Noted: The article was based on a new book, “Fighting for Status: Hierarchy and Conflict in World Politics,” by Jonathan Renshon, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Old guys who hunt have been stepping up to help the Snapshot Wisconsin project, a booming citizen-based science initiative that’s using trail cameras to document what’s going on in our woodlands and other wild places when we’re not looking.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A Republican bill that would block University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty from training resident physicians in abortions would worsen a shortage of obstetrics/gynecological providers in the state, school officials say.
Your speech may, um, help reveal if you’re uh … developing thinking problems. More pauses, filler words and other verbal changes might be an early sign of mental decline, which can lead to Alzheimer’s disease, a study suggests.
Noted: “It’s possible there is some classified intelligence report on China and North Korea and U.S. elections, but I have never heard this claim before, nor seen any evidence,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Yoshiko Herrera, who is the former director of the school’s Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia.
If you think scientists have it bad today, spare a thought for the early philosophers – some even got burnt for heresy. Philosopher Steven Nadler and graphic artist Ben Nadler talk us through their book, “Heretics!”
It is clear that lawmakers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are attempting to achieve politically neutral college campuses in the name of “protecting” free speech — campuses where all speech is considered equally valuable, no matter how morally repugnant, intellectually empty and psychologically dangerous.
Noted: At Babcock Hall Dairy Plant in Madison, manager Bill Klein said every load of milk that comes into the plant for processing and bottling is tested for temperature, and if it’s above 45 degrees, they send it on its way.
Interviewed: Jonathan Gray, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (@jonathanagray).
President Trump and Senate Democrats are steadfastly opposed to one another over judicial nominees. Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Gary Peters, D-Mich., are now threatening to “blue-slip” Trump’s nomination of Joan Larsen to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Other senators are making similar threats. With Republicans poised to reform the blue slip, now seems an appropriate time to discuss what it is and how it works in practice.
Bears, they’re just like us. And I’m not referring to a subset of hairy humans, but to some furry critters in Wisconsin whose diets contain a staggering amount of junk food. Seriously!
We talk to Jake Vander Zanden, an expert about the ongoing efforts to curtail the spread of Zebra mussels in Wisconsin lakes.
A chunk of ice the size of Delaware broke off from the Antarctic Peninsula this week. We’ll learn about why this happened and what it means for climate change around the world and close to home in Wisconsin.
MADISON (WKOW) — UW-Madison students could soon be shaping local policies and helping with county projects after a bill passed Thursday night.
Larva means never having to say you’re sorry. Although I’m sure caterpillars are at least slightly apologetic when they eat a plant that releases a chemical that turns them into cannibals — and then eat their pals.
The arms race between insects that eat plants and plants, has had millions of years to evolve some pretty amazing interactions. Not least the tomato plant that produces chemicals that make caterpillars turn into cannibals.
House Republicans issued a fiscal 2018 budget plan on Wednesday that rejects the Trump administration’s proposal to eliminate or sharply cut so-called indirect-cost payments to universities for medical research.
WASHINGTON — The letters have come in to her office by the hundreds, heartfelt missives from college students, mostly men, who had been accused of rape or sexual assault. Some had lost scholarships. Some had been expelled. A mother stumbled upon her son trying to take his own life, recalled Candice E. Jackson, the top civil rights official at the Department of Education.
The Department of Education will host a closed-door summit on sexual assault today, featuring giving sexual assault victims, due process advocates and campus leaders the chance to speak directly to Secretary Betsy DeVos.
A judge in Madison has entered not-guilty pleas for an expelled University of Wisconsin-Madison student accused of molesting and harassing 11 women on campus since 2014.
Noted: Donald Moynihan, a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he worries that Republican-dominated legislatures could act on their low regard for public colleges and universities by slashing their funding, resulting in tuition increases that would swell levels of student debt already at record levels.
MADISON, WI — There’s nothing like a spa day to peel away layers of stress and reveal a happier, more productive you. It turns out deep tissue massages and other relaxing treatments are good for dairy cows, too, according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison initiative that focuses on making dairy cows happier so they will produce more milk.
Quoted: Microsoft has tried using the TV buffer zones, or white space, to provide broadband internet in several countries. But the idea is “still in its infancy,” said Parmesh Ramanathan, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin.
Perhaps you’ve heard that millennials are obsessed with plants. For a long time I remained unimpressed, considering plants can’t make sound, attack robbers, or even move. But I was wrong. Plants can do something beyond the abilities of mere cats*, dogs, and birds: they secrete a chemical that makes the caterpillars that eat them eat each other instead.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin’s state budget impasse just got $51 million harder to solve thanks to the tax increases that Illinois enacted to finally pass its spending plan, state lawmakers learned Tuesday.
UW-Madison junior Eneale Pickett has started a project called Dear Masculinity for “individuals assigned male at birth and male identifying folks to critically examine their masculinity.” Starting as an online video project, Dear Masculinity will also become a stage production at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago on August 26 at 7 pm.
If you’re a hungry caterpillar and you’ve got a choice between eating a plant or another caterpillar, which do you chose?
Buzz about a massive Taiwan manufacturer setting up shop in Wisconsin seems to be getting louder. That could have tremendous ripple effect, says University of Wisconsin economist Hart Posen.
Noted: “We do know that people who are healthier are more productive and are more likely to work,” said Barbara Wolfe, a health economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We also know that the people who are most affected by the expansion [of health coverage], and would be most affected by cutbacks, are people with lower incomes.”
It is not unusual for insect pests to feast on each other as well as on their staple veg, but it’s now been shown that tomato plants can team up to directly push caterpillars into cannibalism.
