UW In The News

The weirdest things we learned this week: Curing syphilis with malaria, ejecting bears from planes, and discovering new beer yeasts

In 2009, a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, launched a five-continent search for the yeast mama. This portion of the genetics is what gives lager style beer its primary characteristic: the ability to ferment cold. The first hit came from Argentina, a 99.5 percent match from a growth on a beech tree. They named it Saccharomyces eubayanus.

New Emails Show Michigan Republicans Plotting to Gerrymander Maps

Quoted: “It looks like naked partisanship, and that might be permissible,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If it’s merely one party trying to harm the fortunes of the other, the court thus far has given that the green light, and it might continue to.”

Rescuers Arrive for 3,000 Stranded After Laos Dam Collapse: Media

Quoted: “The roads are very poor,” Ian Baird, a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Laos expert, told Reuters by telephone.

BBC World Service – Newshour, Laos dam collapse: What went wrong?

Featured: Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Ian Baird disagrees with calling it a natural disaster and explains why it could have been prevented.

UW Study: Hormone Replacement Therapy Doesn’t Increase Risk Of Alzheimer’s Disease

There’s some reassuring news for healthy women taking hormone replacement therapy who are concerned about Alzheimer’s disease: University of Wisconsin-Madison research shows no increased risk for the most common type of dementia. But it also didn’t find any benefits to the brain.

Is it OK to exploit poor Indians in the name of photojournalism?

Quartz: “Journalists have obligations to relay information within real contexts. To put fake food—and what appears to be Western food and alcohol at that—in front of these subjects and staging them to cover their faces feels exploitative,” said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Paid internship program allows local high school students to explore careers

The Madison Metropolitan School District partnered with UW-Madison to give kids in high school a chance to explore a future career in health care and veterinary medicine.The LEAP Forward internship program is part of the district’s Personalized Pathways initiative, designed to let kids try out their interests through a summer internship at one of seven campus sites, including the School of Veterinary Medicine and University Health Services.

Women’s reproductive history may predict Alzheimer’s risk

Research at the conference also included updates to the associations between hormone therapy and Alzheimer’s risk. Previous studies had suggested that women who start taking hormones in their late 60s and 70s have a higher rate of cognitive decline, a paper out of the University of Wisconsin school of medicine and public health found that risk to be elevated specifically for women with diabetes.

Meet the Woman Who Rocked Particle Physics—Three Times

One of the many women who, in a different world, might have won the physics prize in the intervening 55 years is Sau Lan Wu. Wu is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an experimentalist at CERN, the laboratory near Geneva that houses the Large Hadron Collider.

Wisconsin researchers study genetic screening for Amish

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are working to expand newborn genetic screening for Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities in the state.

Wisconsin researchers study genetic screening for Amish

“We want to be able to offer very rapid, low-cost confirmatory testing of genetic disorders,” said Dr. Christine Seroogy, a pediatric immunologist and associate professor at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. “Additionally, it could be cost-saving, in that we are diagnosing the disorders early, which saves the families lots of diagnostic testing.”

Childhood trauma leaves scars that are genetic, not just emotional, study affirms

Neglect, abuse, violence and trauma endured early in life can ripple directly into a child’s molecular structure and distort their DNA, according to a new study this week from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Report: Critical Communications Infrastructure Could Be Under Water in 15 years

Thousands of miles of buried fiberoptic cable in densely populated coastal regions of the United States may soon be inundated by rising seas, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Oregon, reports news.wisc.edu.

Trevor Matich goes fishing with Wisconsin Badgers’ offensive line

Trevor Matich chats and breaks down film with the Wisconsin Badgers’ offensive line while fishing. (Video.)

Paul Fanlund: Five years in, Rebecca Blank sees UW ‘at a good place’

UW Madison addresses acceptance and affordability concerns over ice cream

The University of Wisconsin at Madison is the largest and best known of Wisconsin’s 13 public universities, but over the past decade it has earned a reputation among some Wisconsinites for being expensive, liberal and hard to get into. The Wisconsin Alumni Association, equipped with a refurbished dairy van and gallons of ice cream, is trying to change that.

