Wisconsin’s new budget boosts some of the funding available to local communities, including those that are home to state buildings.
State buildings are exempt from property taxes, but Wisconsin does compensate the cities, villages and townships where those facilities are located. The increased funding will affect hundreds of communities that house state facilities ranging from prisons to universities to office buildings.
ASK THE WEATHER GUYS
Steve Ackerman and Jonathan Martin, professors in the UW-Madison department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, are guests on WHA radio (970 AM) at noon the last Monday of each month.
Wisconsin’s slate this season and the team’s lack of success under Fickell has many in the media questioning if the Badgers can climb back into contention in the new Big Ten. Reporters from across the Big Ten and national outlets voted Wisconsin to finish 12th in the conference in the Cleveland.com preseason poll.
And when it comes to warning people about flash floods in particular, experts still stress the need to get warnings to people via every means possible.
That’s why a “Swiss cheese” approach to warning people can be most effective in overcoming that last mile, Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist and manager of the Wisconsin Environmental Mesonet at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains. (And it’s similar to an ideology used to prevent the spread of disease.)
“You know you got slices of Swiss cheese and they’ve got holes in them. Nothing is ever perfect. But if you layer enough pieces of cheese, it reduces the risk because something might go through one hole, but then it gets blocked,” Vagasky says. “We always want people to have multiple ways of receiving warnings.”
Ainehi Edoro, associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder of the literary blog Brittle Paper, says the novel marked a turning point. “For a long time, queer characters in African literature were either invisible or treated as symbols of crisis, like their presence was a sign that something had gone wrong,” she says. “So when Dibia wrote a novel that centred a gay Nigerian man as a full human being, that mattered. He pushed back against an entire archive of erasure.”
“There are a small number of studies suggesting uptake of PFAS through skin is possible and the concentrations of PFHxA reported in the study are quite high,” said Christina Remucal, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Gaitsgory, together with Dima Arinkin at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, made this relationship more precise in 2012; then, working alone, Gaitsgory followed up with a step-by-step outline of how the geometric Langlands might be proved.
In Wisconsin, the beetle was first discovered in 2014 in counties west of Milwaukee. In 2019, UW-Madison entomologist P.J. Liesch, on a walk with his family, found an infested shrub. This spring, Liesch fielded dozens of questions from gardeners asking about it, as did Lisa Johnson, a Dane County Extension horticulture educator.
In the Trump era, with university research on the chopping block, some professors have become part-time fundraisers for the sake of science.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors Anne Bonds and Derek Handley need at least $30,000 to finish their project after the National Endowment for the Humanities cut their grant this spring. They said the agency offered no specific reason for terminating the grant aside from it no longer aligning with funding priorities.
William Banholzer, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has been traveling to town meetings arguing research doesn’t support banning the boats. Banholzer, who owns a wakesurfing boat but says that doesn’t affect his conclusions, said studies show about 70% of a wave’s energy is dissipated at around 200 feet.
“If you’re taking my rights away, you better have a preponderance of evidence on your side, and they don’t,” Banholzer said.
“The point isn’t that Trump is a ‘Latin American’ dictator — or an Eastern European one like Orban — the point is that they are all, along with the people who work under them, part of contemporary right-wing networks,” explains Patrick Iber, associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s a dynamic system for mutual support. And it is one in which authoritarian ideas get reinforced, enemies get defined, and the leaders get to imagine themselves as engaged in a project of national redemption.”
“Things are a mess, and it feels like a lot of unnecessary changes have been made to hinder science,” said David Rivera-Kohr who will defend his biochemistry PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison later this year. “It takes a toll mentally, but it also makes my principal investigator and lab group more conservative about our spending. We don’t know how long the money is going to last or whether new funding will come in, so we’re trying to cut costs.”
A lawsuit that targets UW-Madison’s decision to reinstate a former Badgers football star accused of sexual assault will go back to a lower court.
The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges on July 11 overturned the dismissal of a lawsuit a woman brought against the University of Wisconsin-Madison over its decision to reinstate the player.
