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Author: knutson4

The sex mushroom hunters of Nepal

Posted on
Bloomberg

“It’s really an amazing medicine that deserves more attention,” says Tawni Tidwell, a biocultural anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, where she specializes in pharmacological innovations in Tibetan medicine. Tidwell, who spent years studying across the Indian subcontinent, says the mushrooms don’t supercharge her sex drive—she just feels energized after taking them—but she has seen dramatic results in other people’s libidos. “Men report their erections are more functional, stronger and longer,” she says. “It works for women, too.”

‘It infuriates me’: why the ‘wages for housework’ movement is still controversial 40 years on

Posted on
The Guardian

Callaci, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written a book, Wages for Housework, which chronicles the radical 1970s feminist campaign that argued for recognition of the economic value of domestic labour. In truth, she explains, it was a recipe for revolution, designed to smash capitalism and its underpinning myth that women just love keeping house so much they’ll do it for nothing.

26 books that teach young kids about diversity, inclusion, and equality

Posted on
Pop Sugar

Luckily, there’s still plenty of children’s literature that can aid in the process, though children’s literature itself has long suffered from a lack of diverse representation. The University of Wisconsin-Madison has tracked the number of children’s books by or about Black and Indigenous people and other people of color since 2018, and while the numbers have mostly increased, it remains much harder to find children’s books that are widely representative than it should be.

‘Built to burn.’ L.A. let hillside homes multiply without learning from past mistakes

Posted on
Los Angeles Times

People continued to move into fire-prone foothills and valleys. Between 1990 and 2020, the number of homes in the metro Los Angeles region’s wildland-urban interface, where human development meets undeveloped wildland, swelled from 1.4 million to 2 million — a growth rate of 44%, according to David Helmers, a geospatial data scientist in the Silvis Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This first-of-its-kind plant discovery could help boost pantry-staple crop yields — here’s how it works

Posted on
The Cool Down

Improving crop productivity is on the United Nations’ list of Sustainable Development Goals for the 21st century, and a recent discovery by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers may be able to help.

“For the first time, we realized that the effect of these photoreceptors is not everywhere along the stem and that different photoreceptors control different regions of the stem,” as Edgar Spalding, a professor emeritus of botany at UW–Madison, explained in the piece.

Marriages in China plunged by a record last year, fanning birthrate concerns

Posted on
NBC News

“Unprecedented! Even in 2020, due to Covid 2019, marriages only decreased by 12.2%,” said Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He noted that the number of marriages in China last year was less than half of the 13.47 million in 2013. If this trend continues, “the Chinese government’s political and economic ambitions will be ruined by its demographic Achilles’ heel,” he added.

Wisconsin physicians are learning about firearms to prepare them for talking to patients about gun safety

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Two years ago, Dr. James A. Bigham, a clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, began teaching medical students on the issue, not just providing statistics around firearms injury but also arranging for instruction from firearms trainers on how guns function and why someone may want to own one.

Housing Inventory Report: Madison leads Midwest, Texas leads nation

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Wisconsin Public Radio

From 2005 to 2023, Madison stands out as a top performer in the Upper Midwest in addressing the housing shortage, according to a new analysis. Yet, Texas has 15 cities out-pacing the nation in housing stock growth. Kurt Paulsen, a UW-Madison urban planner, examines the report and offers takeaways.

Proposed listing aims to keep monarch numbers from fluttering away

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Karen Oberhauser, professor emeritus of entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been studying monarchs since 1985. She noted the number of monarch butterflies varies widely from year to year driven mostly by weather conditions that have become more extreme due to climate change.

“What we want to do is make the ceiling, or the top of those fluctuations, higher than it has been,” Oberhauser said. “Right now, the population is so low that there’s a chance that, in any given year, a catastrophic event could send monarchs spiraling to a point from which they might not be able to recover.”

Kohl’s appoints third CEO in 3 years as sales continue to decline for Wisconsin chain

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Nancy Wong is a professor of consumer science at the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said department stores are grappling with multiple types of challenges at the same time, including demographic changes and economic pressures affecting America’s middle class.

“Given the economic turbulence and challenges that we’ve been facing in this country, the segments that are most financially squeezed are the middle class — the core segments of the customers that most department store chains used to enjoy,” Wong said.

