UW In The News

The Milky Way is warped, but astronomers still aren’t sure why

And while the warping of the galaxy isn’t a new revelation, Elena D’Onghia, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved with the study, thinks it’s interesting how the team took advantage of the Cepheids in creating the new galactic map that can characterize the warp at a rather high accuracy.

Hot but not bothered: Warm soils favor microbes with small genomes

Quoted: Microbial evolution to a more streamlined state is often suggested as a route to small genomes, says Jo Handelsman, a soil microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the new study.

Video games in Wisconsin classrooms

A new video game created at UW-Madison is helping teachers in Wisconsin generate excitement in the classroom.

Artist Spotlight: Lynda Barry

Indeed, Barry’s works are staples of comics studies courses and fixtures in my own personal comic library. With flamboyantly chaotic artwork that quickly destabilizes reader’s expectations, Barry continues to revolutionize how we think about comics as a medium for self-expression. The University of Wisconsin-Madison professor uses comics as a tool for discovery.

Artificial Intelligence Finds Ancient ‘Ghosts’ in Modern DNA

Quoted: The technique “is powerful because of its simplicity, but it leaves a lot on the table in terms of understanding evolution,” said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

1919: Hollywood’s Boom Year

The First World War radically changed the landscape of moviemaking. Before 1914, Europeans had dominated the booming industry — France, Italy, Germany and even Denmark had sent films across the globe.

Mr. Bordwell is a professor emeritus of film studies at the University of Wisconsin.

‘Black girl joy’ is at the heart of this new children’s picture book

McDaniel’s book is impressive because it uses one hand gesture to showcase a wide range of feelings and scenarios. It humanizes the black girl experience, a rare thing for children’s literature. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center, a research library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, found that only 340 of the 3,700 books it received in 2017 from U.S. publishers had “significant African or African American content/characters.”

Task Force Takes On Flooding In Dane County

The new report comes from a technical work group comprised of people from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the city of Madison, Dane County and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Q&A: Danielle Yancey works to recruit and retain more Native American health professionals

In Wisconsin, Native Americans suffer from sharp health disparities, including higher rates of heart disease, cancer mortality and death and hospitalization from diabetes than the collective Wisconsin population.

Climate Change Could Leave Thousands of Lakes Ice-Free

With temperatures hitting record lows in the midwest last week, John Magnuson, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a co-author on the Nature study, warned that it’s important to understand that the loss of lake ice won’t happen all at once.

Medication Denied: Wisconsin Bill Would Make Insurance Appeals Easier

Quoted: Zgierska’s an associate professor with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and is also on the board of the Wisconsin Society of Addiction Medicine.

Extreme Cold Could Impact Wisconsin Fruit, Alfalfa Crops

Amaya Atucha, fruit crop specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said grapes, apples and other fruits grown in the state aren’t used to the frigid temperatures brought by last week’s polar vortex.

Microbes hitched to insects provide a rich source of new antibiotics

Cameron Currie, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of bacteriology, has shown that some of these insect-associated microbes provide their hosts with protection against infections, suggesting that insects and their microbiomes may be a rich new source of antibiotics for use in human medicine.

Experts Predict Another Challenging Year for Dairy Farmers

Milk prices paid to farmers are expected to be better this year but not by much, University of Wisconsin dairy economist Mark Stephenson said. He predicts an increase of about a $1 per hundredweight, or hundred pounds of milk.

CRISPR And Human Embryo Experiments Underway In The U.S. : Shots

“This is valid research, and I think it’s important research,” says R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It has value not only for the possible use in the future for some number of conditions that would involve a live birth, but it has value for basic understanding of embryology, basic understanding of development,” Charo says.