Camp Randall will welcome 58,000 people Saturday night for Coldplay’s first show in Wisconsin in 16 years.
That will be about 8,000 more people in the crowd than at each of Morgan Wallen’s shows last month, according to officials.
Written by Ph.D. candidate in botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
University of Wisconsin-Madison senior Roselyn Pacheco spoke about the attacks immigrants are facing from the administration.
“I thought it was very well done,” Freya Mowat, a veterinary ophthalmologist at the University of Wisconsin who researches canine visual psychology but was not part of the new study team, tells Popular Science.
The new results are also closely aligned with a 2024 survey study conducted by Mowat and a separate group of dog researchers at the University of Wisconsin.
“Regulators introduced expanded audit reporting to increase the usefulness of the audit report to investors by requiring the auditor to discuss the most challenging issues. However, Prior research generally finds that key audit matters do not influence investor perceptions of audited companies,” says Dan Lynch, a professor of accounting at the Wisconsin School of Business.
Rebekah Willett, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies children and media, said she often hears from parents whose children run into upsetting content that’s recommended by YouTube’s algorithm. (One child, she said, looked up baby animal videos, which led to videos of animals giving birth, which led to videos of humans giving birth.)
The sold-out Coldplay show coming Saturday to Camp Randall Stadium, like the two shows by country music superstar Morgan Wallen at the stadium three weeks earlier, is a game-changer for the city, said the president of Downtown Madison Inc.
UW-Madison entomologist PJ Liesch returns to talk about the bugs we love and hate. Then we talk to another researcher on campus, Sathya Chandra Sagar, about his work on a global study of bird calls.
“If she were indeed committed to running, you would expect her to be raising money at this point, as her opponent already is doing, and as we’ve seen folks doing in prior races at this time,” said Robert Yablon, who co-leads the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A federal appeals court sided with a woman who accused a former Badger football star of sexual assault, overturning a lower court’s dismissal of her lawsuit against the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Wisconsin men’s basketball’s 2025-26 non-conference schedule is official — and includes some familiar faces.
High-major opponents on the schedule include BYU on Nov. 21 in Salt Lake City, Marquette on Dec. 6 at the Kohl Center and Villanova on Dec. 19 at Fiserv Forum, along with two teams from the 2025 Rady’s Children Invitational. The tournament, taking place on Nov. 27-28 in San Diego, also includes Florida, Providence and TCU.
Slower processing of financial aid
The agency distributes federal financial aid to students through universities and colleges. University of Wisconsin System students, for example, received about $720 million in federal financial aid last school year, the bulk of which was delivered through the Education Department.
“It’s a good time to be a private litigator” in Wisconsin, said Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center. “This has become a very litigious state at a high level, in federal court and in the state Supreme Court.”
Coldplay made Wisconsin history in October when it became the first concert announced at Madison’s Camp Randall Stadium in nearly 28 years.
Now, eight months later, the show is finally here — even though country superstar Morgan Wallen made sure the Chris Martin-led British band wasn’t the first to actually perform there. Wallen had two concerts, on June 28 and 29.
Dr. Jonathan Temte, associate dean for public health and community engagement at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said that the resurgence is partly due to the erosion of public confidence in science and public health systems, fueled by misinformation.
“It really is made more difficult when you don’t have an intact public health system, when you don’t have a population that believes in evidence-based science and is wracked with concerns about conspiracy, and you have people who basically profiteer off misinformation,” Temte said.
In 1873, just before becoming a student at the University of Wisconsin, La Follette heard Edward Ryan, soon to become the state’s Chief Justice, give a commencement speech. Ryan bluntly defined the central questions of the coming era: “Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic freemen, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?” This question would animate La Follette’s career as he tried to live up to UW president John Bascom’s insistence that students accept the obligations of citizenship and their duty to serve the state.
Former University of Wisconsin football player Nate White died last month after “a medical event that disrupted his breathing and heart functions,” according to a news release from police in Brookings, South Dakota.
While it’s not unusual to see candidates announce early, this level of spending this early is unprecedented, said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In April, Wisconsin’s Keith Bechtol was in the remote Andes mountains of Chile waiting for the world’s largest digital camera to turn on and take a photo of the night sky.
