The Wisconsin Idea, holiday party version

Making small talk at parties and other social gatherings can be a challenge, especially if the pandemic has you a bit out of practice. You could talk about the weather, but why not break the ice with something more original? Something more interesting? Something that can help get the conversation going — and maybe, just maybe, make you sound a little smarter?

Help is here, courtesy of some of UW–Madison’s newest faculty members. As part of their introduction to campus in Inside UW’s New Faculty Focus, we asked them: “What’s something interesting about your area of expertise you can share that will make us sound smarter at parties?”

Whether you use the information to impress your friends or just learn something interesting for yourself, consider this a slice of the Wisconsin Idea you can serve up when someone asks, “What do you know?”

David Aufhauser
Department of Surgery
Some people who need liver transplants for metabolic diseases can donate their original liver to another person in something called a “domino liver transplant.”

Uwe Bergmann
Department of Physics
Essentially all the oxygen we breathe comes from plants and cyanobacteria splitting water using the energy from sunlight. They all use the same tiny molecular machine, yet we still do not know how it works exactly. We hope that powerful X-rays can help in solving this more than 3 billion-year-old mystery, without which life as we know it would not be possible.

James Crall
Department of Entomology
There are 20,000 species of bees on the planet, just about twice the number of bird species. Individual bees have “personalities,” with some preferring to do specific tasks within the colony or staying in their own particular corner of the nest — in many ways, just like us.

Suzanne Eckes
Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis
When educators, students and families become knowledgeable about the ever-evolving court decisions and state/federal laws, we can create more equitable environments in schools.  Of course, I don’t expect educators to become experts in the law, but it is possible for educators to become legally literate. For example, every year public school teachers violate well-established law when they require students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in school and coaches violate well-established law when leading their teams in prayer. These mistakes could be avoided by establishing a basic legal literacy.

Ke Fang
Department of Physics; Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center
Our universe does not shine only with light; it also sends out particles and other waves. With the help of many observatories in the world, including the IceCube and HAWC observatories that I work on, we can see the universe in “colors” that human eyes are not sensitive to. In this way, the universe looks drastically different.

Audrey Girard
Department of Food Science
Enriched flour has B-vitamins (thiamine, niacin, riboflavin) and iron added to it that were lost from the grain during the milling process. This was popularized in the 1940s and all but eliminated deficiency diseases like beriberi (thiamine deficiency) and pellagra (niacin deficiency). Since the late ’90s, enriched flour also has folic acid added to prevent birth defects.

Chloe Grace Hart
Department of Sociology
Our current gender norms are so familiar to us that it’s hard to imagine them any other way, but if you look across cultures or over time, what is perceived as feminine or masculine turns out to be pretty fluid. For example, people today often think of high heels as a symbol of femininity, but if you go back several centuries, high heels were actually considered very masculine — a shoe for warriors.

David Hershey
Department of Bacteriology
You have about as many bacterial cells in your body as human cells.

Al Kovaleski
Department of Horticulture
Plants hibernate, but it is called dormancy. To know when they should break bud and start growing again, they keep track of time spent at low temperatures through a clock mechanism we don’t understand yet.

Lu Lu
Department of Physics; Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center
Neutrinos are passing through our bodies all the time — while you are reading this sentence, around a half trillion of them just went through the tip of your toe (assuming it took you five seconds to read the sentence).

Erica Majumder
Department of Bacteriology
One of my favorite tidbits is from my graduate work. Plant photosynthetic efficiency maxes out shortly after dawn, leaving ample opportunity for improvements in renewable energy and food production.

Moritz Münchmeyer
Department of Physics
The laws of nature are the same everywhere in the universe. There is a lot of evidence for this statement, despite the fact that we cannot travel outside the solar system. For example, we can calculate the frequencies of light emitted by physical processes using theories developed for physics on Earth and see these very frequencies when we look at faraway stars with telescopes. It is striking that physical processes on “the other side of the universe” work exactly as they do here on Earth.

Claire Richardson
Department of Genetics
I can’t think of anything that would make you sound smarter at a party, but here is something that will make everyone else feel dumber (or at least humbled by how little we all know): The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, one of the major “model organisms” in research, has 302 neurons. Its wiring circuit was completely mapped decades ago via electron microscopy. Having that map did not decipher how nematode behavior works, though it has helped inform hypotheses that are still being tested. Humans have tens of billions of neurons.

Adam Rule
Information School; Department of Family Medicine
Doctor’s notes in the United States are four times longer than those in other countries, and doctors here spend as much (if not more) time documenting patient care as they do interacting with patients. We are still figuring out why this is the case, but it’s likely a mix of tools (it is easy to write really long notes with note templates) and policy (the U.S. had some very prescriptive regulations about what clinicians need to document, though this is changing). But really, the smartest people in the room are often those who listen first and speak later. Ask people good questions and enjoy their stories. The heart of being a human-centered designer is learning how to listen, observe and empathize with other people.

Jacqueline Garonzik Wang
Department of Surgery
Healthy individuals can live a normal and healthy life with only one kidney or half of their liver. So, if you know someone in need, living organ donation is a safe possibility.