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Author: rueckert

Cows Are Being Tested and Tracked for Bird Flu. Here’s Why

TIME

“We need to be able to do greater surveillance so that we know what’s going on,” said Thomas Friedrich, a virology professor at the University of Wisconsin’s veterinary school.

David O’Connor, a virology expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, likened recent bird flu developments to a tornado watch versus a warning.

Could a Calorie-Restricted Diet or Fasting Help You Live Longer?

The New York Times

A key difference between the two monkey trials was that in the 2009 study, conducted at the University of Wisconsin, the calorie-restricted animals only received one meal a day and the researchers took away any leftover food in the late afternoon, so the animals were forced to fast for about 16 hours. In the 2012 study, run by the National Institute on Aging, the animals were fed twice a day and the food was left out overnight. The Wisconsin monkeys were the ones that lived longer.

Inside Wildlife Services, USDA’s program that kills wildlife to protect the meat and dairy industries

Vox

Adrian Treves, an environmental science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the origins of today’s rampant predator killing can be found in America’s early European settlers, who brought with them the mentality that wolves were “superpredators,” posing a dangerous threat to humans. “We’ve been fed this story that the eradication of wolves was necessary for livestock production,” he said.

A Passover Pleasure: Matzo Pizza

The New York Times

Ancient matzo wasn’t as crackerlike as it is today. It was likely similar to a pita, said Jordan Rosenblum, a religious studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There’s a 2,000-year history of putting stuff on matzo and eating it,” he said.

America’s child care crisis is holding back moms without college degrees

ABC News

Women like Slemp challenge the image of the stay-at-home mom as an affluent woman with a high-earning partner, said Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The stay-at-home moms in this country are disproportionately mothers who’ve been pushed out of the workforce because they don’t make enough to make it work financially to pay for child care,” Calarco said.

How Ugandan Tobacco Farmers Inadvertently Spread Bat-Borne Viruses

Scientific American

“This is the butterfly effect of infectious disease ecology,” says senior study author Tony Goldberg, a wildlife epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Far-flung events like demand for tobacco can have crazy, unintended consequences for disease emergence that follow pathways that we rarely see and can’t predict.”

Florida bans local heat rules for outdoor workers, baffling experts

USA Today

Extreme heat kills more people in the United States each year than all forms of extreme weather combined, said Richard Keller, professor and chair of the medical history and bioethics department at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. In a changing climate not only are the days of extreme heat becoming “more frequent and more intense, they’re also longer lasting,” Keller said.

Babies born this year face a $500,000 climate bill

The Verge

“The optimist in me knows there are a lot of moving parts,” University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of energy analysis and policy Tracey Holloway tells Consumer Reports. “It could end up being easier to be sustainable, easier to be resilient, than we thought, and maybe in some ways that will offset the costs that they project.”

Avian Influenza In Cattle And A Person Prompts Health Advisory From CDC

Forbes

Scientists had raised this specter much earlier. Over a decade ago, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Erasmus Medical Center independently showed that specific mutations could make the H5N1 virus transmissible among ferrets. In other words, this virus typically transmitted among birds can evolve to be transmitted among mammals

USC Cancels Valedictorian’s Speech After Claims of Antisemitism

New York Times

Anuj Desai, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, suggested that Ms. Tabassum could have legal grounds to sue, particularly in light of California law that supports students’ First Amendment rights.“If the reason they’re removing her is because of her views, then that just feels much more like a free speech problem,” he said. “Ordinarily we would say, beef up the security.”

1970s, higher ed, lessons, economics, America, nationalism

Inside Higher Ed

The shrapnel-packed bomb that destroyed an East Village townhouse in 1970, leaving three dead; the researcher killed in the bombing of the University of Wisconsin’s Math Research Center; the botched robbery of a Brink’s armored truck that left two police officers and a Brink’s guard dead—as well as the police shootouts that killed Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Bobby Hutton, and other Black Panthers—these are the memories that I conjure up whenever I hear Archie and Edith Bunker sing “Those Were the Days, the theme song from “All in the Family.” Not phrases like “the way Glenn Miller played” or “fifty dollars paid the rent/freaks were in the circus tent.”

Seven organizations the far right is targeting for diversity efforts post-affirmative action

The Guardian

Last Friday, the Wisconsin Bar and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty reached a partial settlement. Under the terms, beginning this September, the program will be open to all first-year law students attending either Marquette University Law School or the University of Wisconsin Law School who are in good standing. Specifically, the bar is prevented from stating, suggesting or insinuating “in its materials that only law students from diverse backgrounds, with backgrounds that have been historically excluded from the legal field, or who have been socially disadvantaged are eligible”.

“The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz,” Reviewed

The New Yorker

Living in shabby apartments with his younger brother and his perpetually unhappy mother, the preteen Schwartz turned to literature as an escape. He borrowed armfuls of books from the public library: O. Henry, Sinclair Lewis, Alexandre Dumas. A three-dollar copy of Hart Crane’s “The Bridge” sparked an interest in poetry, but he didn’t become serious about the craft until college. (Schwartz started at the University of Wisconsin but, lacking sufficient funds for out-of-state tuition, transferred to New York University, where he earned a degree in philosophy.)

The importance of being a public scholar and ways to do so (opinion)

Inside Higher Ed

Access to scholars. There are brilliant scholars whom nonacademics don’t get to engage with. So, to increase access to them, I hosted a weekly show on Instagram Live where I interviewed various academics, including Gloria Ladson-Billings, professor emerita at University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Chris Emdin, Maxine Greene Chair for Distinguished Contributions to Education at Teachers College. You may not want to do something like that every week, but you might post clips from an academic talk or a video of an interview regularly, or at least from time to time.

