UW In The News

Danez Smith: ‘White people can learn from it, but that’s not who I’m writing for’

The New Yorker said of Don’t Call Us Dead that Smith’s poems “can’t make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination”. That imagination was honed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Smith studied before going on to form the Dark Noise Collective with other artists including Franny Choi, with whom Smith co-hosts the poetry podcast VS.

Nevada Democrats Canceled Their Caucus App. But That Poses Its Own Problems.

Quoted: If the number of people who vote early is small, folding the early votes into the process on caucus day should be fairly easy for the volunteers in charge of the caucuses to handle, according to Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

What ‘Normal’ Weather Is Will Change

“Any number of those societal things,” said Jordan Gerth, a research meteorologist who recently left the University of Wisconsin-Madison to join the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington, D.C.

OneWeb Launches 34 Satellites as Astronomers Fear Radio Chatter

Quoted: “It’s very similar to when you have two apartments next to each other,” said Jordan Gerth, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “To some extent, the sound in one unit is confined, but if it gets too loud, it bleeds over.”

Morgridges come through again for UW-Madison with up to $70M matching gift for faculty support

How each US state is impacting the personal finance IQ of students

Melody Harvey, National Poverty Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty, found in a study she conducted that state-level personal finance education requirements make young individuals significantly less likely to borrow payday loans than peers who were not provided the education, across race, ethnicity and gender.

Aerobic exercise limits risk of Alzheimer’s in vulnerable adults

Previous research has shown us how regular exercise can be beneficial for cognitive function and help stave off the brain degeneration associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s, but scientists continue to learn more about the mechanisms at play. The latest discovery in this area comes courtesy of researchers from the University of Wisconsin (UW), who have published a new study describing a relationship between regular aerobic exercise and a reduced vulnerability to Alzheimer’s among high-risk adults.

Mathematicians Prove Batchelor’s Law of Turbulence

Quoted: “I have to take it all at once, which is what makes it incredibly difficult to model,” said Jean-Luc Thiffeault of the University of Wisconsin, who studies turbulence.

Patients Often Get Antibiotics Without a Doctor Visit, Study Finds

“Everybody knows it’s out there, we just didn’t know how big of a piece of the pie it was,” said Michael Pulia, whose research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison focuses on better use of antibiotics. Dr. Pulia wasn’t involved in the study. “It’s very, very problematic.”

California Is on the Brink of an Owl War

Quoted: “[The barred owl] is larger and more aggressive so it can directly out-compete spotted owls,” Connor Wood, a conservation biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Earther. “And they are also more flexible with what they eat and where they live, so the landscape can support more barred owls.”

Bizarre neutrinos detected in Antarctica could open the door to new physics discoveries

“It’s commonly said that neutrinos are ’elusive’ or ’ghostly’ particles because of their remarkable ability to pass through material without smashing into something,” Alex Pizzuto of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, one of the leads on this paper, said in a press release. “But at these incredible energies, neutrinos are like bulls in a china shop — they become much more likely to interact with particles in Earth.”

Read all about it: The ‘reading wars’ are back in America’s education salons

Quoted: Calkins’s approach “is a slow, unreliable way to read words and an inefficient way to develop word recognition skill,” Mark S. Seidenberg, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said in a blog post.

Prosecution in China of student for tweets he posted while studying in U.S. raises free speech concerns

Quoted: Kris Olds, a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on the globalization of higher education, said on Twitter that the case raises a number of questions for international universities hosting Chinese students.

Snow is the only thing keeping some plants and animals from freezing to death

Quoted: “It’s a warm, stable pocket,” says ecologist Jonathan Pauli, a professor of forest and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He coined the term along with his colleague Ben Zuckerberg in 2013.

You may have more Neanderthal DNA than you think

Quoted: Scientists have long speculated about Neanderthals’ relationships to modern humans. While the exact question shifted over the years, it’s a debate that goes back to Neanderthals’ initial discovery, says John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study.

