Noted: Many think there are three kinds of corn — white, yellow, and bicolor — and that sweetness depends on the color. It doesn’t. “It’s not the color, it’s the quality of the variety,” says Bill Tracy, a corn breeder and professor and chair of the agronomy department at UW-Madison. “Color doesn’t have any effect on quality.” There are sweeter varieties within all colors, he says.
Ace Hillard fishes for his iPhone as soon as he steps out of his therapist’s office into the June heat. He taps out a message about the good news: Hillard, a transgender man, finally got approval to begin hormone therapy — something he’s been working toward for more than a year.
The rampant sexism in the tech world was put on full display this week after an internal memo from a Google software engineer went viral on the Internet. If we are to believe the memo’s author — who was fired from the company Monday — women are more prone to “neuroticism” and less likely to pursue leadership roles in the tech industry because of “biological differences.” (Marie Hicks is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing.”)
Expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act cost the federal government billions of dollars. But a University of Wisconsin-Madison study says it also saves money in a different federal safety net program.
Noted: Barry Orton, a retired University of Wisconsin-Madison telecommunications policy professor, said the public/private partnership made meeting federal requirements difficult.
Noted: Many boys beyond that point perceive little benefit to college, especially considering its cost, said Jerlando Jackson, the director and chief research scientist at Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has written about this. To them, he said, it means a lot of sacrifice for a vague payoff far in the future.
Noted: In many parts of Rwanda, local authorities appointed by the national government recruited Hutu men into groups that burned and looted homes of their Tutsi neighbors, killing everyone they encountered, says political scientist Scott Straus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In his 2016 book Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, Straus describes how Rwandan recruitment efforts coalesced into a killing machine. Politicians, business people, soldiers and others encouraged Hutu farmers to kill an enemy described as “cockroaches” in need of extermination. Similarly, Nazis portrayed Jews as cockroaches and vermin.
The income gap between the rich and the poor remains near its highest level ever, according to a new report by the Wisconsin Budget Project and COWS at UW Madison.
MADISON, Wis. – Most experts agree, driverless car or autonomous vehicles are coming. Just when it will happen remains up for debate.
SoHE faculty associate Lesley Sager tells us how she and her students at UW-Madison are using the principles of design to solve problems and create better lives for people around the world.
Affirmative action is back in the news, as The New York Times reported that the Trump administration is taking a look at the pending case against Harvard University’s affirmative action admissions policies.
On Tuesday, Organic Valley will celebrate its participation in the University of Wisconsin’s Project 72 Campaign, which celebrates the state’s 72 counties with stories and events. The project features a 1957 International Harvester delivery truck handing out ice cream treats to residents as a token of gratitude to them for helping make UW a world-class institution. The truck will be at Organic Valley’s Cashton location from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tuesday to distribute treats to employees and others who attend.
A man who claimed to have information on the 2008 homicide of a University of Wisconsin-Madison student died over the weekend.
More than 15 million American adults — 8.4 percent of men and 4.2 percent of women — suffer from some form of alcohol-use disorder, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. (NIAAA). The federal health agency estimates that the annual economic cost of alcohol misuse hovers around $249 billion once one weighs the tolls on our health care system, public safety and productivity, to say nothing of the inestimable emotional cost.
Noted: “Deer are what we consider an edge species,” says David Drake, a wildlife specialist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Any place where you have two or more vegetation types come together—a wooded area and a residential neighborhood or field—that’s a vegetation edge. If you think about suburban areas, or any area developed for humans, there’s a lot of habitat fragmentation going on.”
All life on our planet, to some degree, evolves over time. Think of the furry land mammals that slipped into the water to catch a fish and surfaced – albeit millions of years later – as modern whales.
Noted: Even among Germans who immigrated to Wisconsin in the 20th century, “many immigrants and their descendants remained monolingual, decades after immigration had ceased. Even those who claimed to speak English often had limited command,” according to researchers from the Western Illinois University and University of Wisconsin-Madison.
