UW In The News

Opinion: The future of high school students with autism

Quoted: Currently, mostly families from higher incomes are able to help their autistic high school students succeed. According to an article by University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Adityarup “Rup” Chakravorty, “Children living in census tracts with lower socioeconomic development [are] less likely to be diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder than children living in areas with higher socioeconomic indicators.”

Lynda Barry Explores the Language of Art

Making Comics is Barry’s latest collage of comics and instruction, drawn from the course that she teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Madison art department, where she’s an associate professor.

Can Vape Pens Cause Lung Disease? Symptoms, Deaths Reported

Quoted: The lung illness “gets worse really quickly,” said Jeffrey Kanne, a radiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which has had patients. On scans, “these are like what you see with acute lung injuries,” such as inhaling toxic substances in an industrial accident.

Tips for surviving — and thriving during — school transitions

The transition from elementary to middle school is “extraordinary,” according to Geoffrey Borman, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, because students are leaving behind what’s become a comfortable, “caring” environment for an unknown school, which can often seem “imposing.”

Superfans: A Love Story

At the time, Henry Jenkins was a twenty-eight-year-old doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He had grown up reading Famous Monsters of Filmland and bonded with his wife, Cynthia, over “Star Trek.” (He explained to me that the preferred term is Trekkers, not Trekkies.)

UW-Madison rank rises to 13th best public college in America, report says

UW launches new school of computer science, responding to student demand and workforce need

The University of Wisconsin-Madison announced on Thursday the creation of its first new school in two decades, responding to high demand from students and a burgeoning need in the state’s workforce.

Toforest Johnson is on Alabama’s death row for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit

The investigators appear to have been afflicted with tunnel vision, a form of cognitive bias that is common in wrongful convictions and especially in high-profile cases. Tunnel vision, writes Keith Findley of the University of Wisconsin Law School and the Wisconsin Innocence Project, “leads investigators, prosecutors, judges, and defense lawyers alike to focus on a particular conclusion and then filter all evidence in a case through the lens provided by that conclusion.

Dr Miriam Stoppard: A simple blood test could replace use of cameras when colon cancer is suspected

But now a study has found most small polyps detected during screening will never become cancerous and treating them is unnecessary. Taking a new tack, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have come up with four markers for the pre-cancerous forms of colon cancer most likely to develop into the disease.

Backers Say Congressional Plan Would Save Traditional Pensions For Thousands In Wisconsin

Quoted: “Most young people graduating college in Wisconsin are going to be going into work where they are covered by a defined contribution plan, what is also known as a 401(k) plan. Unless they are working for a state entity or some other collectively bargained organization, they are probably not going to have a pension,” said Gordon Enderle, an actuary at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business.

Hurricane Dorian turns Florida sky purple as it passes state en route to Canada

Quoted: The sky’s colours resulted from an effect known as “scattering,” which sees molecules and small particles change light rays’ direction, according to Steven Ackerman, professor of meteorology at the University of Wisconsin — Madison

Maps of Amazon fires show why we’re thinking about them wrong

For weeks, we’ve seen headlines saying the Amazon rainforest is burning. But something unexpected happens when you map satellite data showing both the fires this year and those that have burned in the previous four years: The bulk of the forest remains almost entirely intact. –Tim Wallace has a PhD in geography from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and is currently a visual storyteller at Descartes Labs.

Dorian set to be the 7th billion dollar hurricane in 4 years

Quoted: Shane Hubbard, a researcher with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says the overall cost in damages from hurricanes in that time span for the U.S. Is more than $335 billion

Hurricane tracking technology is about to regress 30 years, thanks to 5G cell networks | Salon.com

Quoted: “There is going to have to be some sort of agreement between the telecommunications and weather enterprises on what is a viable strategy on what protects the interests of atmospheric observing compared to delivering data via 5G,” Jordan Gerth, an Honorary Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center, told Salon.

Freedom Farmers: Agriculture As A Means of Resilience

White is an associate professor of environmental justice within the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the department of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of the new book  “Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement” (UNC Press/2018).

Digestive problems may respond to diet changes

Although chronic digestive disruptions warrant a doctor’s attention, “generally about 80 percent of patients will benefit from doing some sort of diet intervention,” says Melissa Phillips, a clinical nutritionist at the University of Wisconsin Health System’s Digestive Health Center.

Humans and Neanderthals Kept Breeding—and Breeding—for Ages

Quoted: “But that kind of very simple approach isn’t very good at sorting out the complexity” of how those lost populations interacted, said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Nor does it allow researchers to test specific hypotheses about how that interbreeding unfolded.

Farmers Look to Apps to Help With Timing of Crop Treatment

That has made it difficult for farmers to decide when to apply fungicide to crops because it’s based on specific growth stages of the plants, said plant pathologist Damon Smith from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But an app is helping farmers make better decisions about when to do so.

UW Researchers Develop Camera That Can ‘See’ Around Corners

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Universidad de Zaragoza in Spain have developed a new kind of virtual camera that appears to be able to see around corners.

Wisconsin Fares Well Comparatively When It Comes To Credit Card Debt

Quoted: Financial capability specialist Peggy Olive breaks it down like this: half of all people who have a credit card balance pay it off entirely each month. Another quarter carry a balance a few months of the year, and the rest regularly owe money on their cards.”Definitely, there’s different ways that people handle that credit card debt,” said Olive, who works with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Human Ecology’s Center for Financial Security and UW-Extension.

BBB warns of scams targeting college students

Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Human Ecology Clinical Professor Christine Whelan says that’s okay.

Giant Norway pension fund weighs Brazil divestment over Amazon deforestation

Quoted: “If you buy soybeans that have been raised in the Amazon, you can be almost certain that it is deforestation free,” Lisa Rausch, an agricultural land use researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told Mongabay.

White coat carries cachet for future docs, including one who lives on the cutting edge

Revisionist History Podcast

Featured: Throughout the 1970s, a biologist named Howard Temin became convinced that something wasn’t right in science’s understanding of viruses. His colleagues dismissed him as a heretic. He turned out to be right — and you’re alive today as a result.

Mysterious dark patches in Venus’ clouds are affecting the weather there

“It is hard to conceive of what would cause a change in the albedo without a change in the absorbers,” said Sanjay Limaye, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and paper co-author.

Wisconsin Officials Say Gray Wolf Population Seems Stable

Quoted: “I don’t think that the information coming out of the state should be used by the federal government in its decisions on gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act,” said Adrian Treves, professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Helicopter Parents Are Great at Financial Risk Management

Quoted: “If a parent gets health insurance through their employer, then, through the Affordable Care Act, their kids are covered through their parents at some level,” says Marjorie Rosenberg, a professor of actuarial science, risk, and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business.

UW Study: Exercise Could Help Slow Development Of Alzheimer’s

A recent study conducted by a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows exercise can help slow the development of diseases like Alzheimer’s disease.

Graphic Novels With Fresh Voices From the Margins

Flowers’s loose, expressive line is a little messy, a little scribbly, with both cursive and all-caps text floating through the images. She is a protégée of the great cartoonist of childhood, Lynda Barry, also known for her expressive style. A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Barry has explained how important handwriting is to the experience of reading comics; in her view, judging “good” and “bad” drawing misses the point of comics, which has more to do with the personality of the hand of the cartoonist than with any kind of realism.

Humans Dominated Earth Earlier Than Previously Thought

Quoted: Because information about the past informs predictions of global change in the future, in terms of climate and land use, hard evidence of past land use is invaluable, experts say. “It’s an important paper,” said John Williams, a paleoecologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the project.