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UW In The News

  • COVID-19 vaccine rollout has some feeling envy, resentment, anger

    USA Today | February 17, 2021

    “It doesn’t make you a bad person because you have these kinds of feelings,” said Robert Enright, a licensed psychologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who studies moral development and the science of forgiveness.

  • Advice About the End of the Pandemic, From a Combat Veteran

    Newsweek | February 17, 2021

    Someday, maybe soon, this will all be over. Things will start to get back to a kind of “normal,” whatever that may look like, and lives will begin to pick up where they might have left off. At least, that’s what many are hoping for.

    Chad S.A. Gibbs served in the US Army from 2002-2009, including deployment to Iraq. He is currently a PhD candidate in the history of the Holocaust at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He tweets at @Chad_G101.

  • Nature Makes Wood. Could a Lab Make It Better?

    WIRED | February 16, 2021

    In addition to the tantalizing possibilities of growing whole furniture, the plant-based materials could enhance fuels and chemicals production, says Xuejun Pan, a professor in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who wasn’t involved in the study. “You don’t have to necessarily grow a strong piece of wood. If you can produce a biomass, for example, as a future feedstock for bioindustry—competitively and productively—that could be attractive,” he says

  • Panpsychism: The Trippy Theory That Everything From Bananas to Bicycles Are Conscious

    Discover Magazine | February 16, 2021

    Of course, panpsychism is likely not falsifiable. There’s no experiment that can determine whether or not your mailbox has a mental life, much less a quark. Yet that doesn’t mean science isn’t working on the problem. Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has developed something called the integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT). IIT holds that consciousness is actually a kind of information and can be measured mathematically, though doing so is not very straightforward and has caused some to discount the theory.

  • What Presidents Mean When They Talk About ‘Equity’

    Bloomberg | February 16, 2021

    While Obama also used equity in the more modern, social-justice sense of the word, he did so less often than Biden already has — a possible sign of his reluctance to center race as a national issue as the country’s first Black president, said Dietram A. Scheufele, a social scientist who studies political communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

  • The Comfort of a Lunar New Year in Isolation

    Time | February 12, 2021

    Essay by Professor Beth Nguyen

    Lunar New Year might bring to mind festivals and fireworks, but I’ve always associated it with a kind of isolation. Long before the pandemic, long before the rest of America learned about sriracha and pho, I grew up in a Vietnamese refugee family in a mostly white town in Michigan.

     

     

  • UW-Madison claims nearly $31 billion in annual economic impact to Wisconsin

    Wisconsin State Journal | February 12, 2021

    UW-Madison and its affiliated entities are an economic engine contributing $30.8 billion a year to the Wisconsin economy, according to a new report commissioned by the university and funded by UW Foundation.

  • White House bets on counter programming Trump impeachment

    Washington Examiner | February 11, 2021

    But Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center, was confident Biden was playing his strongest hand since his campaign was “a pitch for national unity and a return to normalcy.”

  • Opportunity in America starts with fixing the internet, says social investing pioneer

    MarketWatch | February 11, 2021

    Streur pointed to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison that shows how COVID-19 has made life in rural and low-income communities in Wisconsin, which ranks 38th for internet access out of all 50 states, even harder without broadband.

    A team of university researchers led by Tessa Conroy found that even before the pandemic, those on the winning side of Wisconsin’s “digital divide” often had higher home values, improved health outcomes, better entrepreneurship opportunities and higher educational outcomes than those living without fast internet.

  • Poem: Smokey

    New York Times | February 11, 2021

    Born and raised in Compton, Calif., he is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he directs the M.F.A. program in creative writing. His latest collection, ‘‘Imperial Liquor,’’ was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2020 and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry.

  • New CDC guidance on masks cites UW-Madison invention, research

    The Capital Times | February 11, 2021

    New guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention encourages Americans to make their masks work better by tightening their fit, including by using a simple, homemade tool designed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

  • How Right-Wing Radio Stoked Anger Before the Capitol Siege

    The New York Times | February 10, 2021

    “It’s like your friend in the bar,” said Lewis A. Friedland, a professor who studies talk radio and politics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where stations serve up six or more hours of right-wing talk a day. “He’s your buddy, and he’s kind of like you and he likes the same kind of people that you like and doesn’t like the same kind of people that you don’t like.”

  • CDC urges to double mask or to wear masks that fit

    The Washington Post | February 10, 2021

    David Rothamer, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, has experimented with masks on mannequins in classrooms while studying the best ways to prevent the spread of the virus in college classes. He said he is not a proponent of double masking because it consumes more masks, and can also lead to more air leakage.

  • Ikea’s Ambitious Plan To Make Its Cheap Furniture Last Forever

    HuffPost | February 10, 2021

    “Ikea is fairly unique in its ability to tell a potential supplier, ‘If you can’t meet our terms, we’ll find someone else who will,’” said Tom Eggert, a senior lecturer on business sustainability at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Whether it’s a wood alternative or plant-based plastics or something else entirely, they have the buying power to create a market where one may not yet exist.”

  • How vaccinating monkeys could stop a pandemic

    BBC Future | February 9, 2021

    They’re also useful. “Júlio [Bicca-Marques] likes to say that monkeys are like the canary in the coal mine,” says Karen Strier, anthropology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a career-long researcher of primates in Brazil. “They’re a good warning that you have to worry about yellow fever” – and other diseases, too.

  • Ready for takeoff: Three simple guidelines for flying after vaccination

    The Hill | February 8, 2021

    It will take years until all air travelers are immunized, but we do not have to wait years until it is safe to fly.

    -Dr. Laura A. Albert is a professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the College of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a prominent member of INFORMS. Her research applies optimization and analytical methods to public sector applications including aviation security.

