UW-Madison in the Media

A selection of media coverage about the university and its people.

• Reader's Questions: The Science of Evolution - Science Q&A New York Times June 26, 2007 Science Times this week has a special issue devoted to these advances and Sean B. Carroll, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin, is one of scientists whose work is featured. Watch a video interview with Dr. Carroll.
• On Fringe of Forests, Homes and Wildfires Meet New York Times June 26, 2007 A new generation of Americans like the Morrises, in moving to places perched on the edge of vast, undeveloped government lands in the West, are living out a dangerous experiment, many of them ignorant of the risk. Their migration — more than 8.6 million new homes in the West within 30 miles of a national forest since 1982, according to research at the University of Wisconsin — has coincided with profound environmental changes that have worsened the fire hazard, including years of drought, record-setting heat and forest management policies that have allowed brush and dead trees to build up. “It’s like a tsunami, this big wave of development that’s rolling toward the public lands,” said Volker C. Radeloff, a professor of forest ecology and management at the University of Wisconsin. “And the number of fires keeps going up.”
• Turning Whole Plants into Fuel in Four Simple Steps Scientific American June 21, 2007 A recipe for fuel: take the carbohydrates like starch and cellulose that make up the majority of plants. "It should be a great fuel," says James Dumesic, a chemical engineer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who, along with his colleagues, discovered the new process, "DMF has the energy density of petroleum."
• Scientists manage to turn sugar into fuel The Telegraph (United Kingdom) June 21, 2007 A way of turning simple plant sugar into a fuel as powerful as petrol has been discovered by scientists. Researchers in the United States have developed a way of converting fructose, the sugar that gives apples and oranges their sweet taste, into a fuel that can be burned to generate energy. For years, chemists have been searching for a way to sidestep the use of crude oil as the root source of chemicals for fuels, aiming to replace it with inexpensive, non-polluting plant matter that is more environmentally friendly.
• Wisconsin wins UW's concrete canoe competition (AP) June 18, 2007 SEATTLE (AP) - And you thought badgers were land animals. For the fifth year in a row, the University of Wisconsin-Madison won the National Concrete Canoe Competition over the weekend in Seattle. The Wisconsin team used a 179-pound, natural gray canoe -- named the Descendent -- to capture the "America's Cup of Civil Engineering" prize at what is officially called the American Society of Civil Engineers' National Concrete Canoe Competition.
• One City's Home Sellers Do Better on Their Own New York Times June 8, 2007 It sounds like the setup for a dull economist’s joke. Who gets the better deal: the cautious economist who sells his house through a real estate agent, or his risk-taking colleague who finds a buyer on his own? Quoted: Francois Ortalo-Magne, an associate professor of real estate and urban land economics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and one of the three authors of the study.
• One ear, or two? Star Tribune June 6, 2007 Jared Campbell, 2, flailed his little arms at the iridescent soap bubbles floating around his head in the hall outside a University of Wisconsin research lab in Madison. "Pow! Pow!" he said as he swiped them out of the air. Then his mom called his name, and he did something extraordinary. For a split-second, he turned his head and looked at her.
• Why those pesky allergies follow us wherever we go Seattle Times June 5, 2007 A university professor who usually writes for highly specialized journals explodes all sorts of myths about allergies in this fascinating book — and does so while avoiding jargon and passive-voice sentences that too frequently infect the prose of academics. Gregg Mitman teaches medical history and science/technology courses at the University of Wisconsin. His interest in allergies is both professional and personal. He suffered terribly from bronchial asthma as a child, and his son is a sufferer, too.
• Student visitors find themselves reenacting a historic protest Philadelphia Inquirer June 4, 2007 A university class from the Midwest passed through Philadelphia yesterday on a two-week tour of historic sites in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender equal-rights movement. When their red-and-white bus, adorned with the University of Wisconsin badger mascot, pulled up in front of Independence Hall, Mark Segal, publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News, had a surprise for them.
• No Place Like Om: Meditation training puts oomph into attention Science News May 15, 2007 Intensive meditation training does more than foster inner peace and relaxation. Mental practice of this type boosts control over attention and expands a person's ability to notice rapidly presented items, at least during a laboratory test. The new results demonstrate that mental resources devoted to attention can be amplified through mental training, say psychologist Richard J. Davidson of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his colleagues
• Tragedy strikes, a family forgives National Post (Canada) May 14, 2007 Quoted: Robert D. Enright, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin- Madison who has studied forgiveness for 25 years.
• Study Suggests Meditation Can Help Train Attention New York Times May 8, 2007 In meditation, people sit quietly and concentrate on their breath. As air swooshes in and out of their nostrils, they attend to each sensation. As unbidden thoughts flutter to mind, they let them go. Breathe. Let go. Breathe. Let go. According to a study published today in the online edition of the journal PloS Biology, three months of rigorous training in this kind of meditation leads to a profound shift in how the brain allocates attention. It appears that the ability to release thoughts that pop into mind frees the brain to attend to more rapidly changing things and events in the world at large, said the study’s lead author, Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Expert meditators, he said, are better than other people at detecting such fast-changing stimuli, like emotional facial expressions.
• Who's Wooing Who at Wisconsin BusinessWeek May 4, 2007 The University of Wisconsin, Madison School of Business is just two hours from Chicago, an appealing draw for students who want to secure a job in the Windy City. Couple the location with the school's innovative MBA specialization program—where students pick a concentration before they enter school—and the school is an ideal fit for many driven students from the Midwest. "Students don't have to know exactly what they want to do in life, but they need to be fairly sure how they want to start out," said Blair Sanford, director of career services.
