UW In The News

Scientists Forecast U.S. Sea Levels Could Rise a Foot by 2050

“This is a red-flag warning, like, we can see this freight train coming from a mile away,” said Andrea Dutton, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the relationship between melting ice sheets and sea-level changes, who wasn’t involved with the report.

Most U.S. wolves are listed as endangered—again. Here’s why.

“It’s a good day for science, for wolves, for ecosystems, and for the people who value wolves,” says Adrian Treves, a wolf researcher and professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin.

Tributaries play key role in feeding ‘forever chemicals’ into Great Lakes: study

“Our study is bringing some much-needed answers to not only the people who live around the bay of Green Bay, but also to all of the Great Lakes communities because it’s an interconnected water system,” Christy Remucal, a University of Wisconsin – Madison professor of civil and environmental engineering, said in a statement.

Ethanol Less Green Than Gas, Study Funded by Biofuel Critics Says

A U.S. program requiring the use of corn-based ethanol in the nation’s gasoline supply hasn’t curbed greenhouse gas emissions, according to a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison published Monday.

How pandemic isolation is affecting young kids’ developing minds

Unless there are deficits in care or a stressful family environment, extra time at home may have benefitted the very young. For babies, caregivers are their whole world, and their greatest need is responsive, sensitive care. “There’s really no indication that their social development is going to be impacted at all,” says Seth Pollak, a psychologist and brain scientist who studies child development at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Netflix ‘Tinder Swindler’ Simon Leviev isn’t the only dating app scammer

A trio of professors from Michigan State University, Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison collected data from 37 online daters and found that describing yourself in profiles can be “ambiguous” because of lack of self-awareness, conscious efforts to disguise the self and the technical limitations of the online platform’s choices.

F.D.A. Delays Review of Pfizer’s Covid Vaccine for Children Under 5

“I honestly let out a woo-hoo of elation that reason and science had prevailed, and that they actually really did do the right thing,” said Dr. James Conway, a pediatric infectious disease expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

UW-Madison chancellor calls political divide the greatest threat to public universities

Scientists Hail ‘Big Moment’ for Future of Nuclear Fusion

Stephanie Diem of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said the technology used by JET to achieve the result, using magnets to control ultra-hot plasma, show that harnessing fusion — a process that occurs naturally in the stars — is physically feasible.

NASA has big plans for space farms

“It’s just so expensive and so hard to constantly provide food and oxygen and all the things that you need to keep people alive,” Simon Gilroy, professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved with the research. Space is a “weird” place for biology to exist in, says Gilroy, and that’s one of the reasons it’s a great opportunity to study plants and humans’ evolutionary record.

‘Loophole’ allowing for deforestation on soya farms in Brazil’s Amazon

Holly Gibbs, professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, said: “At the same time that soy farmers comply with the moratorium, they continue to deforest illegally for other purposes.”

UW-Madison keeps alive its 20-year streak in international computer competition

Why outdated rainfall records are blocking cities’ climate change preparations

“Throughout most of the country, big storms are happening more often,” says Daniel Wright, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There’s every reason to expect that rainfall will continue to intensify in the future.”

Opinion | A judge should not have rejected Ahmaud Arbery’s killers’ plea deal

Steven Wright, a clinical associate professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, teaches criminal appellate law and creative writing.The fate of Ahmaud Arbery’s murderers, whose federal hate-crimes trial began on Monday, took an unexpectedly dark turn last week when a federal judge rejected a plea deal reached with prosecutors. Under the deal, two of Arbery’s three killers were to accept responsibility for federal hate crimes; at least one had confirmed he would publicly admit race had motivated the murder. In exchange, the two men would serve the next 30 years in federal custody. The plea deal fell apart largely because the Arbery family objected.

Sleeping eight hours a night could help with weight loss: study says

A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that by increasing sleep duration to 8.5 hours per night people reduced the number of calories consumed in a day and the long-term potential to gain weight.

Mentoring Doesn’t Need To Be A Trial And Error Practice

Dr. Angela Byars-Winston is a professor in the UW-Madison Department of Medicine and a leading thinker on the science of mentoring.

Has the Pandemic Pushed Universities to the Brink?

As the University of Wisconsin philosophy professor Harry Brighouse points out:

Instructional quality is the most neglected—and perhaps the most serious—equity issue in higher education. Good instruction benefits everyone, but it benefits students who attended lower-quality high schools, whose parents cannot pay for compensatory tutors, who lack the time to use tutors because they have to work, and who are less comfortable seeking help more than it benefits other students.

