UW In The News
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What do cicadas sound like, and why are they so loud?
Cicadas are very loud indeed. Extension entomologist P.J. Liesch of the University of Wisconsin-Madison told CBS 58 in Milwaukee that a grove of trees with a bunch of singing and screeching cicadas could reach 70 to 80 decibels – a similar volume to a vacuum cleaner.
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Genes known to increase the risk of Alzheimer’s may actually be an inherited form of the disorder, researchers say
Dr. Sterling Johnson, a study author who leads the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention at the University of Wisconsin, said it would be very important for clinical trials to start to take participants’ APOE4 status into account.
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How to avoid buying and planting invasive species in your garden
If you find them, remove them before they start flowering or seeding, said Susan Carpenter, native plant garden curator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. Native plants should be your first choice to replace invasives, but you can also opt for noninvasive ornamentals, Carpenter said.
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60 Minutes: Teens come up with answer to problem that stumped math world for centuries
Gloria Ladson-Billings, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, has studied how best to teach African American students. She told us an encouraging teacher can change a life.
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Cicadas Are Here. Time to Eat.
“We still don’t fully understand some of the core aspects of their biology,” said PJ Liesch, an entomologist at the University of Wisconsin. Though there are theories about the insects counting the years through the compounds in tree sap, soil temperatures and their own underground communication, none manage to completely unravel the cicada’s mystery.
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Why Venus May Be Our Best Bet For Finding Life In the Solar System
“If it had liquid water in the past, and if we can really confirm that, then yes – Venus would likely be the planet I would place my bet on,” University of Wisconsin-Madison planetary scientist Sanjay Limaye tells Inverse.
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What are nanoplastics? An engineer explains concerns about particles too small to see
ssistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Milk Has Lost Its Magic
If concerns around bird flu persist, milk’s relevance may continue to slide. Even the slightest bit of consumer apprehension could cause already-struggling dairy farms to shut down. “An additional contributing factor really doesn’t bode well,” Leonard Polzin, a dairy expert at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Division of Extension, told me. For the rest of us, there is now yet another reason to avoid milk—and even less left to the belief that milk is special.
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Making Flying Cleaner
I spoke to Tyler Lark, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose 2022 study questioned ethanol’s climate credentials and concluded that it can be more carbon-intensive than gasoline. He told me that the margins on ethanol’s benefits are thin enough that, depending on the model you chose to calculate its effects, the results can be radically different. His paper prompted rebuttals from the Renewable Fuel Association, an industry group, and the United States Department of Agriculture.
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Chimps are dying of the common cold. Is great ape tourism to blame?
Months later, molecular testing revealed the culprit: human metapneumovirus (HMPV), one of a collection of viruses that presents in people as a common cold but is “a well-known killer” in our closest primate relatives, says Goldberg, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. More than 12% of the community that Stella belonged to died in the outbreak. Others were lost as a result of being orphaned. “Stella had a baby that was clinging to her body for a while after she died,” Goldberg says. “The baby subsequently died.”
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Third parties will affect the 2024 campaigns, but election laws written by Democrats and Republicans will prevent them from winning
rofessor of Political Science, Director of the Elections Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Ecstasy’s bid for FDA approval reveals challenges of psychedelic trials
“It’s very kind of New Age with spiritual components,” said Bruce E. Wampold, a counseling psychology professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has studied the effectiveness of psychotherapy in clinical trials. “It’s on the periphery of what I would say evidence-based treatments would be.”
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Why Your Voice Sounds Older As You Age
These changes happen to about 1 in 5 of us as we age, according to Lisa Vinney, a speech-language pathologist and faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Age-related voice changes happen to everyone to some degree,” she said. “But those changes can occur more rapidly or be more pronounced thanks to genetic, lifestyle and health factors.”
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Scientists debate adding a Category 6 for mega-hurricanes
In their paper, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Wehner and co-author James P. Kossin of the University of Wisconsin–Madison did not explicitly call for the adoption of a Category 6, primarily because the scale is quickly being supplanted by other measurement tools that more accurately gauge the hazard of a specific storm.