MADISON — After lawmakers finished grilling members of the Walker administration over the details of a proposed incentive package to bring Foxconn Technology Group to Wisconsin, the mood in Thursday’s public hearing audibly changed.
The University of Wisconsin System regents have formed a new panel to work on increasing the number of job applications with non-academic backgrounds.
More than two years after it was created as part of the state’s 2015-’17 budget, the University of Wisconsin System’s Office of Educational Opportunity is taking steps to authorize its first charter schools.
Just a year ago, after the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the University of Texas at Austin’s admissions program by a single swing vote, the question seemed to be edging, at last, toward an answer: Colleges could, the justices ruled, consider race when deciding whom to let through their gates.
Scores of Chicagoans and suburbanites retreat from the dog days of summer by heading to bucolic vacation spots around Lake Michigan.
Robert Enright was studying justice for 10 years when he hit a wall.
Noted: The University of Wisconsin-Madison offers two 16-week courses for one credit that teach money management. One offering is directed at freshmen and sophomores and the other for juniors and seniors. These courses are supported by peer counselors from the personal-finance major who conduct small group sessions. The UW alumni association also has long-offered a free one-day workshop for graduating seniors in cooperation with local financial professionals that draws up to 300 attendees.
A new program at a Wisconsin university aims to make it easier for students to get fresh produce.
The University of Wisconsin System says with more state money, it can boost engineering enrollments and training for other workers needed by a Taiwanese electronics company that has big plans to build a factory in southeastern Wisconsin.
After a cross-country manhunt, a Northwestern University professor and University of Oxford employee are in custody for the brutal stabbing death of a 26-year-old hair stylist in Chicago. The case has involved peculiar twists, including a cash donation by one of the two suspects in the victim’s name at a Wisconsin library and a videotaped confession sent to friends. The two men surrendered peacefully in California after eight days as fugitives.
Betsy DeVos, who plans to put her stamp on federal policy governing campus responses to sexual harassment and assault, is in the midst of an extended period of deliberation and gathering input on potential changes.
Ever since I can remember, food has fascinated me. When I was a young child, my parents frequently took me out to eat—to the kinds of places you didn’t take kids. I collected menus and received a subscription to Gourmet magazine on my 10th birthday. It was inevitable that I would want to learn how to cook. My father instigated it when he gave me a meat thermometer and a dollar and told me to take out the Sunday roast before my mother overcooked it. But what would become a lifelong passion began with Carson Gulley and his TV show.
A former college student in Wisconsin has been found not guilty of sexually assaulting a woman in a dorm, despite telling friends in a group text message that he did.
Noted: “Everybody wants clean air, but to get there we need to keep improving the science so we can make smart, informed decisions about where we should target our efforts,” said Tracey Holloway, a University of Wisconsin researcher who isn’t involved in the new study but often collaborates with the scientists behind it.
University of Wisconsin head coach Tony Granato will coach the U.S. men’s national ice hockey team at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, according to multiple reports. The formal announcement is scheduled for Friday morning at 10 a.m. ET.
The divide between urban and rural communities, which has existed essentially everywhere for centuries, took on a singular importance to many of us when Donald Trump was elected last November. In her new book, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, political scientist Katherine J. Cramer looks at what happened in 2016 through the lens of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s rural popularity, despite policies that would endanger his rural and working-class constituents.
Quoted: Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, dismissed concerns about the work leading to designer babies.
Quoted: Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who is co-chair of the National Academies committee that looked at gene editing, said that concerns about the work that have been circulating in recent days are overblown.
Quoted: “We are seeing a lot of species shifting their ranges — locally and globally — in response to climate change,” said Jonathan Pauli, an associate professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Specifically, states with an increasing concentration of non-citizen residents lacking proper papers experienced “reductions in drug arrests, drug overdose deaths, and DUI arrests,” writes a research team led by sociologist Michael Light of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Noted: “While most other election reforms show pretty mixed effects, Election Day registration . . . has produced a wide consensus that in pretty much every study you find positive and increased voter turnout,” said professor Barry C. Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: “The hope would have been that by targeting this, you could especially capture some of the people who early on fall off and get them to keep going for longer,” said Justin Sydnor, one of the report’s authors and a risk-management and insurance professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “These incentive programs did increase slightly how often people went, but only by about one visit, and then it really has no lasting impact.”
