UW In The News

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?”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Applauds Russia for ‘Protecting Christianity’

Mikhail Troitskiy, professor of practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, disagreed with Greene’s characterization. “There is simply no reason for the Ukrainian government to persecute Christians because it has much more important concerns during the war with Russia,” he told Newsweek. “The constitution of Ukraine does not mention Christianity or any other religion as official, and Ukraine is a secular state—but there is no reason for its government to crack down on the Christian faith.

Someday, Earth Will Have a Final Total Solar Eclipse

There’s good evidence that the moon retreated more slowly in the past as well. Margriet Lantink, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has analyzed sedimentary rocks in Australia that record climatic changes caused by fluctuations in the Earth-moon distance. “I read the fingerprints of those astronomical variations,” Dr. Lantink said.

How Often Do You Take Breaks From Your Phone?

If you want to peacefully coexist with technology, you need to get a handle on those impulses. Start by noticing when you have an urge to lift your phone or open social media on your browser window, said Richard J. Davidson, the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Online child safety laws could help or hurt – 2 pediatricians explain what’s likely to work and what isn’t

Column by Megan Moreno, professor of Peditatrics, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Winter’s Last Gasp

Column by Jack Williams, professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Microsoft’s quantum computer may be the most reliable yet

“A logical error rate 800 times lower than the error rate of the physical qubits is a very significant advance in the field that takes us another step closer to fault-tolerant quantum computing,” says Mark Saffman at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved with the experiment.

The FAFSA Fiasco Is a Really Big Deal

Nick Hillman, an education-policy professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said that the “hollowing out” of the department forced it to rely on third-party contractors to complete its technical fixes.

What Would A Solar Eclipse Have Looked Like to Neanderthals? Here’s What We Know

“It’s almost impossible to imagine that ancient hominins would have ignored an eclipse, or not noticed,” University of Wisconsin anthropologist John Hawks tells Inverse. What’s harder to guess — and more interesting to speculate about — is what the Neanderthals would have thought and felt when darkness suddenly swallowed the day.

Deepfakes raise alarm about AI in elections

What might have taken a studio budget and a production team to produce a few years ago can now be put together by everyday users with just a few clicks, said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And with the ubiquity of social media platforms, fabricated content can be widely spread, with few formal checks in place.

Trump-backed GOP leaders call for embrace of early and mail-in voting even as former president continues to cast doubt

“The [Republican] Party does not have a single message about all of this, in contrast to the Democrats, who – at least in 2020 – had a really unified message,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And they also developed the infrastructure to figure out how to navigate the 50 state laws and determine who has already voted early and how to reach out to people who have requested absentee ballots but not returned them. That’s very much a state-by-state process.”

5 Things You Should Do First Thing In The Morning To Be Happier All Day

“You can start with a simple appreciation practice,” Cortland Dahl, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, previously told HuffPost. Just bring a friend or loved one into your mind, then consciously focusing on the things you really cherish about them.

Why Do Colors Change during a Solar Eclipse?

For other animals, an eclipse-induced Purkinje effect may be even more intense, says Freya Mowat, an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. Birds have a fourth cone that lets them see ultraviolet light. It’s difficult to say exactly how the sudden light change during a solar eclipse would affect avian vision, Mowat, says but it’s possible that the shades of purple would be extra vivid and disorienting

How Baseball’s Official Historian Dug Up the Game’s Unknown Origins

The year Baseball in the Garden of Eden was published, Selig tapped Thorn as MLB’s second official historian. “John Thorn has been brilliant,” says Selig, who now teaches baseball history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Arizona State.

Viral Genetics Confirms What On-the-Ground Activists Knew Early in the Mpox Outbreak

David O’Conner, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told me that COVID initially increased the collaborations between researchers and public health officials. He worries that in our supposedly post-COVID world, we’re returning to a baseline with public health and academics working with “less overlap than during the early [SARS-CoV-2] pandemic.”

Leading Economic Index went up for first time in two years

Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said even if the economy slows down this year, a recession is unlikely. “At least there’s strength in the economy, probably enough so that you’re not going to go into actual negative growth,” he said.

US housing market faces biggest shakeup in years – here’s what we know

“The decoupling of seller agent and buyer agent fees allows for a lot more flexibility and novelty in how agents are going to get paid,” said Max Besbris, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The possibilities are more open now than ever before. We’re really going to see, generally, a lot more transparency.”

Patients Hate ‘Forever’ Drugs. Are Ozempic and Wegovy Different?

“People think they are doing fine, so they don’t need the medicine,” said Corrine Voils, a social psychologist at the University of Wisconsin who studies medicine compliance. “But the medicine is what is keeping them well.”

Bizarre ‘Hot Jupiter’ Planets Keep Surprising Astronomers

The next step in fully understanding hot Jupiters is to use these discoveries to establish the relative likelihoods of the three possible migration mechanisms in order to determine which systems formed which way. Jupiter-sized planets are the rulers of their planetary system because of their dominant gravitational influence and the way their migration pathway sculpts the architectures of their system. Understanding these worlds is the first step to constructing a unified theory of planet formation that scientists have been seeking for centuries.

-JULIETTE BECKER is an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is also a founding member of the new Wisconsin Center for Origins Research (WiCOR).

Planet-Eating Stars Are Surprisingly Common, New Study Suggests

Numerous unanswered questions remain, such as what sorts of planets tend to be consumed and how to know with certainty whether any given star has wholly abstained from devouring members of its brood. Even so, “this work is super compelling,” says Melinda Soares-Furtado, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “I’m excited about what we’re starting to find.”

5 Tips for a Healthier Relationship With Your Phone

If you want to peacefully coexist with technology, you need to get a handle on those impulses. Start by noticing when you have an urge to lift your phone or open social media on your browser window, said Richard J. Davidson, the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Does a Houseplant Need to Glow for You to See It as Alive?

To see what other scientists thought of this petunia, I emailed Simon Gilroy, a botanist who leads a lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison that uses green fluorescent proteins to study how a plant sends signals through its body. But the fluorescence of those proteins—originally synthesized from a jellyfish—is visible only with specialized lights, unlike the petunia now in my house, which glowed on its own. When I visited Gilroy’s lab in 2022, he showed me a tiny plant beneath a microscope lens, handed me a pair of tweezers, and instructed me to pinch it. I watched as a green luminance moved through the entire plant body: The experience permanently changed my view of plant life. Here was a lively, dynamic creature that absolutely knew I was touching it. Gilroy quickly wrote back: “I actually have 2 of those luminescent petunias on pre-order.”

Schools are using Yondr pouches to lock up kids’ cellphones

There’s also reason to believe that using cellphones in class is bad for learning. Studies on doctors, nurses, and others have shown that “multitasking during learning interferes with the long-term processing and retention of what you learn,” said Megan Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Some research suggests that curbing smartphone use in the classroom could help students stay focused on their lessons.