The discovery is especially surprising because the ants are well known. “There are thousands of papers on leaf-cutter ants,” says study co-author Cameron Currie, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Allyson Fergot, a spokeswoman for College Democrats of UW-Madison, said the group held weekly virtual phone-banking events over Zoom in the month before the election to encourage students to vote and answer questions about voter registration
In Dane County, Wis., home to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Mr. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received nearly 35,000 more votes than the Democratic ticket got four years ago. And in Centre County, Pa., home of Pennsylvania State University, the running mates received 1,800 additional votes over the 2016 count.
The stands were empty save for some cardboard cutouts of “fans” behind the team benches. Piped-in crowd noise is better than silence, but it hardly can be considered an atmosphere.
Video: Most UW-Madison students packed up to head home for Thanksgiving and finish the semester virtually. However, positive COVID tests are leaving some stuck here.
Thousands of UW-Madison students cast ballots in the Nov. 3 election but the stakes were perhaps highest for the more than 6,400 students who come from overseas and are unable to vote. When the race was called for Joe Biden, the cloud of anxiety students described living under for several years lifted.
Quoted: Joe Lauer, an agronomy professor for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said farmers were grateful for more normal weather patterns this year after an extremely wet season in 2019.
“There’s a little more peace of mind, if you will, in kind of going through what I just call an average normal production season,” Lauer said. “We’re going to end up with record yields but it’s just kind of easier psychologically to take.”
Shawn Conley, soybean and wheat specialist for UW-Madison’s Division of Extension, said a lack of precipitation throughout the state at the end of summer caused the USDA to lower their forecasted yields to 53 bushels per acre. That’s six bushels, or almost 13 percent, higher than last year.
But Conley said most farmers were happy to have the dry weather.
“That allowed farmers to have a lot of days in the field that they can push through and get their crops out of the field in a timely manner,” Conley said.
Wisconsin schools across the state are facing a shortage of special education teachers, especially in smaller rural districts. A new UW-Madison masters program is working to fill that gap.
Quoted: Patrick Remington, former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program, said the best approach to tackling the massive outbreak is working together.
“To beat this virus, we have to be united in response,” he said.
James Gavins, the creative director of the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (OMAI) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has taken to making music, dance and comedy videos during the COVID pandemic. Performing is nothing new for Gavins — an alum of the UW’s First Wave performing arts scholarship with a degree in theater, he worked with the Youth Arts Initiative and mounted a one-man show before returning to UW to join OMAI.
“The comedy and the sketches, and things like that, I’ve been doing that for a while, but as far as the music … that really started once quarantine hit, because I was an artist at home figuring this all out for myself, this is how I communicate. You try to communicate, and this is how I relate to most people,” he said in an interview Wednesday.
Community leaders behind an effort to place a new statue honoring Vel Phillips on the Capitol Square hope to see it installed by next year.
There weren’t many applicants for the Southwestern eighth-grade boys basketball coaching job in the fall of 1990, as Bill Taylor remembers it, and the field was whittled down even further when a couple of them didn’t bother returning his calls.
Nelson, a redshirt junior safety, is also playing with a purpose deeper than winning football games. He’s playing for the memory of a late friend and trying to be an example for people who are going through mental health struggles like he was to reach out for help.
In the seven years since, Engel-Natzke has developed alongside the players she has worked with as a video coordinator, most recently with the University of Wisconsin men’s hockey team.
The Badgers’ regular season is scheduled to end with a road game at Iowa, but the slate beyond then is up in the air.
The men’s basketball team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison knows the road ahead could be rocky as they embark on a basketball season amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Letter to the editor: I predict the next phase of their agenda will be the removal of “offensive” names (namely white and male) from all university buildings, which will be the warmup act to the main event: the removal of the Abraham Lincoln statue from Bascom Hill.
Letter to the editor: I’m especially saddened that this usage came in an article where the State Journal’s problematic use of the term in the past was recognized. The article stated that the president of the Wisconsin Black Student Union Nalah McWhorter “also faulted the Wisconsin State Journal for printing the vulgarity in a 1925 news article.”
Letter to the editor: Most students are not even aware of the boulder that sits atop Observatory Hill. Virtually no one knows the racially derogatory name it was apparently known by in the 1920s.
Quoted: “The in-store experience is going to be so much different,” said Hart Posen, a professor of management and human resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business.
Quoted: “It will be unlike any other Thanksgiving week shopping that we’ve had, I imagine,” says retailing expert Jerry O’Brien.
Perhaps this year’s biggest Black Friday change is that retailers effectively started Black Friday weeks ago.
“They’re pretty much all coming out openly saying, ‘We’re going to spread Black Friday out through November,’” says O’Brien, who is executive director of the Kohl’s Center for Retailing Excellence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW-Madison epidemiologist Dr. Ajay Sethi is hoping that foot traffic will be modest and safe.
“I anticipate there’ll be less Black Friday shopping this year compared to last year, because a sizable proportion of people are well aware of our pandemic,” says Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences and faculty director of the UW-Madison master of public health degree program. “It obviously needs to be minimal, because we want to have really no crowding anywhere, for at least the next several weeks or months, so we can stop the spread of COVID in the state.”
But David Noyce, a UW-Madison engineering professor and director of the university’s Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory, said many of the most serious crashes don’t have anything to do with the number of vehicles on the roads.
Many customers are either canceling subscriptions or never signing up in the first place if they are able to instead subscribe to streaming services, which may be cheaper or more tailored to their interests, UW-Madison professor emeritus Barry Orton said. “They’re all focusing on exclusive content,” Orton said of streaming services. “Something you can’t watch anywhere else.”
The other, media, is taking on new forms in a digital age, but if recent statements by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Beto O’Rourke are anything to go by, this is a national problem for Democrats that a growing chorus within the party are already well aware of. Grenier tells me that Democrats in Florida are already well aware that the GOP’s hold over the Cuban-American community was not built overnight. We can’t expect Democratic inroads to be either.
Andrés S. Pertierra (@ASPertierra) is a PhD student in Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A native of Washington, DC, he previously received his undergraduate degree from the University of Havana, Cuba.
Noted: Groups like We Need Diverse Books and accounts like The Conscious Kid have pushed for diversity and inclusion on children’s bookshelves and promoted stories written by and featuring Black and Indigenous people and other people of color. Only 46 out of 4,035 books for children and teens reviewed in 2019 were by Indigenous authors, according to data compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A new initiative based at UW-Madison is helping others do the same in a bid to boost Wisconsin’s struggling ag economy while promoting healthy food and the environment.