How do Trump’s executive orders affect climate and clean energy funding in Wisconsin?

Posted on
Wisconsin Public Radio

Greg Nemet, energy expert and public affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the president doesn’t decide what to do about spending that Congress has authorized.

“This could end up just being more of a power struggle between Congress and the president,” Nemet said. “But in the meantime, it does reduce some confidence in the funding and the expectations that would go to our state.”

Milwaukee immigration advocates stress need to know rights as first Trump orders roll out

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Meanwhile, about five to 10 University of Wisconsin law students are preparing for a visit to the Dodge County Detention Facility, where people facing deportation are detained. Erin Barbato, director of the UW Immigrant Justice Clinic, said the goal is to be thoughtful in the information they share with clients about the Trump orders.

Historic hotel in New York City introduces round table to a new generation

Posted on
Forbes

What started as an impromptu lunch (at two square tables pushed together; the round table came a year later) proved to be such delicious fun that the group returned at 1 p.m., and practically every day thereafter, inviting new lunch companions, until it dissolved in the early 1930s,” wrote University of Wisconsin history professor Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen in the New York Times.

Bad Bunny’s DtMf: The meaning behind his most political lyrics about Puerto Rico

Posted on
Teen Vogue

Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, knows his music knows no borders, so, alongside the project, he also released visualizers going over the history of Puerto Rico with the help of Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, assistant professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“I’ve always wanted to take academic knowledge outside the ivory tower, and this project has allowed me to share our history on a global platform,” Meléndez-Badillo tells Teen Vogue in Spanish. “Art can’t be decontextualized from the moment it’s produced. There’s no way to escape Puerto Rico’s colonial reality, where we deal with blackouts, displacement, and the appropriation of our historical memory daily. Like a committed Puerto Rican, Bad Bunny is using his platform to amplify the conversations taking place in Puerto Rico.”

The perfect storm: why did LA’s wildfires explode out of control?

Posted on
The Guardian

Since 1990, more than 1.4m new housing units in California have been built in wildlife-urban interface areas, which have a higher fire risk, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As of 2020, they found, there were more than 5m housing units in these areas across the state. In Los Angeles, a real estate data company identified nearly 250,000 homes “with a moderate or greater wildfire risk”, according to a 2024 report.

How does alcohol cause cancer?

Posted on
Live Science

“Both ethanol and acetaldehyde are carcinogenic and when they touch the lining of the mouth, throat or esophagus, that can cause cancer,” Dr. Noelle LoConte, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, told Live Science in an email. Like ethanol, acetaldehyde can also disrupt DNA methylation.

Why Thailand is not a safe place for Asian dissidents

Posted on
DW

Lim Kimya’s case is “part of a long-standing and unchanging mistreatment” that exiles and asylum seekers suffer in Thailand, Tyrell Haberkorn, a professor of Southeast Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told DW.

“What enables this to take place with impunity is an unwillingness to investigate or hold perpetrators to account,” said Haberkorn.

Rocks, crops and climate

Posted on
Scientific American

For enhanced rock weather (ERW) to have a large impact by 2050, it will need to expand quickly, says Gregory Nemet, an energy scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Last May he and his colleagues published a study analyzing the combined potential of novel CO2 removal methods such as ERW, direct air-capture machines and the use of biofuels with CO2 captured from smokestacks. Between now and 2050 these methods need to grow “by something like 40 percent per year, every year,” Nemet says.

Madison bakery ahead of the curve as FDA bans Red No. 3 food dye

Posted on
Spectrum News

Audrey Girard is a food scientist and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Girard explained why the effort has taken a long time. “We have other natural additives, but a lot of times they’re more expensive and not as stable,” Girard said.

Girard explained that a scientific study on rats — completed more than 40 years ago in the 1980s — first raised health concerns about the dye. “At high ingestion levels, rats can have adverse effects, like growing tumors,” Girard said.“At high ingestion levels, rats can have adverse effects, like growing tumors,” Girard said.

How layoffs at local TV news stations affect Wisconsin communities

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Mike Wagner, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told “Wisconsin Today” that these types of reductions are becoming more common in local television across the state and country.

