UW In The News

Here’s More Evidence Facebook Is Harming Democracy

Quoted: “On balance, the overall impact of social media on political knowledge appears to be negative,” write University of Wisconsin–Madison scholars Sangwon Lee and Michael Xenos. “Political social media use does not have a significant effect on political knowledge, while general social media use has a modestly negative effect.”

How Colleges Are Sparing Birds’ Lives and Conserving Energy

Aaron Williams was never a bird expert or even a bird enthusiast. But somehow, he’s found himself coordinating a flock of volunteers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as part of a large-scale effort to protect local and migrating birds.

The Mendocino Complex Fire is now the largest wildfire ever recorded in California

Quoted: “Extreme droughts and high winds are increasing as climate is warming,” said Monica Turner, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has spent three decades researching fires at Yellowstone National Park. “That’s the ultimate driver behind what’s happening in California.”

An Invasive New Tick Is Spreading in the U.S.

Quoted: “One tick can crank out females in fairly large numbers,” said Thomas Yuill, a retired pathobiologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was one of the first to raise alarms about the invaders.

Security Experts: Wisconsin Voting Systems Can Be Hacked

Noted: Wisconsin and other battleground states were targeted by a sophisticated social media campaign, according to a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison study headed by journalism professor Young Mie Kim.

Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and the war over change

A new report out of the University of Wisconsin Madison’s Applied Population Lab found that white births are now outnumbered by white deaths in 26 states, up from 17 in 2014 and four in 2004.

White House Report Claims ‘War On Poverty’ Is Over

Featured: According to the U.S. Census, more than 43 million Americans were living below the poverty line in 2016. But a recent report released from the White House says initiatives to reduce poverty in the United States over the last 50 years have largely been a success. Timothy Smeeding–Lee Rainwater Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics and former Director of the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty–joins us to talk about the report and what it could mean for social programs in the future.

Is there a right kind of screen time?

Featured: In the last installment of our series on the trade-offs of technology and what it means for our kids, Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talked with Dr. Megan Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin who studies how media use affects kids.

‘I Think All Those People Are Dead’: Laos Dam Survivors Seek Word of Neighbors

Quoted: “It’s hard to know if they were lying now or if they were incompetent before,” said Ian Baird, an expert on Laos at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, referring to Laotian officials. But he said the confusion was to be expected, with a risk-adverse authoritarian government in a poor country that is not accustomed to responding to disasters of this magnitude.

Weed Legalization Is Tearing This Neighbourhood Apart

But in Denver, pot businesses boosted property values in their host neighbourhoods, according to a report last year from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business. In other words, the business of weed can be both a boon to homeowners and a source of stress on local renters.

Dam Collapse in Laos Displaces Thousands, Exposes Dam Safety Risks

Featured: We’ll discuss what led to the tragedy and how it could’ve been prevented with Ian Baird, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s an expert on Laos and impacts of dams.

‘Battery of Asia’: Laos’s controversial hydro ambitions

Quoted: “Poor people in the project areas are worse off because of these dams, not better off,” said Ian Baird, assistant professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Locals reap little benefit in Laos’s controversial hydroelectricity ambitions

Quoted: “Poor people in the project areas are worse off because of these dams, not better off,” said Ian Baird, assistant professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

An Advocate’s Perspective on Patient-Centered Care

Attorney Meg Gaines found a calling to be a patient advocate after her own cancer experience. Gaines’ self-advocacy helped her through her extended and difficult diagnosis and treatment process in the 1990s. After her successful treatment, she wanted to empower other people with cancer to advocate for their care. Her first opportunity came unexpectedly, when her oncologist asked her to help cheer up a patient who was feeling down. “I jumped on the bus and really was there in about 25 minutes,” Gaines told me in a recent interview. “[I] sat for most of the afternoon with her—talking about life, and death, and mortality and what it’s like, and family, and fear, and cancer.”

America needs independent judges

Rather than enhancing the neutrality of administrative law judges, the executive order diminishes them by making their hiring subject to political considerations. It means that administrative law judges will be more akin to Roger Goodell than a Supreme Court justice, no longer bound by precedent and legal reasoning, but rather incentivized to decide cases to advance political, not legal, objectives. This calls for Congress to protect the continued independence of administrative law judges.

-Steph Tai is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin who represents amici in federal court and Supreme Court cases.

A Day Before Laos Dam Failed, Builders Saw Trouble

Quoted: Both South Korean companies mentioned heavy rains in their descriptions of the disaster. But Ian Baird, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who specializes in Laos and has studied the hydropower project, said he believed the problem was either faulty construction, or a decision to store too much water in the dam’s reservoir at a time when heavy rain should have been expected. “When at the end of July do we not get rain in this part of the world?” he asked.

Why are so many products being recalled over Salmonella concerns?

Quoted: “It’s an ingredient derived from the waste of cheese making,” Bradley Bolling, a food scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.

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.