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Fragments of Bird Flu Virus Discovered in Milk
Finding viral fragments in milk from the commercial supply chain is not ideal, but the genetic material poses little risk to consumers who drink milk, said David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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As bird flu spreads in cows, fractured U.S. response has echoes of early covid
“Lots of farms aren’t raising their hands to be tested because they don’t want to be known as having an infected herd,” said Keith Poulsen, director of the veterinary diagnostic lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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U.S. births fell last year, marking an end to the late pandemic rebound, experts say
But “the 2023 numbers seem to indicate that bump is over and we’re back to the trends we were in before,” said Nicholas Mark, a University of Wisconsin researcher who studies how social policy and other factors influence health and fertility.
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Do implicit bias trainings on race improve health care? Not yet – but incorporating the latest science can help hospitals treat all patients equitably
ssociate professor of Population Health Sciences and Obstetrics and Gynecology, UW-Madison.
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Inside Wildlife Services, USDA’s program that kills wildlife to protect the meat and dairy industries
Adrian Treves, an environmental science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the origins of today’s rampant predator killing can be found in America’s early European settlers, who brought with them the mentality that wolves were “superpredators,” posing a dangerous threat to humans. “We’ve been fed this story that the eradication of wolves was necessary for livestock production,” he said.
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A Passover Pleasure: Matzo Pizza
Ancient matzo wasn’t as crackerlike as it is today. It was likely similar to a pita, said Jordan Rosenblum, a religious studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There’s a 2,000-year history of putting stuff on matzo and eating it,” he said.
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A Dentist Found a Jawbone in a Floor Tile
It’s “clearly hominin,” John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who also blogged about the discovery, told me in an email.
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America’s child care crisis is holding back moms without college degrees
Women like Slemp challenge the image of the stay-at-home mom as an affluent woman with a high-earning partner, said Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The stay-at-home moms in this country are disproportionately mothers who’ve been pushed out of the workforce because they don’t make enough to make it work financially to pay for child care,” Calarco said.
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Dentist finds ancient human jawbone embedded in his parents’ tile floor
John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, titled his blog post on the matter: “How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?”
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How Ugandan Tobacco Farmers Inadvertently Spread Bat-Borne Viruses
“This is the butterfly effect of infectious disease ecology,” says senior study author Tony Goldberg, a wildlife epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Far-flung events like demand for tobacco can have crazy, unintended consequences for disease emergence that follow pathways that we rarely see and can’t predict.”
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Florida bans local heat rules for outdoor workers, baffling experts
Extreme heat kills more people in the United States each year than all forms of extreme weather combined, said Richard Keller, professor and chair of the medical history and bioethics department at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. In a changing climate not only are the days of extreme heat becoming “more frequent and more intense, they’re also longer lasting,” Keller said.
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Babies born this year face a $500,000 climate bill
“The optimist in me knows there are a lot of moving parts,” University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of energy analysis and policy Tracey Holloway tells Consumer Reports. “It could end up being easier to be sustainable, easier to be resilient, than we thought, and maybe in some ways that will offset the costs that they project.”
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A Botched FAFSA Rollout Leaves Students Worried
“It’s just this perfect storm of technical issues and procedural delays that have just rolled downhill right from the Department of Education to institutions to students and families,” says Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Cicadas incoming: Billions to emerge in double-brood invasion
“There aren’t many places in the country where two very different broods overlap,” said Daniel Young, a professor of entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the school’s insect research collection.
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Toward A Universal Covid Vaccine
This dynamic underscores the need for a universal vaccine, a potential game-changer that could neutralize all forms of SARS-CoV-2 and even other related coronaviruses. A recent study by Peter Halfmann and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin offers promising indications that this universal vaccine is on the horizon.
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Why experts are studying how to improve tablets for parrot use
It was not surprising that the birds could learn to follow a circle on a screen because of their higher capacity for intelligence, said Kurt Sladky, a clinical professor of zoological medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine. Sladky was not involved in the new study.
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