UW In The News

Joking around with kids isn’t just fun, it’s vital

So calibrate your comedy accordingly. You’ll know if your approach is on the right track because laughs never lie. “Interactions with your child that are filled with mirth should be unscripted and spontaneous,” says Dipesh Navsaria, associate professor of pediatrics and human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “They should involve a back-and-forth where parent and child are ‘riffing off’ each other.”

The new liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is off to a tense start

“The court has been a contentious place, by some measures, for a decade,” said Michael Wagner, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But I do think it’s in the court’s interest to demonstrate how the decisions they make are rooted in the law and not rooted in politics. “It’s a difficult thing to do,” he added.

The NIH halts a research project. Is it self-censorship?

Even though the NIH has had to navigate political rapids for decades, including enduring controversy over stem cell research and surveys on the sexual behavior of teens, this is a particularly fraught moment. “It is caught up in a larger debate about who gets to decide what is truthful information these days,” said Alta Charo, a professor emerita of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has advised the NIH in the past.

Naked Florida man found next to body in Maryland. Was it murder?

“The jury is trying to try to figure out what the defendant was thinking in the moment, and that can be really hard to know,” said Cecelia Klingele, a University of Wisconsin law professor and expert on self-defense laws.

July Was Likely Earth’s Hottest Month on Record

“The reason that setting new temperature records is a big deal is that we are now being challenged to find ways to survive through temperatures hotter than any of us have ever experienced before,” University of Wisconsin–Madison climate scientist Andrea Dutton tells Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press. “Soaring temperatures place ever-increasing strains not just on power grids and infrastructure, but on human bodies that are not equipped to survive some of the extreme heat we are already experiencing.”

Journalism Is a Public Good and Should Be Publicly Funded

Other journalism models—including nonprofits such as MinnPost, collaborative efforts such Broke in Philly and citizen journalism—have had some success in fulfilling what Lewis Friedland of the University of Wisconsin–Madison called “critical community information needs” in a chapter of the 2016 book The Communication Crisis in America, and How to Fix It. Friedland classified those needs as falling in eight areas: emergencies and risks, health and welfare, education, transportation, economic opportunities, the environment, civic information and political information.

Climate change is hitting close to home for nearly 2 out of 3 Americans, poll finds

“It’s really hard to bring people on different ends of the political spectrum together on this issue,” said Nan Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Bots Are Grabbing Students’ Personal Data When They Complete Assignments

“We behave differently if we know we’re being watched. We get timid, we get shy, we spend a lot of our cognition on what people are going to think. … That’s not what we want” in higher ed, said Dorothea Salo, a teaching faculty member at University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Information School. This is especially the case in today’s political climate, where exploring topics like gender identity and abortion can put people in danger.

Phoenix Heatwave Poised to Break Record for American Cities

Another aspect of heat waves that disproportionately affects certain communities is the urban heat island effect, where cities are warming because of buildings and lack of trees and greenspace, said Dr. Jonathan Patz, a professor of health and the environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Environmental markets should guide federal land use

Allowing markets to operate on federal land would put different American values on more equal footing, thereby reducing conflict. This might harm some political and special interests in the short run, but the change will be a win-win for free markets and for the environment.

-Dominic P. Parker is an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a senior fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, and the Ilene and Morton Harris visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institutio

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.