert witnesses testifying in Wisconsin’s federal voter ID trial
Noted: Witnesses include Barry Burden, Professor of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Director, UW Elections Research Center.
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Stem cell scientist says industry poised to boom
Twenty years after UW-Madison scientist Jamie Thomson began work to isolate human embryonic stems, research has advanced so far that the field is now poised to boom and create Wisconsin companies that could rival Epic, the Verona-based electronic healthcare records company with more than 9,000 employees.That was the optimistic forecast by three panelists who spoke Tuesday at a Wisconsin Innovation Network luncheon in Madison.
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Alvarez helped create winning culture at Wisconsin
When Barry Alvarez was extended an offer to become the football coach at the University of Wisconsin in 1990, he approached some of his friends and mentors for advice before accepting.
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Billions at Stake in University Patent Fights
A powerful and inexpensive technique for rewriting snippets of DNA — known as CRISPR-Cas9 — has two research institutions locked in a bitter patent battle. On one side is UC Berkeley, where faculty first reported using the gene-editing technology in 2012, on the other, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where faculty won a special expedited patent for the technique in 2014.
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Atucha: How Wisconsin Fruits Were Hit By A Late Spring Frost
Every year as spring unfolds, fruit growers around Wisconsin start feeling anxious, wondering whether a late frost will harm their crop. Overall, temperatures are warming across the state amidst global climate change, but this pattern is accompanied by unseasonable cold weather events, such as the late spring frost much of the state experienced earlier this month.
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‘Use your turn signal’: Six of the best celebrity commencement speeches of 2016
Recognize: Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson’s speech at UW-Madison
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Poverty linked to epigenetic changes and mental illness
Noted: Seth Pollak, a child psychologist at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, says that it is unclear whether poverty harms cognition and mental health, or whether a person’s intrinsic biology increases the likelihood that he or she will be poor as adults. But epigenetic research, such as the new study, shows that genetic differences are not the only important factors. “You might have a particular gene — but depending on the experience you have or don’t have, the gene might never be turned on,” Pollak says.
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1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility
Noted: But all these factors are exacerbated by common forces, says Judith Kimble, a developmental biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison: competition for grants and positions, and a growing burden of bureaucracy that takes away from time spent doing and designing research. “Everyone is stretched thinner these days,” she says. And the cost extends beyond any particular research project. If graduate students train in labs where senior members have little time for their juniors, they may go on to establish their own labs without having a model of how training and mentoring should work. “They will go off and make it worse,” Kimble says.
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Nigel Hayes will return to UW for senior season
Wisconsin coach Greg Gard has reeled in a key recruit for the 2016-’17 season.
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UW-Madison scientist says flu virus mapping could improve vaccine
The development by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka follows research he did last year suggesting another way to improve flu shots: manufacturing them with dog or monkey cells instead of the current, lengthy process using chicken eggs.
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Neurological therapy: Can stimulating the tongue help stimulate the brain?
A new experimental therapy is trying to determine if stimulating the tongue can retrain the brain and offer some relief to those with neurological issues.
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China’s Coming Demographic Crash
Quoted: “It’s already too late,” says Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a critic of Chinese population policies. “China’s population is aging quickly and will start to shrink soon.”
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Thousands more trail cameras coming to Wisconsin
Wisconsin scientists have launched an ambitious new project that uses trail cameras to inventory wildlife and tamp down simmering questions about how many deer really roam the state.
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Madison ranked No. 1 college football town
The Bleacher Report put out a list of the top 15 college football towns in the country based on the town’s relationship to its college program, passion in terms of fan support, traditions, culture and entertainment options on football weekends.
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UW researches why obesity is breast cancer risk factor
Studies show that being overweight or obese is associated with a higher risk of cancer. One woman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is trying to figure out why that is, specifically in cases of breast cancer.
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Madison ranked No. 1 college football town
The Bleacher Report put out a list of the top 15 college football towns in the country based on the town’s relationship to its college program, passion in terms of fan support, traditions, culture and entertainment options on football weekends.
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Thousands more trail cameras coming to Wisconsin
MADISON — Wisconsin scientists have launched an ambitious new plan to catalog wild animals using thousands of trail cameras, a project that could help answer just how many deer and other creatures roam the state.
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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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Teaching today’s students is more taxing
Gloria Ladson-Billings posed a question to point out a troubling trend in education: “How can we develop culturally competent students if our teachers are culturally incompetent?” Ladson-Billings asked at her “Urban Education and Community Forum” lecture at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
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Health officials work with UW to track Zika-prone mosquitoes
Health officials are collaborating with the a state university after learning that a Wisconsin woman contracted the Zika virus.
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Jonathan Martin: Extreme Cold in Wisconsin
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