UW In The News
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Second Alzheimer’s drug to slow disease’s progression may be approved in the US this year
“The modest benefits would likely not be questioned by patients, clinicians, or payers, if amyloid antibodies were low risk, inexpensive and simple to administer,” wrote UCSF’s Dr. Eric Widera, SUNY Upstate Medical University’s Dr. Sharon Brangman and the University of Wisconsin’s Dr. Nathaniel Chin. “However, they are none of these.”
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Rasmussen Reports Is Using Its Polls To Push Conspiracy Theories
That level of influence is “sort of like Walmart, in a way,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center and a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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Nearly 1 in 10 U.S. children have been diagnosed with a developmental disability, CDC reports
“It’s been a constant increase, it seems, with these national surveys, every time they measure it, it seems to go up,” said Maureen Durkin, chair of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Population Health Sciences.
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Climate change ratchets up the stress on farmworkers on the front lines of a warming Earth
Climate change makes extreme heat more likely and more intense. Farm work is particularly dangerous because workers raise their internal body temperature by moving, lifting and walking at the same time they’re exposed to high heat and humidity, said Dr. Jonathan Patz, chair of health and the environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Greece migrant boat disaster: Mapping a tragedy on coast guard’s watch
Till Wagner, an assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Navid Constantinou, a physical oceanography research fellow at the Australian National University and Ian Eisenman, a professor of climate science and physical oceanography at the University of California at San Diego, used weather and ocean current data obtained from MarineTraffic to estimate the drift velocity using a method described in a 2022 study.
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UW-Madison IceCube researchers produce first neutrino image of Milky Way
New data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s IceCube neutrino detector has led to the first ever image of our Milky Way galaxy using the subatomic “ghost particles.” An international team of researchers also found the Milky way is a neutrino desert compared to others.
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Scientists Find Ghostly Neutrino Particles From the Milky Way
“Only cosmic rays make neutrinos, so if you see neutrinos, you see cosmic ray sources,” Francis Halzen, a member of the IceCube team and physicist at the University of Wisconsin, tells Popular Science. “The goal of neutrino physics, the prime goal, is to solve the 100-year-old cosmic ray problem.”
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2 Leading Theories of Consciousness Square Off
Dr. Melanie Boly, a neurologist at the University of Wisconsin, came onstage to explain the other contender: the Integrated Information Theory. What makes consciousness special, Dr. Boly argued, is the way it manages to feel at once rich and unified over time.
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A.I. Is Coming for Mathematics, Too
These days there is no shortage of gadgetry for optimizing our lives — diet, sleep, exercise. “We like to attach stuff to ourselves to make it a little easier to get things right,” Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said during a workshop break. A.I. gadgetry might do the same for mathematics, he added: “It’s very clear that the question is, What can machines do for us, not what will machines do to us.”
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Neutrinos from the Milky Way finally detected
In 2013, IceCube detected the first cosmic neutrinos. In the years since, they’ve been able to narrow neutrino sources down to individual galaxies. “We have been detecting extragalactic neutrinos for 10 years now,” says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the IceCube collaboration.
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Astronomers Just Detected An Important High-Energy Particle In the Milky Way for the First Time
“We now hope to have established the multi-messenger techniques that will allow us to pinpoint the cosmic ray sources in the galaxy which, arguably, represents one of the oldest problems in astronomy,” Francis Halzen, IceCube principal investigator and physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, tells Inverse.
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IceCube detector finds neutrinos from the Milky Way for the first time
“It took us 10 years to find the galactic plane in neutrinos,” says IceCube head Francis Halzen at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s totally counterintuitive. It’s like if you went outside at night and saw a sky bright in active, distant galaxies but no Milky Way.”
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In a First, Scientists See Neutrinos Emitted by the Milky Way
IceCube had already definitively detected neutrinos streaming in from outside the Milky Way, but it couldn’t be said with certainty that any of them came from within the galaxy, says Francis Halzen, lead investigator of the project and a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. This was rather strange, considering the proximity of the Milky Way’s disk (in fact, our solar system is embedded in it) and the high likelihood that neutrinos form there.
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A ‘loneliness loop’: How the American culture of busyness can increase isolation
Christine Whelan, clinical professor of Consumer Science at the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says an individual’s work ethic is at the core of what it means to be an American. You demonstrate to other people you are pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and are busy, indicating a sense of success. “Affluence and busyness seem to go together as status symbols,” Whelan said in a telephone interview. “It is easy to criticize it, but the culture demands it from us. We need to be careful about individual actions versus cultural norms.”
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Cancer drug shortages could put chemo patient treatment at risk
“We had to make some decisions about who we were going to prioritize during this difficult time,” said oncologist Dr. Kari Wisinski with the University of Wisconsin Health, who told CBS News she had never seen a shortage this serious.