When Super Bowl fans eat a billion chicken wings, the world eats the leftovers

U.S. and Canadian farmers will often export chicken wings with the flappers still attached to Asian markets such as Hong Kong, Thailand and Cambodia. Those markets have more of an appetite for the wingtips, according to Ronald Kean, an expert in poultry production at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

‘When Death Becomes Life’ Review: Doctors and Donors

Dr. Mezrich’s book braids unflinching medical history with frank clinical memoir. A transplant surgeon at the University of Wisconsin, he got his first inkling of his future vocation when he volunteered in medical school for the New York Firefighters Skin Bank, “an ‘elite’ group that would head out in the middle of the night to skin dead people.” The scare quotes around “elite” and the brazen verb “to skin” are typical of Dr. Mezrich’s rueful candor.

Early-Voting Laws Probably Don’t Boost Turnout

Meanwhile, a more recent study by political scientists at the University of Wisconsin, Madison discovered that, when not accompanied by other reforms, early voting actually leads to lower turnout — perhaps because the social and campaign-driven pressure to vote is not as focused as it is when voting must all occur on a single day.

Thinking like a doula: “Birth coaches” negotiate the roles of everyone in the birthing suite

Amy Gilliland believes that a positive birth experience has a lasting effect on the lives of both mother and baby. Gilliland should know: As a research fellow in the U.W.-Madison’s School of Human Ecology, she studies and teaches about the psychological needs of people during the birth experience.

How working from home helps the environment

Quoted: “Anything that reduces vehicle miles helps improve air quality and reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming,” said Jack Williams, a professor who researches global climate change in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Pundits who decry ‘tribalism’ know nothing about real tribes

Although “ethnic labels .?.?. have pre-colonial origins, they became comprehensive and rigidly ranked categories only in the colonial period; they were heavily influenced by imperial codifications and further transformed by politicized actions in the last half [of the 20th] century,” writes Merwin Crawford Young, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Awake on the Table

“There’s plenty of evidence” that even without an explicit memory of surgery, humans can form implicit or subconscious memories under anesthesia, said Dr. Aeyal Raz, an anesthesiologist at the University of Wisconsin.

New blood thinners better than warfarin for atrial fibrillation

“Stroke due to atrial fibrillation tends to be quite severe,” said Dr. Craig January of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who helped draft the new guidelines published in Circulation.

How a high-flying balloon could search for life on hellishly hot Venus

Conditions are more hospitable 30 miles above the surface. In fact, temperatures in this region of the atmosphere are much like those on Earth — “similar conditions to Miami, Florida in summertime,” said Kevin Baines, a planetary scientist at the JPL and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

AP Exclusive: US Nobelist Was Told of Gene-Edited Babies

Quoted: It’s not clear how someone would have raised concerns about He’s project, said University of Wisconsin bioethicist Alta Charo, who was one of the leaders of the Hong Kong gene-editing conference where He gave details of the experiment.

Howard Schultz’s presidential ambitions draw backlash

Quoted: Barry Burden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied third-party runs, agreed. However, he said Mr Schultz would face other obstacles to a winning candidacy.

Mystery outbreak of human viruses is killing chimpanzees in Uganda forest

’These are very common human viruses that circulate worldwide and cause ’the sniffles’ in kids,’ Tony Goldberg, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor, said.

Lakes ‘skating on thin ice’ as warming limits freeze

“The deeper the lake is, the more heat storage it has and it takes more cold weather to get the lake down to a temp where it could freeze,” said Prof John Magnuson, a co-author from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

You can’t control what you can’t find: Detecting invasive species while they’re still scarce

Jake Walsh, University of Wisconsin-Madison: Most of the 10,000 ships lost to the bottom of the Great Lakes in wrecks over the past 400 years are still lost – hidden somewhere in 6 quadrillion gallons of water. Finding anything in a lake is a lesson in humility, so life as a freshwater biologist is always humbling. If we can’t account for huge steel freighters, imagine the challenge of finding a single tiny organism.

Report: Lots Of Access To Pre-K, But Quality Sometimes Lacking

Quoted: “Particularly in large urban areas they can’t afford to have a class that low,” said Graue, director of University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Research in Early Childhood Education.