Caterpillars turn into cannibals and eat each other when plants deploy defensive chemicals to make their foliage less appetising, research has revealed.
Plants are often seen as taking a passive role in their environments, just hanging out and soaking up the sunlight. But that impression is wrong—plants have many sophisticated ways of influencing their environment, and other plants and animals in it. And this includes leading herbivores down the garden path to cannibalism.
Noted: “There are a lot of dimensions to the decision of an individual to vote and the administration of an election,” says Ken Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin studying the voter patterns of the 2016 election. But from his research, some of which documents Americans forgoing the vote if the hurdle is unfair or too high, he is convinced that the “end game is to provide rationale for massive purges, and it’s not going to be Jennifer Andersons but Hector Gonzaleses who are going to face this.”
In the caterpillar-versus-plant fight, the winner might seem obvious. One side sits motionless in the sun, while the other feasts on it. But the tomato plant has a nefarious defence strategy. In some encounters with herbivores, it winds up relatively unscathed, while the caterpillars wind up eating each other.
Some plants have been found to use nature’s dog-eat-dog world to their advantage, forcing herbivores to become cannibals when the plants feel threatened by a caterpillar’s endless appetite.
A majority of Republicans and right-leaning independents think higher education has a negative effect on the country, according to a new study released by the Pew Research Center on Monday. The same study has found a consistent increase in distrust of colleges and universities since 2010, when negative perceptions among Republicans was measured at 32 percent. That number now stands at 58 percent.
LAKE ALFRED, FLORIDA — Put expensive high-tech scientific equipment in a former citrus packing house more than 60 years old, throw in an overworked air conditioner, a corroding foundation, and the sticky Central Florida climate, and you’ve got problems.
Noted: “We are still struggling with how to manage the dual-use dilemma. How do we get the benefit of the research without the risk of it being turned against us?” said Alta Charo, a law professor and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin who has followed the debate closely.
John Behling, the new president of the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents, said Friday that he wants institutions to recruit leaders from the private sector and otherwise “streamline” the process for hiring chancellors and other top administrators. In so doing, he might have shed light on why a state budget proposal includes language — opposed by faculty members — that would ban the regents from ever considering only academics as top administrators.
UW-Madison is #27.
Noted: After President Trump announced a temporary travel ban in January, academic leaders were swift to condemn it, and to warn that it would shut out some of the world’s most talented scholars.
“Conflating doxing and journalism risks blurring or eliminating the public interest goal of good journalism,” says Andrew Zolides, a digital media scholar who has taught courses about doxing at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted; At Wisconsin, professor Matthew Herndon said Christensen was a student in an undergraduate class he taught and did research for him. He called Christensen a good student and said he completed a research project that studied data from the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
Noted: However, an enzyme in rennet clips off the tails. The loss causes the clusters to stick to each other, explained David Montgomery, outreach specialist and assistant coordinator at the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Sherry Herwig, director of UW-Madison’s Family Business Center, said the family dynamic can be the most complicated part of succession plans. Some families struggle to communicate, especially when multiple children are involved.
The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents unanimously approved a resolution at its meeting Friday affirming the system’s commitment to free speech.
The Altons’ farm was one of the properties hit hardest by June 28’s tornadoes, which caused well over $700,000 of property and business damage in Green County according to Green County Emergency Management. Fortunately, friends and relatives came to assist over the weekend — and this week, they found out even more help was coming in the form of Team Rubicon, a national organization of veterans who provide rapid response after natural disasters.
For more than a half century, the United States has operated what might be called a “Miracle Machine.” Powered by federal investment in science and technology, the machine regularly churns out breathtaking advances.
Authors of an updated study of wolf threats to Wisconsin livestock say they have a proven way to lower the risk of animal deaths. University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have tested a map they put out six years ago that showed verified reports of where grey wolves attacked livestock in the state. The updated findings show that “risk map” predicted the geographic area of about 90 percent of subsequent attacks.
Noted: Research by Daniel Phaneuf, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of agricultural and applied and economics, found that anglers were willing to pay the most money to catch a chinook on a Lake Michigan trout and salmon fishing trip.
Noted: The debate over voter ID “has been the most visible point of election reform,” says Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But this registration stuff is just as important but has been happening at a lower level that people aren’t necessarily aware of.”
We’re no strangers to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Badgerloop team, having spilled some ink about their impressive showing at last year’s inaugural Hyperloop competition at SpaceX headquarters in California. (We even profiled them in a video vignette which you can view here.)
Many people complain about the people they work with sometimes, but Hannah Black’s co-workers are a bunch of monkeys, literally. The Waunakee woman looks after the primates at the UW-Madison’s Harlow Primate Lab, feeding them and hosing down their cages.
The University of Wisconsin-La Crosse will draw down its reserve of tuition funds under an operating budget passed Thursday by the UW System Board of Regents.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The University of Wisconsin System regents plan to vote on a resolution affirming their commitment to free speech as legislators consider a bill that would punish UW students who disrupt campus speakers.
Exercise is just as good for the brain as it is for the body, a growing body of research is showing. And one kind in particular—aerobic exercise—appears to be king.
Dementia cases are set to soar by nearly two thirds within the next 25 years, a major new study predicts.
Physicist Usama Hussain laughed uncomfortably every time the conversation even got close to the question, “Do you look for nothing?” His professors would kill him if they heard him agree with that. After all, he’s technically looking for a brand new particle that may or may not exist, with the hopes that it might help explain some of the Universe’s weirdness.
Poor sleep may increase the chances of people at risk of Alzheimer’s developing the disease, a study has shown.
MADISON –Two students from Menomonie will participate in a sought-after rural medical education program through the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