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The ‘Forbidden Planet’ That Escaped a Fiery Doom
Melinda Soares-Furtado, a NASA Hubble fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies planetary engulfment, called the study an “exciting” example of the “unexpected properties” revealed in star-planet interactions. She suggested that future research about the system involve experts on blue stragglers, a class of luminous stars that are thought to be formed by stellar mergers.
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Humans have significant impact on atmospheric CO2 | Fact check
However, in the context of climate change, the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere is less relevant than the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, Grant Petty, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of two textbooks on atmospheric physics, told USA TODAY in an email.
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Tropical rainforests are still vanishing at an alarming rate
Brazil, again, offers a strong example: Some companies that slaughter cows for beef say they’re monitoring their supply chains to ensure that they aren’t driving deforestation; they’ve agreed to only source cattle from suppliers without recent forest loss. Yet those same cattle may have traveled through several other farms where deforestation happened before reaching the slaughterhouses’ direct suppliers, according to Amintas Brandão Jr., a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin Madison. So in reality, those companies are implicated in environmental harm and misleading consumers.
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How do you know if your water is safe from forever chemicals?
The EPA’s proposed limit amounts to one drop of water in twenty Olympic-size swimming pools, said Christy Remucal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin.
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Tricky survival tactics of the flu virus uncovered in new study
The two main viruses that cause the flu — influenza A and B — have existed for centuries and, although some antiviral advances have been made, these bugs have proven extremely difficult to eradicate. Now, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) have identified at least one secret to the success of influenza A, a finding that might arm researchers with another way to combat it.
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Why Some Americans Buy Guns
Nick Buttrick, a psychologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, wanted to know whether firearms provided similar comfort to gun owners, serving as a sort of psychological security blanket.
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Many Future Storms May Dump 50% More Rain, Overwhelming City Drains
But plenty of America’s infrastructure was laid down even earlier, meaning it was designed to specifications that are probably even more obsolete, said Daniel B. Wright, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Unpaid internships have long been criticized. Why are they still around?
Matthew Hora, founding director of the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that he “wholeheartedly” endorses a ban on unpaid internships and associated training programs, but he isn’t optimistic that they are going away anytime soon. Some disciplines, like social work, make them mandatory for graduation; employers in some fields, such as the arts, have limited resources; and others, he said, pointing to government, seem to “ignore the unethical nature of free labor.
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A linguist on why talking can sound like singing
To put this practice into context, I spoke to two experts: Langston Wilkins, expert in hip-hop and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Dan Charnas, historian of hip-hop and associate arts professor at New York University. Both confirmed that the use of repetition to add musicality to spoken vocal samples is a common practice in hip-hop, but neither was familiar with Deutsch’s framing of the phenomenon as an auditory illusion.
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How to tell good advice from not-so-good advice
Humankind has long sought crowd-sourced answers to problems. From the 300-year history of the advice column to the plethora of advisers at our employ — spiritual, political, financial, emotional, professional, legal — people are inclined to make better choices when those actions have been guided by another. “We all have biases,” says Lyn Van Swol, a professor of communication science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “and if you can meld your perspective with another good source of information, you’re starting to cancel out some of your biases.”
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Experts say influential group’s guidance on CTE is too weak
“There are researchers out there who, rightfully so, want really strong data. We all should be striving for very strong evidence, but it’s very hard to come by in environmental exposure cases like this,” said neuroscientist Julie Stamm, a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the consensus statement. She agreed that cohort studies will yield the best evidence regarding CTE, “but that’s going to take decades,” she said.
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To fight berry-busting fruit flies, researchers focus on sterilizing the bugs
Lyric Bartholomay, a professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies integrated pest management and public health entomology who was not part of the study, said “increasingly tailored genetic approaches” will be necessary in the future to protect crops and people from pests, especially as insecticide resistance increases.
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Aspiring Fathers Open Up About the Emotional Toll of Fertility Issues
Plus, while the impact of age on a couple’s fertility has historically focused on the woman, “there has been a lot of data gathered over the last 10 years that indicates that, as men age, their fertility potential does decline over time,” said Daniel H. Williams, a urologist who specializes in male infertility at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
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Cancer drug shortages highlight supply chain vulnerabilities
“This is the first time I’ve ever experienced drug rationing in my career,” said Marina Sharifi, medical oncologist at the University of Wisconsin’s Carbone Cancer Center.
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The Simple Way to Fight Aging, According to Experts
Exercise can help your memory and learning ability, too. Moderate-intensity exercise is linked to an increase in cerebral blood flow and brain glucose metabolism, which are connected to cognitive functions, says University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Ozioma Okonkwo, who co-wrote two studies on the subject.
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