Noted: Lawrence Sromovsky, astronomer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who also helped analyse the image, noted that Ariel’s shadow creates a region of totality about the same size as the moon itself — a very different situation from what we see during an eclipse on Earth, where the area of total eclipse is fairly small, and surrounded by a much larger region of partial eclipse. This, he explained, is due to the fact that at Uranus, Ariel is roughly ten times bigger in the sky than the distant Sun.
Noted: But the full details of the experiment, which are released today, show that the study is scientifically important but much less of a social inflection point than has been suggested. “This has been widely reported as the dawn of the era of the designer baby, making it probably the fifth or sixth time people have reported that dawn,” says Alta Charo, an expert on law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And it’s not.”
An arrest warrant has been issued for a Northwestern associate professor and a University of Oxford employee in connection with the fatal stabbing of a man in a Near North Side apartment. He is a UW alum.
MADISON, Wis. – The University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing has received a $1.3 million grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration to develop a program to recruit and retain 30 Native American nursing school students.
Eneale Pickett was just two years old when his father died.
President Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is looking at suing colleges and universities whose affirmative action programs violate the U.S. Constitution by discriminating against white students.
Noted: R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at University of Wisconsin at Madison, who led the committee with Dr. Hynes, said the new discovery could also yield more information about causes of infertility and miscarriages.
College students notoriously rely on cheap, easy food like ramen noodles. But a new program on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is trying change that by making fresh produce an easy option for students, too. It’s called the UW Campus Food Shed.
EAU CLAIRE, Wis. — John Behling doesn’t have to look far to see the transformative power of a degree from the University of Wisconsin system.
Noted: Rick Brooks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison then collaborated with Bol.
At a small cafe in Randolph, Wis., James Tinjum found himself surrounded by a dozen rapt diners, intrigued by the dedicated cyclist on a mission to promote wind energy.
John Biondi, who since 2014 has directed Discovery to Product—a program that helps students, faculty, and staff at the University of Wisconsin-Madison turn ideas into companies—says he’s leaving the organization later this month.
Scientists have cracked the science behind one of our most common facial expressions – the smile. They say the distinction between sincere and fake smiles that is often made is not entirely accurate.
Noted: During the war, tax rates went up, and a broader number of people were expected to pay them. Professor Anuj Desai from the University of Wisconsin Law School said there was a saying that income tax went from “a class tax to a mass tax.”
Last week, Governor Scott Walker announced that Foxconn would open its first U.S. plant in Wisconsin and in turn, the state would provide $3 billion in incentives. WUWM spoke with UW-Madison economics professor Noah Williams about why states offer deals to companies.
Noted: Modifications were explained by Rob Montgomery, a UW-Madison civil and environmental engineering professor.
Veterinarians are trying to figure out why two dogs died after swimming in Lake Mendota on Sunday. Lindsey Holmes says she took her dog Lucy to the Memorial Union for a quick swim around noon Sunday. Within minutes of getting home, the 3-year-old dog started acting strangely. She vomited and was gasping for air, so Holmes took her to the UW School of Veterinary Care. She was told the dog could no longer breathe on her own.
Noted: “Up until very recently, surprisingly few people were looking at this,” says Heather Kirkorian, an assistant professor of human development in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In the last year or so, we’re actually seeing some research into apps and touchscreens. It’s just starting to come out.”
It takes a hookworm four to six weeks to travel through the human body and reach the gut, where it latches onto the small intestine and sucks blood to sustain itself.
One University of Wisconsin-Madison professor is touring the Midwest on his bike to promote wind energy.
We learn about the UW Food Shed, a program setup to give away free fresh produce that is harvested and leftover from research at the UW-Madison.
