UW In The News

How a warming world may have caused Hurricane Florence to stall

Featured: A study in the journal “Nature” in June of this year concluded, between 1949 and 2016, tropical cyclones have slowed down 30 percent when they hit land in the Northwest Pacific and 20 percent in the North Atlantic.Atmospheric research scientist James Kossin of the University of Wisconsin is the lead author.

Humans have been messing with the climate for thousands of years

“There is a huge difference between the very gradual and accidental warming trend that early farmers probably caused, versus the much more rapid climate changes that our modern industrial world is effecting knowingly,” said Stephen Vavrus, a senior scientist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Climatic Research who conducted the study, which recently appeared in the journal Scientific Reports.

Models in labor, breastfeeding are latest fashion trend

Quoted: “This is the latest incarnation of the whole ’super mom’ idea. Not only do we have to be working right up until we deliver our babies but now we have to look beautiful, nay sexy, while doing it,” said Whelan, clinical professor in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It puts a tremendous amount of pressure on women.”

New Discoveries Made in How Plants Warn Each Other of Danger

The research comes from a team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor of Botany Simon Gilroy and postdoc researcher Masatsugu Toyota collaborated on the find. The pair has since collected over a dozen videos displaying the reaction of plants in response to stress.

Life Insurance Offering More Incentive to Live Longer

Quoted: “The main thing we’ve seen in a variety of studies looking at health incentives is that healthy people are very interested in being in these types of programs,” said Justin Sydnor, associate professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Chemical in cigarette smoke may damage important aspect of vision

“This particular aspect of vision is really important because it affects your ability to see the end of a curb or put a key into a lock in low light,” said lead author Adam Paulson of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, School of Medicine. “It’s something that at this point in time there’s no way to correct, unlike visual acuity, which you can easily correct with glasses or contact lenses.”

Campaign ads in Wisconsin showcase porn-watching teachers

Quoted: “Walker is in trouble,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

How studying chicken butts cracked the inner workings of our immune system

The missing piece, which was languishing largely unnoticed in Poultry Science, got to Cooper when some hormone researchers at the University of Wisconsin noticed the chicken paper and relayed it to Cooper’s advisor, Robert Good (an immunologist who would eventually perform the first successful bone marrow transplant).

How Studying Business, Engineering in College Can Lead to Jobs

The University of Wisconsin—Madison is exploring ways to incorporate cross-disciplinary content across a school of about 31,000 undergrads, says Suzanne Dove, assistant dean for academic innovations at the university’s Wisconsin School of Business.

Watch a Mutant Plant Burst Into Action When Attacked

When plants are wounded, they send out warning signals that spread to other leaves, raising the alarm and activating defense mechanisms for the undamaged areas. Now, researchers have captured this burst of activity in a set of mesmerising videos that are helping to explain the tricky topic of plant “intelligence”.

Gotta See ‘Em All: Group visits all 85 Bucky statues in one day

As summer winds down, so does Bucky On Parade.

Editorial: Keep Bucky on Parade going

MADISON, Wis. – Wednesday, one of Madison’s most successful public arts projects comes to an end with the conclusion of Bucky on Parade.

Editorial: It was the summer of Bucky love

Even in the most contentious of times, when tumult rules and vitriol pushes harmony aside, some days all we need is a little Bucky love.

UW-Madison ranked 15th best public university, drops slightly from last year, report says

Wisconsin’s flagship university remains one of the top public higher education institutions in the United States despite a slight drop compared to last year, according to a report released Monday.

Key internet connections and locations at risk from rising seas

Carol Barford, University of Wisconsin-Madison. (THE CONVERSATION) Despite whimsical ads about computing “in the cloud,” the internet lives on the ground. Data centers are built on land, and most of the physical elements of the internet – such as the cables that connect households to internet services and the fiber optic strands carrying data from one city to another – are buried in plastic conduit under the dirt. That system has worked quite well for many years, but there may be less than a decade to adapt it to the changing global climate.

Discovering the ancient origin of cystic fibrosis, the most common genetic disease in Caucasians

Philip Farrell, University of Wisconsin-Madison (THE CONVERSATION) Imagine the thrill of discovery when more than 10 years of research on the origin of a common genetic disease, cystic fibrosis (CF), results in tracing it to a group of distinct but mysterious Europeans who lived about 5,000 years ago.