Peter Higgs, a Giant of Particle Physics, Dies at 94

Scientific American

Many physicists took to X, formerly Twitter, to pay tribute to Higgs and share their favourite memories of him. “RIP to Peter Higgs. The search for the Higgs boson was my primary focus for the first part of my career. He was a very humble man that contributed something immensely deep to our understanding of the universe,” posted Kyle Cranmer, physicist at the University of Wisconsin Madison and previously a senior member of the Higgs search team at the CMS.

Toward A Universal Covid Vaccine

Forbes

This dynamic underscores the need for a universal vaccine, a potential game-changer that could neutralize all forms of SARS-CoV-2 and even other related coronaviruses. A recent study by Peter Halfmann and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin offers promising indications that this universal vaccine is on the horizon.

Biden’s student debt gambit

POLITICO

“What I found fascinating was that it was clearly a very explicit choice to not be at University of Wisconsin Madison,” says Allison Prasch who teaches about rhetoric, politics and culture at UW, which sports a student body population of more than 50,600. She adds that the speech, while ostensibly geared toward students, had an underlying message for folks not typically thought of when people think of UW, which is considered by many to be among the state’s most elite universities.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Applauds Russia for ‘Protecting Christianity’

Newsweek

Mikhail Troitskiy, professor of practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, disagreed with Greene’s characterization. “There is simply no reason for the Ukrainian government to persecute Christians because it has much more important concerns during the war with Russia,” he told Newsweek. “The constitution of Ukraine does not mention Christianity or any other religion as official, and Ukraine is a secular state—but there is no reason for its government to crack down on the Christian faith.

Someday, Earth Will Have a Final Total Solar Eclipse

The New York Times

There’s good evidence that the moon retreated more slowly in the past as well. Margriet Lantink, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has analyzed sedimentary rocks in Australia that record climatic changes caused by fluctuations in the Earth-moon distance. “I read the fingerprints of those astronomical variations,” Dr. Lantink said.

How Often Do You Take Breaks From Your Phone?

The New York Times

If you want to peacefully coexist with technology, you need to get a handle on those impulses. Start by noticing when you have an urge to lift your phone or open social media on your browser window, said Richard J. Davidson, the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Student athlete suicide rates have doubled since 2002

Inside Higher Ed

The study was authored by researchers from the University of Washington, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Oregon Health and Science University.

“Athletes are generally thought of as one of the healthiest populations in our society, yet the pressures of school, internal and external performance expectations, time demands, injury, athletic identity and physical fatigue can lead to depression, mental health problems and suicide,” the authors wrote.

More Than Half a Million Democratic Voters Have Told Biden: Save Gaza!

The Nation

“This is a big, f**king deal,” declared US Representative Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat, after his state voted Tuesday. Pocan was responding to the news that more than 30 percent of voters in precincts where University of Wisconsin–Madison students reside had answered the call of the “Listen to Wisconsin” coalition of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian activists to “[take] urgent action—with our ‘uninstructed’ votes this April—to shift American policy toward an agenda of justice in Gaza.”

Wisconsin’s bar association agrees to change diversity definition in settlement

CBS Minnesota

On its website, the bar association says the program is for University of Wisconsin and Marquette University law school students “with backgrounds that have been historically excluded from the legal field.” But the lawsuit alleged that is a new focus and that the program has historically been touted as a way to increase racial diversity among attorneys at law firms, private companies and in government.

Evan Stark

The Guardian

After graduating from Brandeis in 1963, he pursued his PhD at the University of Wisconsin, but his graduate fellowship was withdrawn in 1967, in retaliation for his role as a leader of protests against the war in Vietnam.

State Bar of Wisconsin agrees to change diversity definition in lawsuit settlement

Washington Post

On its website, the bar association says the program is for University of Wisconsin and Marquette University law school students “with backgrounds that have been historically excluded from the legal field.” But the lawsuit alleged that is a new focus and that the program has historically been touted as a way to increase racial diversity among attorneys at law firms, private companies and in government.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate and the vaccine wars

The Washington Post

Of course, even if a link to air pollution is not yet proved, that does not mean it can be ruled out. “It’s hard to disagree with the opinion that exposure to neurotoxins and air pollution is bad for our health and that we should be doing more to protect our environment and prevent these exposures,” Maureen Durkin, chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an email. “Credible research into the causal links of these exposures to autism specifically is difficult to do but should be done and critically evaluated to inform environmental policies.”

New one-and-done vaccine protects against multiple coronaviruses

New Atlas

In what could be a step change in the fight against coronaviruses, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin-Madison created a new vaccine that, when tested on hamsters, removed all traces of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 plus its omicron variants from the animals’ lungs. The team had previously identified hamsters as suitable animals on which to test potential vaccines.

Wisconsin voters enshrine amendments that could ‘subvert’ elections in state

The Guardian

“This really comes down to how broadly we interpret the constitutional amendment,” said Emily Lau, a staff attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin. The courts could, theoretically, affirm existing processes – and could even look to the amendment banning private funding as an opportunity to ensure full public funding for election offices.

3 big hurdles Trump faces in his bid to win back Wisconsin: From the Politics Desk

NBC News

Dane County gets bigger and bluer: The state’s largest city, Milwaukee, remains a crucial source of votes for Democrats. But their new ace in the hole is Dane County, home to Madison and the University of Wisconsin. Dane has the state’s highest concentration of white voters with college degrees and is filled with college students and plenty of higher income areas. It’s gaining population, too, and seems to be getting bluer with each election:

Researchers develop more broadly protective coronavirus vaccine

Medical Xpress

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a new vaccine that offers broad protection against not only SARS-CoV-2 variants, but also other bat sarbecoviruses. The groundbreaking trivalent vaccine has shown complete protection with no trace of virus in the lungs, marking a significant step toward a universal vaccine for coronaviruses.