Science & UW-Madison, GOP targets, shine worldwide

As the UW-Madison gets worldwide notice for its role in a just-announced and monumental discovery about the fossilized history of humankind, I wonder if anyone will ask UW budget slasher Scott Walker and his snide, science-dissing sidekick Robin Vos whether today's news gives them a better appreciation for science and the immeasurable benefits across-the-board provided by a fully-supported and respected state university system.

The unprecedented paleoanthropological discoveries heralded in media today from the The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - - and props to the paper for naming three UW-Madison members of the multi-national discovery team, including Alia Gurtov, one of the six-person, all-female 'underground astronaut' team which crawled perilously through South African caves to the eventual discovery site - - to The New York Times, which said:

At a news conference on Wednesday, John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a senior author of the paper describing the new species, said it was “unlike any other species seen before,” noting that a small skull with a brain one-third the size of modern human brain cases was perched atop a very slender body. An average H. naledi was about five feet tall and weighed almost 100 pounds, he said.

Hawks is also quoted at CNN:

"Overall, Homo naledi looks like one of the most primitive members of our genus, but it also has some surprisingly human-like features, enough to warrant placing it in the genus Homo," says John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a senior author on the papers describing the new species that were published Thursday.

On, Wisconsin.