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June 19, 2025

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Can A.I. quicken the pace of math discovery?

The New York Times

“I think we’ll learn a lot about what the capabilities of various A.I. protocols are from how well we can get them to generate material that’s of interest,” said Jordan S. Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is part of a team applying for an Exponentiating Mathematics grant. “We have no intuition yet about which problems are going to be hard and which problems are easy. We need to learn that.”

Top Stories

Research

Madison has an ‘extraordinary asset’ to rebuild public trust in science

Madison Magazine

The Morgridge Institute for Research, or MIR, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has always been a bit of a mystery to me, and not just because the scientific research that goes on there exceeds my limited grasp of biology, chemistry and physics. (Or the fact that the building it shares with the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, or WID, is at the nearly-impossible-to-navigate intersection of University Avenue, Campus Drive, North Randall Avenue and North Orchard Street.)

Trump cuts to NOAA, NASA ‘blinding’ farmers to risks, scientists warn

The Hill

The effect on U.S. forecasting will be “like losing your eyesight: slow and torturous,” said Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin.

Americans who have grown up amid the “unheralded revolution” of ever-more-precise weather forecasts will find themselves in a world growing blurrier — even as the weather grows ever more volatile, Martin added.

Higher Education/System

Budget causes friction as Senate passes bills without funding attached

Wisconsin Examiner

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said his caucus supports cutting $87 million from  the UW system, but wouldn’t say if that’s the final proposal the budget committee will take up. The system has said it needs additional funding and Evers had requested $855 million in his proposal for it. Vos says Republicans want “reform” of the UW for the “broken process that we currently have.”

State news

Wisconsin legislators want tax cuts. How much would their plans save?

The Cap Times

“The income tax proposals cost the state a fair amount of money, but it’s not a huge share of the state budget,” said Ross Milton, an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The flip side of that is that the impacts to any given household in Wisconsin in terms of how much money they’ll save on income taxes are pretty modest.”

Agriculture

‘We know what to do’: Wisconsin fairs continue bird flu testing requirements for cows

Wisconsin Public Radio

Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, said the impact was disappointing last year, especially given the amount of work exhibitors put into getting an animal ready for show.

“I’m hoping that with one year of experience under their belt, they feel more comfortable to be able to submit that testing and make sure that we have robust cow classes in these shows,” said Poulsen, whose lab processes all of the avian flu samples taken in the state. “It’s part of our culture, and we missed that last year.”

Health

1 psychedelic psilocybin dose eases depression for years, study reveals

Live Science

Very few long-term studies of psilocybin for depression have been conducted to date, said Dr. Charles Raison, a professor of human ecology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the research.

“They are very difficult to do because people drop out,” Raison told Live Science in an email. “But also because they go on all sorts of other treatments that obfuscate the degree to which any longer lasting benefits result from the psychedelic or because the participant got therapy or restarted an antidepressant.”

Business/Technology

Riots, police dogs and campgrounds. What to know about a batch of bills passed in the state Senate

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Already, a group of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Realta Fusion, a Madison-based nuclear startup, have developed a fusion device in Stoughton that creates the same kind of reaction that fuels the sun and stars. The process is much different than fission, the nuclear reaction that powers current nuclear reactors and the atomic bomb.

UW Experts in the News

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