“We’re seeing local television stations experience less investment from their owners,” Wagner said. “Reporters are tasked with doing more stories for more newscasts, plus do stuff for the web, plus do stuff for social media, all in the job of also trying to chase down the verifiable truth about important matters for their audience.”

Bad Bunny is a better leader for Puerto Rico than its politicians

Posted on
MSNBC

This “love letter to Puerto Rico,” as one headline about the album puts it, isn’t just entertainment. Working with Jorell Meléndez-Badillo of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Puerto Rico: A National History,” Bad Bunny includes 17 mini-history lessons about the island, one for each song.

“[Bad Bunny] was really interested in having that sort of historical component, so people were not only listening to the songs on YouTube, but learning their history while they do so,” Meléndez-Badillo told the Los Angeles Times.

How California’s wildfires could lead to higher insurance costs for the rest of the country

Posted on
Barron's

Expect more increases ahead. “If you are thinking about housing expenses, you probably shouldn’t rely on historical data on premiums and don’t assume that this is a high point that will be a flash in the pan,” says one of the paper’s authors, Philip Mulder, a University of Wisconsin professor of risk and insurance.

These Wisconsin specialty license plates were the most popular in 2024

Posted on
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Anyone can show their love for the Wisconsin Badgers with this plate — it’s not just available to alumni. While the UW-Madison plate is the most popular, you can choose a plate logo for any of the other UW System campuses.

The annual donation associated with the plate is $20, less than the typical $25. Proceeds support scholarship programs at the selected campus.

Climate change, high winds, extreme dry conditions the real reasons for Los Angeles fires

Posted on
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

About one third of all houses live within a mile-and-a-half of a forest, grassland or another ecosystem, said Volker Radeloff, a professor at UW-Madison who investigates wildfire risk. Scientists call this zone the wildland-urban interface. Researchers at UW-Madison, along with Radeloff, have been tracking this population movement towards natural spaces.

Why are egg prices rising in Wisconsin? Here’s what’s behind the egg shortage

Posted on
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Of course, $3.65 is just an average. Egg prices are similar across most U.S. states but can vary slightly, said University of Wisconsin-Extension poultry specialist Ron Kean.

“I would say the Midwest tends to be a little bit cheaper, but, by and large, prices are pretty similar, because we can ship eggs pretty easily,” Kean said. “So, if they’re a lot cheaper in one place, people will probably ship (those) eggs to the more expensive areas.”

After three collapsed mergers, Sanford CEO shares why fourth time’s a charm

Posted on
Newsweek

Multiple health systems have abandoned merger and acquisition plans in recent years following FTC interference—but only about 1 percent of hospital mergers are flagged by the government agency, according to an April 2024 study from the University of Chicago, Harvard University, Yale University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That study—and others—associated health system mergers with rising costs amidst dampened competition.

Public charging tax now in effect for electric vehicle owners in Wisconsin

Posted on
FOX 11, Green Bay

Others like Chris McCahill, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and managing director of the State Smart Transportation Initiative, point out one negative to the tax — is electric vehicle owners already pay more than those with gas powered vehicles when registering their vehicle each year.

“So now with this new surcharge, the folks will be paying the state twice to try and compensate for those lost gas tax revenues,” said McCahill.

Mumps case in Clark County highlights vaccination concerns

Posted on
Wisconsin Public Radio

A confirmed case of mumps in Clark County, which has one of the state’s lowest rates of vaccination against measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, has public health officials on alert.

Dr. Jonathan Temte, a professor of family medicine and the associate dean of Public Health and Community Engagement for the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, spoke with WPR’s Shereen Siewert to explain the symptoms of mumps and the broader implications involved.

Madison Police veteran John Patterson named interim chief following Barnes’ exit

Posted on
Spectrum News

Now, Patterson will take over for the time being. But Patterson is no stranger to Madison. In addition to serving in his current role for about six years, he’s also been captain, lieutenant and sergeant for the Madison Police Department. In total, he’s spent over 26 years with the department, his LinkedIn page indicates. He also holds a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Embattled UW-Madison engineering building back on track after Republicans hit pause

Posted on
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The embattled University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering building is back on track.

The State Building Commission unanimously approved the project’s new $420 million budget during a Friday meeting, a few weeks after Republican lawmakers stalled the project last month over transparency concerns related to increasing the project’s budget.