RNA Detection Tool Debate Flares Up at ACS Meeting

Quoted: Weibo Cai, an associate professor in biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was present at Mirkin’s presentation, says he didn’t think the heated discussion was a “big deal” and does not recall the name-calling, he writes to The Scientist in an email. “I think they probably have had the debate multiple times before,” he adds.

Wisconsin’s catastrophic flooding is a glimpse of the Midwest’s drenched future

Quoted: Madison, home to the state’s flagship university, has seen the brunt of the flooding so far. The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s center that specializes in studying lakes is itself flooded. “This is what climate change looks like,” Adam Hinterthuer, the center’s spokesperson, wrote in a blog post. On Twitter, the center posted maps of recent floods alongside projections for the worst expected floods later this century. They matched remarkably well.For Eric Booth, a climate scientist at the university, the whole thing is almost too much to comprehend.

How Reddit helped me tackle my biggest insecurity

Quoted: “It’s empowering to be able to help other people,” says Catalina Toma, an associate professor of communication science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “You’re viewing yourself through other people’s eyes. If you’re the kind of person who helps others and have advice that people can benefit from… That can make people feel better about themselves.”

Mike McCabe says Minnesota is imprisoning half as many people as Wisconsin, with same crime rates

Quoted: The reason Minnesota imprisons fewer people, according to Kenneth Streit, a clinical professor of law emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is because Minnesota saw in the 1970s how its prison population was projected to increase.

If Nike Is Serious About Oppression Against People of Color, They Should Pay Their Own Workers

Quoted: “by coining and investing in the Girl Effect, the Nike Foundation, the company’s philanthropic arm, “gave it authority and made it catchy,” says Kathryn Moeller, an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is writing a book about the Girl Effect.

UW-Madison announces new cultural centers for Latinx and Asian students

The University of Wisconsin-Madison will open two new cultural center “startup spaces” to serve students who have Asian and Latinx cultural, ethnic or racial identities, in response to the efforts of student organizers to create such spaces.

UW scientist Robert Fettiplace wins share of $1 million prize considered portent of Nobel

University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientist Robert Fettiplace this week will receive a gold medal from the king of Norway, a share of a $1 million science prize, and take his place in the running for a future Nobel Prize.

CNN said a source declined to comment. Except he actually did. Is that a problem?

Quoted: “If CNN did tell its readers and viewers that Davis did not comment when he was indeed one of their confidential sources, that breaks a bond of trust with the public,” said Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s deceptive and wrong. And if it is the case, CNN needs to be as transparent as possible immediately and develop practices to ensure this never happens again.”

Are Tech Giants Doing Enough To Fight Against Foreign Powers Trying To Influence Elections?

Quoted: So far, the most common complaint against the new rules is how broadly Facebook applies them. If you spend enough time on the ad archive, you’ll find news stories and even random events like a comedy show – but also, of course, the never-ending flood of political ads. University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Young Mie Kim studied divisive advertising in 2016. And she says Facebook’s new archive still does not address one common tactic – multiple groups coordinating to push the same agenda.

In Defense of Air-Conditioning

In July, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison concluded that up to a thousand people die annually in the eastern US alone due to the elevated fine particulate matter from increased use of fossil fuels to cool buildings. By saving ourselves, we’ll be killing ourselves.

Here out west, ‘smoke season’ keeps getting worse

Right now, much of the west is affected by wildfires.An unlucky minority will have to evacuate their homes, and some will lose their homes altogether — or even their lives. But for millions more across the west, “smoke season” is a real thing.

—OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is pursuing a PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives in San Diego. Distributed by www.OtherWords.org.

The New Science of Seeing Around Corners

Quoted: Self-driving cars already have LIDAR systems for direct imaging and could conceivably someday also be equipped with SPADs for seeing around corners. “In the near future these [laser-SPAD] sensors will be available in a format that could be handheld,” predicted Andreas Velten, the first author of Raskar’s seminal 2012 paper, who now runs an active-imaging group at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Earth’s oxygen increased in gradual steps rather than big bursts

By using the Hüttenberg Formation, which formed between a billion and half a billion years ago, to study the time between Earth’s change from an anoxic environment (i.e. one lacking oxygen) to a more hospitable environment that heralded the animal kingdom, a team of researchers led by Dr. Huan Cui of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison discovered a sustained, high level of carbon.

Could eating crickets boost your health?

“Insects are novel to the American diet, but they should be considered a potentially helpful food that contains important nutrients and fibres that could have benefits to our overall health, including our gut microbiome,” said the study’s lead author, Valerie Stull. She is a researcher at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.