The Riveting and Murky Quest to Hack the Meditating Brain

Much of what scientists have found so far isn’t so surprising, but it does confirm long-held associations about what parts of the brain fire up during meditation. One meta-analysis of 110 studies showed the imprint mindfulness can have on the brain, such as increased activation in areas associated with focused problem-solving, self-regulation, self-control. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been able to teach machines how to recognize meditative states in humans through measurements of brain patterns. We are not far from a reality in which researchers could teach people how to mirror a mindful brain state through a process similar to Powers’ Decoded Neurofeedback.

Are Colleges Discriminating Against Asian Applicants?

It’s not even a question. Students for Fair Admissions revealed the discrimination against Asian-Americans with their lawsuit against Harvard. In their petition to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, they documented how Asian students who were academically in the top 10% of Harvard applicants were accepted at a rate of 12.7%, white applicants at a rate of 15.3%, black applicants at a rate of 56.1%, and Hispanics at a rate of 31.3%.

—Jonathan Draeger, University of Wisconsin Madison, economics

‘Pretty appalling’: Asian scientists rarely awarded top science prizes

In 2020, in conversations stimulated directly by the racial unrest of the time, ASCB leaders decided to systematically examine the awards process. “Forty years is a long time to go without thinking hard from the outside about what’s going on,” said Bill Bement, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who volunteered to lead a task force on the issue. “There was a lot of dust that had to be shrugged off.”

Inside UW-Madison’s new Chemistry Tower: modern labs, study spaces and a ‘library of the future’

Experts question unusual plan to clear Covid vaccine for kids under 5

Malia Jones, an epidemiologist who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and who specializes in vaccine hesitancy, said it has been clear for a while that getting children vaccinated against Covid is going to be an uphill battle. She worries that the low level of confidence in Covid vaccines for children will erode parental support for other vaccines. “This is the thing that keeps me up at night,” she said.

What Is a Bomb Cyclone? A Winter Storm Explained

If traveling by vehicle, pack a winter survival kit, and in the event of getting stranded in the snow, stay with the vehicle. Laura Albert, an industrial engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies emergency response and preparedness, recommends packing such a kit with jumper cables, a small shovel, a flashlight, warm clothes, blankets, bottled water and nonperishable snacks, and a bag of sand or cat litter to regain traction on snow or ice.

New Reports Shine a Light on Rural Colleges

What is a rural college? And where can such institutions be found? The questions seem simple, but in higher education, the answers are surprisingly complex. Now two new reports aim to clarify them.

The first, released in December, comes from the University of Wisconsin and is titled “Mapping Rural Colleges and Their Communities.” Nicholas Hillman, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin who spearheaded the report, says the research was born out of the question “Where are rural colleges located?”

It won’t be easy to prove Oath Keepers committed seditious conspiracy

“The idea of being branded a traitor to your country, of committing sedition, stands out,” said Joshua Braver, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin. “It sends a certain political message.”

What Does Endemicity Mean for COVID?

Pretty much all we can say for sure about the flu is that—as Malia Jones, a population-health expert at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told us—it is “a huge pain in the butt, but also not a global pandemic, most of the time. Unfortunately, there is not a single word for that.”

Will Delta Survive the Omicron Wave?

In a “worst-case scenario,” Gostic said, Delta could transform into something capable of catching up with Omicron, and the two would tag-team. Dual circulation doesn’t just double the number of variants we have to deal with; it “leaves open the possibility for recombination,” a phenomenon in which two coronavirus flavors can swap bits of their genomes to form a nasty hybrid offspring, Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. (Delta’s brutality + Omicron’s stealth = bad-news bears.) Alternatively, a daughter of Delta may totally overtake Omicron, exacting its ancestor’s sweet, sweet revenge. Or maybe the next variant that usurps the global throne will be a bizarro spawn of Alpha … or something else entirely. In the same way that Omicron was not a descendent of Delta, the next variant we tussle with won’t necessarily sprout from Omicron.

Tennessee school board votes unanimously to ban book about the Holocaust

Simone Schweber, Goodman Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says there are already so few living Holocaust survivors left, and few teachers have the resources or the time to teach historically and emotionally complex topics.

Is ‘Fully Vaccinated’ ‘Up-to-Date?’ Experts Are Worried Americans Are Too Confused to Care

Part of the problem, David O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin, said, is that the CDC may have painted itself into a corner by initially describing those who went through a two-dose mRNA vaccine course as “fully vaccinated,” despite not knowing the long-term efficacy of the vaccines against new variants.

Seditious conspiracy is rarely proven. The Oath Keepers trial is a litmus test | US Capitol attack

But because sedition charges so rarely go to trial, there isn’t a great deal of precedent for how such trials proceed, experts say. And US prosecutors have a checkered history in securing sedition convictions. “It’s been used in ways that have been absurd and has been used in ways that were slam dunks,” said Joshua Braver, an assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin.