UW In The News

Is a vaping-linked lung illness a public health crisis? That depends on who you ask

Quoted: Communication scholar Dietram Scheufele at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said that at any point in time, roughly five issues tend to dominate a person’s memory. A constantly shuffling set of concerns struggle endlessly for one’s attention.

A Note to the Nobel Prize Selection Committee

A professor here at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Howard Temin represented what society expects from us and had the characteristics that make society willing to fund our work. People want scientists who get up every morning committed to finding the truth.

UW sports analytics, bracketology and solving the opioid crisis

Noted: According to the UW-Madison College of Engineering website, Albert researches “modeling and solving real-world discrete optimization problems with application to homeland security, disasters, emergency response, public services, and healthcare.”

The research on emergency response, for example, focuses on how to match the right resources with the right needs at the right time. In one aspect of this research, Albert looks at how to get the right mix of vehicles to an emergency.

National Academy of Sciences pulls video on possibility of designer babies

Quoted: “I am disappointed by this,” said Alta Charo, a University of Wisconsin, Madison ethicist involved in past academy panels on gene editing. She said the tweet and video could further misunderstanding about editing’s most important uses or wrongly suggest that it’s possible now to bestow traits like intelligence.

Wisconsin manufacturing hub asks, ‘what factory recession?’

Quoted: “We have pretty much tapped out the labor market,” says Steve Deller, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We have companies that are saying that that’s causing part of the slowdown. It’s a bottleneck.”

What electronic games can teach us

Quoted: Green, now a cognitive psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, admits that the benefits of playing hours upon hours of Call of Duty may be limited in real life.

UW Study: Electric Pulses Hidden By Hats Could Help Reverse Balding

Now, a team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison think they have a promising — and discreet — solution. A device, hidden by a hat, that sends low-energy electric pulses to stimulate hair growth.

As the economy teeters, Trump’s ‘eighth wonder of the world’ wobbles with it

Quoted: “Every couple of months there’s been a different plan,” said Steven Deller, an economist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “First it was 13,000 jobs. Now it might be 1,000 jobs. They’ve really scaled back on what they plan to do.”

New Study Finds Connected Habitats See Increases In Biodiversity

Researchers measured 239 plant species over 18 years as part of a habitat experiment at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, said the study’s lead author Ellen Damschen, an integrative biology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

If We Connect Fragmented Habitat, New Species Will Come, Study Shows

“Like compound interest in a bank, the number of species increases at a constant rate each year, resulting in a much larger bottom line over time in habitats that are connected by a corridor than those that are not,” lead author Ellen Damschen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says in the press release.

Connecting fractured habitats has long-lasting ecological benefits, study in Science finds

Few plants grow beneath the timber trees’ dense canopy. Spongy mats of pine needles, up to a foot thick, cover the forest floor. “I might see zero species in the understory,” said study author Ellen Damschen, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Maybe one or two.

Flash drought declared in Washington due to abnormally hot and dry weather

Quoted: Jason Otkin, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin who published a study on the characteristics of flash droughts, wrote in an email that the D.C. area “is on the northern edge of large region centered on the southern Appalachians” that has seen sudden drought onset due “to a prolonged period of much drier and warmer than normal conditions.”

Rudy Giuliani’s role in Ukraine’s investigation of Joe Biden

Quoted: Soliciting help or anything of value from foreign officials in an election is unusual and could be illegal, said Yoshiko Herrera, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It’s also uncommon for a president’s personal attorney to communicate with foreign officials on matters that could influence White House policy, she said.

At Yale’s Singapore college, a canceled course on dissent triggers censorship claims

Quoted: Most U.S. universities that pursue such growth “recognize that their assumptions about academic freedom will need to be adjusted,” said Kris Olds, an expert on the globalization of public education, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “How far will they bend, though?”

Rates of Autism and ADHD Are Increasing Significantly for U.S. Kids

Quoted: It isn’t clear whether the greater prevalence of reported ADHD and ASD cases is necessarily a bad thing. According to Maureen Durkin, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, in an editorial appearing accompanying the study in Pediatrics, greater awareness of the disorders and better diagnosis might be largely responsible for the higher numbers.

Harry Potter’s Broadway Box Office Tactic Cloaks Drop in Demand

Quoted: “When supply is fixed (as in this case), a decrease in demand requires a decrease in price to clear the market,” stated University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Alan Sorensen.

Climate change: Landmark UN report warns sea levels will rise faster than projected by 2100

Quoted: “It drives home the message that policies that curb greenhouse gas emissions can have a strong effect on future sea level rise,” said Andrea Dutton, an associate professor in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Wisconsin Madison. “What we do today can decide which of those pathways we’re on.”

Apparent new rise in autism may not reflect true prevalence

Diagnoses of those two conditions increase with maternal education, points out Maureen Durkin, professor of population health sciences and pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Durkin was not involved in the study but wrote an editorial accompanying the work3.

Can you teach kids kindness? New curriculum hopes to reverse trend of bullying in schools

Now, a team of psychologists at the University of Wisconsin think they have a way to help reverse the trend.

Madison cartoonist Lynda Barry wins MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ award

Graphic novelist, cartoonist and creativity educator Lynda Barry of Madison is one of this year’s winners of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowship, commonly known as a “genius” grant.

Why Vaping Became A Public Health Priority In Wisconsin, The US

“In Wisconsin today, 19 individuals will die of a disease directly caused by smoking cigarettes,” said Dr. Michael Fiore, who directs the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention, in a Sept. 17, 2019 interview on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Central Time.

Who Are 2019’s MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant Winners? Here’s The Full List Of Fellows

Andrea Dutton, 46, geochemist and paleoclimatologist. “Furthering current understanding of sea level dynamics by reconstructing the extent and rate of sea level rise in the ancient past.”

Here are 2019?s MacArthur ‘genius grant’ winners, including cartoonist Lynda Barry and Chicago urban designer Emmanuel Pratt

On the art faculty at University of Wisconsin, she teaches students how to conceive and draw comics and does research on the deeper language of imagery and on helping people defeat the voice in their head telling them they can’t draw.

2019 MacArthur Foundation ‘genius grant’ winners

Lynda Barry, 63: graphic novelist, cartoonist and education, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ Winners: An Algorithmic Playwright, Coral Researcher –

Ms. Dutton, who is leaving the University of Florida for a new job at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, plans to spend the next year in New Zealand. There she will work with researchers to correlate her database on ancient coral reefs with ice-sheet data and computer models from Antarctica.

How to fix student debt

Quoted: ? Fenaba Addo , Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison

We believe that in order to address the black student debt crisis, we need to eliminate racial wealth inequality.

Cap that zaps your scalp could reverse male balding

It’s a phenomenon known as the triboelectric effect and can result in faster hair re-growth than being hooked up to a machine for several hours a day. The team, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tested it out on the backs of shaved lab rats and found that when they moved it caused the flexible patch to bend and stretch.

Denisovan face and body reconstruction uses DNA methylation

Quoted: University of Wisconsin anthropologist John Hawks, who was not involved with this research, endorsed this group’s investigation of ancient DNA methylation and called them pioneers of the technique. “It’s a line of investigation that I want to see people pursue,” he said.

This is almost certainly not what Denisovans looked like

Quoted: “Today we cannot predict very much about a person’s bone morphology,” says John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The (Not So) Secret Lives Of City-Dwelling Coyotes And Foxes

Led by wildlife ecologist David Drake at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, these researchers have observed behavior that suggests the critters may be more prone to peaceful coexistence than are their highly competitive peers in the state’s hinterlands.