Super Bowl ad: WeatherTech CEO buys ad to thank vets for saving dog

MacNeil’s family took Scout to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where an intense, experimental procedure consisting of chemotherapy, radiation and immunotherapy shrank the tumor to nearly nothing, according to the university.

Super Bowl Ad Thanks Veterinarians Who Saved Dog’s Life

WeatherTech CEO David MacNeil is grateful that veterinarians saved his dog from a deadly form of cancer. He bough a Super Bowl ad to thank the veterinary school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

WeatherTech CEO buys Super Bowl ad to thank University of Wisconsin veterinary school for saving his dog

After David MacNeil’s dog collapsed last July and was given a grim cancer diagnosis with a life expectancy of one month, he took the 7-year-old golden retriever named Scout to the University of Wisconsin at Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, hoping for a minor medical miracle.

Dog treated for cancer by UW vets to be in Super Bowl ad

“Scout’s illness devastated us,” MacNeil told WMTV. “We wanted this year’s Super Bowl effort to not only raise awareness, but also financial support for the incredible research and innovative treatments happening at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine, where Scout is still a patient,”Mark Markel, dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine says this is an incredible opportunity, not only for the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the School of Veterinary Medicine, but for veterinary medicine worldwide.

Grateful dog owner thanks UW vet school with multimillion dollar Super Bowl ad buy

Fact-checking Pete Buttigieg’s Fox News town hall in Des Moines, Iowa

Quoted: “Setting aside instances where an incumbent president is running for re-election, Democrats in the modern era have fared better when nominating new faces rather than Washington insiders,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

‘Blatant manipulation’: Trump administration exploited wildfire science to promote logging

Monica Turner, a fire ecology scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said “it is climate that is responsible for the size and severity of these fires”.

Greta Thunberg Turns 17: A Look Back at Her Year

Quoted: In sum, she has become “a symbol of future generations whose lives will be impacted by the failure of older generations to act today,” Connie Flanagan, a professor at the school of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert in youth politics, told Newsweek.

Panicking About Your Kids’ Phones? New Research Says Don’t

Quoted: Dr. Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin, said that in her own medical practice, she tends to be struck by the number of children with mental health problems who are helped by social media because of the resources and connections it provides.

Goodwill Sparks Deep Division, at Least on Balance Sheets

Quoted: Thomas Linsmeier, a former member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, said he thinks there is “momentum on the board to move toward amortization.” A “driving factor of concern … is the amount of cost in the impairment test,” Mr. Linsmeier, a professor of accounting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.

Should We Alter the Human Genome? Let Democracy Decide

Humankind needs greater scientific and moral clarity on germline genome editing. Achieving it requires inclusive, international, democratic deliberation, supported by our democratic institutions.

We’re trying to keep the Galapagos pristine. That might destroy them.

Visiting the Galapagos Islands — which have long been considered Charles Darwin’s natural laboratory — is like stepping into a nature documentary. You can snorkel with playful sea lions, watch “Darwin’s finches” feed and inch up to ancient giant tortoises.

Elizabeth Hennessy is an assistant professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the author of “On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden.”

Brain Parasite Strips Rodents of Fears of Felines—and So Much More

Quoted: If confirmed, the findings widen the scope of Toxoplasma’s effects. Just because the parasite isn’t as targetted as previously thought, doesn’t mean it’s no longer considered a master manipulator, says Laura Knoll, a parasitologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who wasn’t involved in the study,

How sports fans respond to their teams’ wavering odds of winning

Quoted: Sundays, then, are spent watching win probabilities bounce around like an errant onside kick. This made me and my colleague Evan Polman, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wonder about how people interpret predictions that change.

How The ‘Phase 1’ US-China Trade Deal Will Affect Wisconsin Agriculture

Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Jon Pevehouse said even if all tariffs are lifted, there’s no guarantee Wisconsin farmers will get their Chinese markets back.