“I was very focused to the task at hand,” he said. “I was selecting the target that we would use for the very first images.”
Andrew Reschovsky, an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, estimates Madison schools will receive about $9.6 million more in special education aid over the next two years. But he said without increases to general aid or equalization aid — other major forms of state funding for schools — Madison must rely more heavily on local taxes for funding.
“Even though special education aid has been increased, it’s still a relatively small part of total state aid,” he said. “At the state level, state aid all together is less than half of total money needed, or total revenues, to support K-12 education.”
Entomology professor Dan Young said this year marks a short-term win for the regional firefly population. The area is coming out of a drought, leaving abundant ground moisture for fireflies to thrive in during their larval and pupa stages.
“Compared to the last couple years, people would probably be noticing a lot more. I’m certainly noticing more in my own backyard.” said Young, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and serves as the director of the Wisconsin Insect Research Collection. “But looking at it more long-term, I would say … this is a pleasant blip in the radar.”
Madison, Wisconsin’s capital city and home to the University of Wisconsin’s main campus, is one of the Midwest’s most magnetic destinations — and fall is prime time for a visit. It’s when you’ll find the city’s four pristine lakes reflecting the season’s fiery foliage, the Dane County Farmers’ Market (the largest producers-only market in the country) brimming with the local farms’ harvest, and Camp Randall Stadium erupting with the electric energy of Badger football.
Coon, a University of Wisconsin-Madison grad who performed with the Madison Repertory Theatre, American Players Theatre and Renaissance Theaterworks, was nominated in 2017 for lead actress in a limited series or movie for “Fargo,” and in 2024 for lead actress in a drama series for “The Gilded Age.”
A federal appeals court has reversed a lower court’s dismissal of a woman’s lawsuit against the University of Wisconsin-Madison over how it reinstated a Badgers football star after he had been expelled for sexual assault.
“It feels like home when I hear it,” says Kelly Elizabeth Wright, an assistant professor of language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who grew up in Tennessee. “It’s from where I was raised. But it makes me feel included and welcome. And I think that’s part of why people are embracing it, because it has this capacity to make others feel included and welcome.”
“Due to ongoing litigation, SAVE borrowers do not yet know when their administrative forbearance will end and payments will resume,” said Nicholas Hillman, director of the Student Success Through Applied Research (SSTAR) Lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “All they can be certain of is their interest will now start to accrue, and that’s cold comfort for borrowers who have—for no fault of their own—been stuck in administrative forbearance.”
Marc VandeWettering, an eight-year veteran of the Badgers staff who has worked with Wisconsin for 13 years dating back to his time as a student, has been named the program’s general manager, the Badgers announced in a release Monday afternoon.
Fortunately, many of the mammals in the U.S. being reported ill or dead with avian influenza are of common species. Infected red foxes, coyotes and raccoons, for instance, are appearing relatively frequently—but not at nearly the scale of the marine mammal mass mortalities. And these are plentiful species, says David Drake, an urban wildlife ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so he isn’t too concerned.
A new collaborative grant-making effort administered through the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, dubbed the Orion Initiative, seeks to reverse these trends for rural Wisconsin. Orion Initiative Chief Executive Officer Dr. Amy Kind and U.W. Medicine Associate Professor of Rheumatology Christie Bartels spoke with Monday Buzz host Brian Standing about the project.
The Wisconsin Badgers made scholarship offers to at least six new recruits in the classes of 2027 and 2028 over an eight hour span, headlined by a few top four-star athletes.
The University of Wisconsin announced the promotion of Men’s Basketball chief of staff Marc VandeWettering to the position of General Manager on Monday.
The promotion will give him the responsibilities of overseeing recruiting, roster management, player personnel and revenue sharing strategy alongside head coach Greg Gard.
One study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found there are “no official statistics on the number of unauthorized immigrant dairy workers.”
“Estimates range from 46 percent; to as high as 90 percent, with the most used estimate being 70 percent,” the report said on Page 11.