  • The Mysterious Cause of a Deadly Illness in Sanctuary Chimps Revealed

    Smithsonian Magazine | February 8, 2021

    “It was not subtle—the chimpanzees would stagger and stumble, vomit, and have diarrhea, sometimes they’d go to bed healthy and be dead in the morning,” says Tony Goldberg, a disease ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to Ann Gibbons for Science.

  • McDonagh completing degree during breaks in Lightning schedule

    NHL | February 5, 2021

    Ryan McDonagh isn’t just lacing up his skates this season. He’s also hitting the books.

    The Tampa Bay Lightning defenseman is working on getting his bachelor’s degree in personal finance at the University of Wisconsin via online learning. He left Wisconsin in 2010 after his junior season, just 18 credits short of the finish line, and signed a contract with the New York Rangers.

  • Pandemic offers Lightning’s Ryan McDonagh opportunity to finish his degree

    Tampa Bay Times | February 5, 2021

    Lightning defenseman Ryan McDonagh has found a way to make the most out of the new normal brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. He’s finishing his college degree.

    McDonagh, who is 18 credits short of getting his personal finance degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is now taking online classes to put himself on a path to graduate.

  • House Exiles Marjorie Taylor Greene From Panels, as Republicans Rally Around Her

    The New York Times | February 5, 2021

    Removal from committees is usually reserved for lawmakers who are facing indictments or criminal investigations or who have otherwise broken with their party in a particularly egregious way, according to Eleanor Neff Powell, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

  • Rescue dog breeds take DNA tests for the Puppy Bowl on Super Bowl weekend

    Popular Science | February 5, 2021

    But as some experts put it, defining doggie ancestry can be tricky. “To a large degree, the accuracy of breed composition tests very likely depends on the degree to which a dog is ‘mixed,’” Lauren Baker and Susannah Sample, both of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote in an email to PopSci. “From a veterinarian’s standpoint, we find these ‘breed identification’ tests are fun for many owners. But having not been evaluated by the scientific community, they shouldn’t be used to alter medical decisions.”

  • Chimps first, then humans? Scientists worry about new fatal bacterium.

    USA Today | February 4, 2021

    “There are very few pathogens that infect chimpanzees without infecting humans and very few pathogens that infect humans without infecting chimpanzees,” said Tony Goldberg, one of the authors of the paper and a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of epidemiology.

  • Chimpanzee-Killing Disease Linked by Researchers to New Species of Bacterium

    Science Times | February 4, 2021

    Led by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the disease was reported on February 3rd in the journal Nature Communication.The study suggests that the disease is caused by a newly discovered bacterium that comes as the world struggles with the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic.

  • As world reels from coronavirus, UW researchers report on chimpanzee-killing disease, raising concerns about jump to humans

    Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | February 3, 2021

    A new and always fatal disease that has been killing chimpanzees at a sanctuary in Sierra Leone for years has been reported for the first time by an international team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

  • Parting The Clouds

    The Sun Magazine | February 3, 2021

    A professor of psychiatry and human ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Raison believes depression isn’t a single thing but a cloud of related mental and physical states unique to each person; there is no one symptom that every depressed person experiences. “It’s all kind of hunt-and-peck,” he says. “We have an array of treatment options that we just start throwing at people because we don’t know why, biologically, they’re depressed.” Meanwhile depression is growing to epidemic proportions in the United States, with few truly novel treatments approved over the last three decades.

  • A mysterious disease is killing chimps in West Africa. Scientists may now know the culprit

    Science | February 3, 2021

    Disease ecologist Tony Goldberg was stunned in 2016 when he learned that a mysterious infection was swiftly killing chimpanzees at a lush sanctuary in Sierra Leone’s rainforest. “It was not subtle—the chimpanzees would stagger and stumble, vomit, and have diarrhea,” recalls Goldberg of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Sometimes they’d go to bed healthy and be dead in the morning.”

  • Lethal Chimp Disease Is Linked to Newly Identified Bacteria

    The New York Times | February 3, 2021

    In 2016, Dr. Goldberg, an epidemiologist and veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and head of the Kibale EcoHealth Project, was approached by the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance to try to solve the mystery. He and his colleagues at Wisconsin joined forces with other veterinarians and biologists in Africa and elsewhere to undertake a comprehensive analysis of blood and tissue from the dead chimps that had been frozen at a nearby hospital.

  • Pathogen Discovered That Kills Endangered Chimps; Is It a Threat to Humans?

    Scientific American | February 3, 2021

    But cases kept coming. In 2016, the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance, an umbrella organization for the continent’s primate sanctuaries, reached out to epidemiologist Tony Goldberg, Owens’ advisor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Goldberg was immediately intrigued. “This is an unknown infectious disease that poses a serious risk to the health and survival of an endangered species, which happens to be our nearest relative,” he says.

  • UW nursing, pharmacy students join effort to bring vaccines to rural areas

    The Capital Times | February 3, 2021

    Over 200 University of Wisconsin nursing and pharmacy students have volunteered to help administer COVID-19 vaccines at statewide mobile clinics in local high-need areas.

  • The Webb Telescope, NASA’s Golden Surfer, Is Almost Ready, Again

    New York Times | February 2, 2021

    Feature billing goes to researchers like Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute, a pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial civilizations; Natalie Batalha of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a leader of the Kepler mission who is now planning Webb observations; Margaret (Maggie) Turnbull, an expert on habitable planets at the University of Wisconsin, and a former candidate for governor of that state, whom Mr. Kahn interviewed as she tended her backyard beehives; and Amy Lo, a Northrop engineer who works on racecars when she is not working on making all the Webb pieces fit together.

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