Monarch butterfly ‘way station’ feeds migrating insects in Duluth

Noted: Karen Oberhauser, who directs the University of Wisconsin Arboretum and is the former head of the Monarch Lab at the University of Minnesota, says the loss of breeding habitat also is a huge problem in the Upper Midwest where milkweed used to grow between rows of crops like corn and soybeans.

Mindfulness y meditación: un experto explica el trasfondo de esta práctica milenaria

Dr. Charles L. Raison speaks with CNN Español about the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. (In Spanish)

Elitist? Callous to state students? UW-Madison tries to smooth image

If you’ve heard it’s next to impossible for Wisconsin kids to get into the University of Wisconsin-Madison, here’s the scoop.

Confronting Implicit Bias in the New York Police Department

Noted: But Patricia G. Devine, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin who runs a research laboratory on prejudice, said she was troubled by the spread of such training in the absence of probing, objective research. She said more study of officers’ unintentional biases is necessary to evaluate how training can impact their behaviors. Additional data is needed, she said, to determine if officers retain what they are taught and if civilians are benefiting from fairer policing.

UW-Madison-led team and Antarctic observation led to discovery from galaxy far, far away

Astronomers trace cosmic ray neutrino back to remote blazar

The initial detection by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica, and subsequent observations of high energy radiation from the same source by space telescopes and ground-based observatories, indicate such black holes act as the particle accelerators responsible for at least some of those cosmic rays.“The evidence for the observation of the first known source of high-energy neutrinos and cosmic rays is compelling,” said Francis Halzen, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor of physics and the lead scientist for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.

What’s a Blazar? A Galactic Bakery for Cosmic Rays

Scientists have finally located a source of the most energetic rays. Starting with a single signal—a flash of light in a detector at the South Pole—and combining it with telescope data from a collaboration of over a thousand people, astrophysicists have traced the origin of some of Earth’s cosmic rays to a blazar, a type of galaxy, 4 billion light years away. “We’ve learned that these active galaxies are responsible for accelerating particles and cosmic rays,” says physicist Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Origin of Mystery Space Radiation Finally Found

Quoted: “It’s exciting, no doubt, to have finally nailed the cosmic accelerator,” says the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Francis Halzen, lead scientist with IceCube. The results are reported today in three papers appearing in Scienceand the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Tracing the Source of Cosmic Rays to a Blazar Near Orion

Astronomers said the discovery could provide a long sought clue to one of the enduring mysteries of physics and the cosmos. Where does the rain of high-energy particles from space known as cosmic rays come from?

Scientists link record heat and power outages in Southern California to climate change

“Air conditioning saves lives from heat waves,” Jonathan Patz, who directs the University of Wisconsin’s Global Health Institute, told Earther. “But if the electricity to run air conditioners requires coal-fired power plants, then we have a problem.”

Preparing your teen for college dorm life? Don’t over-pack

Quoted: “Sometimes we don’t know what to do with emotions,” so parents channel them into packing and shopping to feel productive, said Beth Miller, a coordinator for residence life at University of Wisconsin-Madison who has been involved in campus life for the past 17 years. “But sometimes parents are purchasing things based on emotion and not necessarily based on need.”

Why the warming planet and increased air conditioning use could cause future deaths

According to new research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, increased use of air conditioners may only be making a bad problem even worse.

Emotional support from families makes a difference for low-income students

Roksa and her co-author, Peter Kinsley, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin Madison, surveyed 728 students in their first year at a two- or four-year institution and who had applied for financial aid in Wisconsin. Roksa asked each student about the financial and emotional support they received from their families and how engaged they were on campus and collected information about their academic success to determine how the three measures were related. The results were recently published in Research in Higher Education. The abstract is available here.

A true wildfire ‘fix’: End bad incentives that nudge people into harm’s way

Noted: In research published in March, scientists with the Forest Service and University of Wisconsin-Madison reported that 43 million homes now lie within the so-called WUI. After decades of new housing additions, the WUI footprint has swelled to 190 million acres — an expanse 10 percent larger than the state of Texas. Based on those trends, the U.S. wildfire problem could have as much to do with people’s preferences to live near forests and nature as it does a changing climate.