Jamie Nack is a senior wildlife outreach specialist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension. If people encounter a bear outdoors, she said they should talk to the bear or shout at the animal and raise their arms over their heads to look bigger.
“You really don’t want to be turning and running, but just kind of backing away slowly and again just giving them an escape route for them to just go ahead and leave,” Nack said.
Despite the ruling, reproductive care advocates say much work remains to be done to ensure equitable access. Jenny Higgins is a professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is the director of the Collaborative for Reproductive Equity.
Generative AI may “hallucinate” and pollute the internet, but it is a powerful tool for scientific inquiry, we learn. Then, 50 years of the History of Cartography Project is expected to result in six massive volumes of maps and analysis.
A grave long marked only as “Unknown Soldier” in a quiet corner of Restlawn Memorial Park in Wausau was opened last month, as part of a statewide effort to identify missing service members through DNA technology.
The exhumation, carried out June 6, is part of the Missing in Action Recovery and Identification Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Biotechnology Center. That project works to identify remains of service members declared missing in action, many of whom still have living relatives.
University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor Miriam Seifter said Planned Parenthood could still try to advance its constitutional arguments in a future case.
“Wisconsin imposes many other restrictions on abortion, and Planned Parenthood or other plaintiffs could decide to tee up the constitutional question by challenging those restrictions,” Seifter said.
“It’s worth remembering what those [2017] changes were,” said Ross Milton, an assistant professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison. “Those were some tax cuts for middle-income households and pretty large tax cuts for high-income households, and those are being extended permanently as part of this new act.”
As President Donald Trump orders and sometimes rescinds tariffs on countries across the globe this year, one of his top advisers is an economics professor on leave from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Trump appointed Kim Ruhl in February to his Council of Economic Advisers, a three-member panel that plays a central role in shaping domestic and international economic policy and counselling the president.
Wisconsin and the Great Lakes region have all the pieces to build a fusion industry here. UW-Madison is one of the top two fusion energy research universities in the country (MIT is the other). Amazingly, UW-Madison has spun out three of the world’s 45 fusion companies: SHINE Technologies; Type One Energy and Realta Fusion. And UW-Madison alumni work at all the major U.S. fusion companies that use magnetic (as opposed to laser) plasma containment.
Daniel Wright, a 6-foot-9 pitcher, was taken in the 10th round by the Chicago White Sox. In 2020, he walked on to play quarterback for the Wisconsin football team, then returned to baseball in 2022 at Iowa Western Junior College, before landing at Houston, then Iowa.
Students from rural communities and small towns can bring a rich set of strengths and perspectives to college — from leadership experience and resourcefulness to a deep sense of community — but they may also face unique logistical and cultural challenges. Not only do such barriers impact individual students, but they also affect college attendance rates.
The Lifelong Learner is a monthly feature written by UW–Madison Division of Continuing Studies staff, including this week’s feature written by Christine Cina, academic advising manager.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab, created in 1978, supports the public and local county extension offices by receiving and analyzing several thousand insect samples each year. Every year, about two or three non-native insect species are discovered in Wisconsin. Some are only annoyances; others bring serious trouble. The latter is the case with the viburnum leaf beetle.
In Wisconsin, the beetle was first discovered in 2014 in counties west of Milwaukee. In 2019, UW-Madison entomologist P.J. Liesch, on a walk with his family, found an infested shrub. This spring, Liesch fielded dozens of questions from gardeners asking about it, as did Lisa Johnson, a Dane County Extension horticulture educator.
Two University of Wisconsin-Madison graduates founded Forage Kitchen in 2015, opening their first location on Madison’s State Street.
There are about 192,000 childless adults enrolled in BadgerCare Plus. Most of them already work and cannot get health insurance through their employer, said Donna Friedsam, distinguished researcher emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Even those who work, however, could lose coverage if they do not know how to correctly report their work hours to the state, she said.
Riley graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a BA in history and the University of Missouri with an MA in journalism.
“The theme and the ethos of this record is sort of affirming that Puerto Rican culture in the face of cultural and physical displacement of Puerto Ricans,” said Meléndez-Badillo, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is attending one of the concerts this weekend.