• Hope for insomniacs as scientists unlock secrets of deep slumber The Telegraph (United Kingdom) May 1, 2007 Scientists may have discovered a way of triggering deep sleep in people suffering from chronic insomnia. A study has found a way of stimulating the brain so that sleep-deprived people can feel the full restorative powers of an eight-hour period of slumber. The researchers have developed an electronic device that stimulates the brain with harmless magnetic pulses which cross into the nerves that control a type of deep sleep called "slow-wave activity".
• New antibiotics discovered that could beat back superbacteria Seattle Post-Intelligencer April 30, 2007 Researchers reported Friday they have found four promising antibiotics in chemical families never used before against germs through a novel testing tool that can screen dozens of compounds at once. The four compounds appear to kill bacteria, at least in a lab dish. Because they probably attack bacteria in different ways, germs should take some time to develop resistant strains. "These represent whole new classes of antibiotic agents," said Helen Blackwell, lead author of a University of Wisconsin-Madison report on the discoveries published in the journal Chemistry and Biology.
• Tune In Yesterday: The making of broadcast television The New Yorker April 23, 2007 Television swept across American society as rapidly as the Internet is sweeping across it now—and with even greater immediate effects. At the midpoint of the twentieth century, radio was the dominant broadcast medium, newspapers were the dominant news medium, and movies were the most popular form of visual entertainment. Within ten years, television had taken over. Vast wasteland though it may have been (Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called it that in 1961), television had become the basic forum of American culture. So it’s easy to forget that everything about it was once up for grabs. There was a lot of earnest debate about what form it ought to take, and people in the business stumbled around trying to figure out how to make money at it. In “Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948-1961” (Johns Hopkins; $35), James L. Baughman performs the basic historian’s function of taking a story whose conclusion we all know and showing that it didn’t necessarily have to turn out that way.
• Festival Dispatch:Like Butta: Wisconsin Fest Tastes a Line up of Merit IndieWire April 25, 2007 In searching for the perfect title for the donor's fund for the Wisconsin Film Festival, which celebrated its 9th year running last weekend, festival director Meg Hamel hit upon the idea of "The Real Butter Fund". "I didn't want to call it the 'Platinum Fund' or the 'VIP Club' or anything so exclusive," says Hamel. "I figured Wisconsin, dairy. It has to be butter... real butter represents the deepest, truest essence of what's good in Wisconsin, and what's good in film." Hamel, in her second year as director (and seventh involved in the festival), knows her audience well; applause met each mention of The Real Butter Fund during the trailers for all 185 films in the festival's four-day run.
• Written in Bone Archaeology Magazine April 24, 2007 In the late thirteenth century, drought ravaged the American Southwest, withering the corn, squash, and beans upon which ancient inhabitants relied for survival. Across the region people abandoned their homes in a desperate search for arable land. Some were lucky enough to find a moist Arizona valley where they built a settlement now known as Grasshopper Pueblo. At its peak, the pueblo consisted of 500 rooms housing hundreds of families. Archaeologists were puzzled by the differing architecture, pottery styles, and burial traditions within the pueblo, leading them to speculate that the drought must have been so severe that people from several different cultures were forced to live together in one of the few places where food would still grow. While the pottery strongly hinted at the disparate origins of the population, there was no way to test that idea. Enter archaeologist T. Douglas Price, geochemist Jim Burton, and their colleagues from the Laboratory of Archaeological Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. In the late 1980s, Price and Burton learned of a new technique that measured the ratio of strontium isotopes in human bone, revealing how an individual had migrated. One of Price's students, Joseph Ezzo, had worked at Grasshopper Pueblo and was eager to try the new technique there.
• Global warming may create new climates, eliminate others USA Today March 27, 2007 Quoted: John W. Williams, an assistant professor of geography at UW-Madison
• The Sciences: Greening The World CBSNews.com March 30, 2007 Jonathan Foley, head of the University of Wisconsin's Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, or SAGE, cites the launch of Earth Day in 1970 as the original catalyst. But until recently, he says, "we've had an artificial separation" between the study of the natural environment and our human impact on it. Sustainability studies views the two as an inextricably connected whole. It addresses predicaments whose impact can be felt both locally (Greenland's melting ice field, in one well-known example) and globally (the resulting potential for rising water levels and changing ocean currents).
• 100-Year Forecast: New Climate Zones Humans Have Never Seen Scientific American March 27, 2007 If global warming continues unabated, many of the world's climate zones may disappear by 2100, leaving new ones in their place unlike any that exist today, according to a new study. Researchers compared existing patterns of temperature and precipitation with those that may exist at the turn of the century, based on scenarios put forth in the recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue rising at the same rate, up to 39 percent of Earth's continental surface may experience totally new climates, primarily in the tropics and adjacent latitudes as warmer temperatures spread toward the poles.
• A non-nostalgic history of mass-consumption TV Philadelphia Inquirer April 11, 2007 In "Same Time, Same Station," James L. Baughman, a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains the evolution of network television. Baughman tells a familiar story - commerce crushes cultural aspiration - but he adds fresh and fascinating details from behind the scenes at the television networks. And he avoids nostalgia for a "golden age" of television that never was.
• Dark chocolate lovers get more sweet news Milwaukee Journal Sentinel March 26, 2007 Feeding chocolate to a bunch of middle-age, overweight people for weeks on end might not be as unhealthy as it seems. Researchers found that six weeks of daily consumption of a dark chocolate cocoa mix significantly improved the blood vessel health of those who participated in the study. The study is the latest in a growing number that link reduced heart disease risk to flavonoids in dark chocolate and other food and beverages, such as red wine, green tea and dark-colored fruits and vegetables. "There are hundreds, if not thousands, of flavonoids in every plant substance we eat," said James Stein, director of preventive cardiology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. "This is a very hot area. This study confirms what other investigators have found."