Dan Vimont has a depressing prediction for anyone concerned about climate change.
“We will almost definitely shatter the global temperature record in 2027,” said Vimont, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As another stretch of hot weather settles into southern Wisconsin, UW-Madison is continuing to work to restore cooling across campus after a major chilled water line broke last month.
The university says campus remains open and operating, but many buildings are still warmer than normal. Some buildings remain temporarily closed while crews continue both temporary cooling efforts and work toward a permanent repair.
Bricks that held an emotional connection with some University of Wisconsin fans are out of storage and going back into the ground around Camp Randall Stadium.
A new walkway at Gate 1 leading into Kellner Hall at the stadium’s southeast corner is the site the University of Wisconsin athletic department chose for the relocated brick walk.
When Andrea Gilmore-Bykovskyi, an associate professor in emergency medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, saw that the N.I.A. was interested in video research on lucid episodes, she knew one way to approach the problem. Her past work had involved filming people with dementia during interactions with nursing staff and then meticulously analyzing the videos, second by second, to assess which types of care affected patients’ behavioral symptoms. She proposed retooling those video methods to study lucidity.
University of Wisconsin athletic director Shawn Eichorst is starting with a slightly more lucrative contract than his predecessor, and it includes pay increases and potential incentives that could make it even more lucrative.
Eichorst’s five-year contract has an initial base salary of $1.6 million for 2026-27, and that is set to increase by $50,000 in each year, according to his contract obtained by the Journal Sentinel via an open records request.
Early findings indicate Sen. Lindsey Graham died from an aortic dissection— a condition that UW Health researchers in Madison are actively studying.
An aortic dissection occurs when a layer of the body’s main artery separates, disrupting blood flow to vital organs.
Dr. Paul DiMusto, a UW Health vascular surgeon and co-director of the UW Health Aortic Center, said many patients have no symptoms until the event occurs, and it is often life-threatening.
The size of an adult male giraffe. The height of a small two-story house. The length of a standard shipping container.
That’s how deep crews are digging to fix the broken pipe 20 feet underground that has left UW-Madison without most of its air conditioning and temporarily shuttered nearly three dozen buildings to preserve cooling.
It’s expected to take weeks to repair the chilled water line that broke on June 17, Robert Cramer, vice chancellor for finance and administration, wrote in a message to campus Monday.
Question: Does NOAA conduct fire weather forecasting?
Answer: Wildfire outbreaks require the alignment of several factors, including temperature, humidity, winds and the lack of moisture in fuels such as trees, shrubs and grasses. These factors have strong direct or indirect ties to current weather, climate variability and climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration supports weather forecasting throughout a wildfire’s lifecycle: before, during and after the wildfire.
Drought conditions can set the stage for wildfires.
The foundation for much of what UW-Madison and the Universities of Wisconsin have become today was laid by Charles Van Hise.
President of UW-Madison from 1903 until his death in 1918, Van Hise is credited with creating the “Wisconsin Idea,” the concept that the state’s public university system should benefit every person in the state.
As college athletics enters a new era, programs across the country have spent years learning through trial and error how to succeed in a rapidly changing landscape.
Some institutions have found success. Others are still searching for the right approach. At Wisconsin, that challenge now falls to Shawn Eichorst, a Wisconsin native with deep ties to the state and the University of Wisconsin.
The Energy Department has underestimated the potential deadly consequences should plutonium escape the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which produces bomb cores for America’s nuclear weapons, a study published today by independent scientists found.
UW Madison’s Trout Lake Station is a lake ecology research station on the South side of Trout Lake in Vilas county. Every summer they open their doors to the public and invite them to explore the science happening right in their own backyard.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) wildlife ecologist quickly swung into action. He placed a small speaker on the hood of the truck and set it to play the same “Who cooks for you?” call on repeat, an irresistible provocation for the aggressively territorial owl species. Then, he pulled his 12-gauge Beretta shotgun from the truck’s cab and snapped a single birdshot-packed cartridge into place.
Lily leaf beetle, also called scarlet lily beetle, is an invasive species that is native to parts of Europe and Asia. It first showed up in Wisconsin in 2014 in the Wausau area. It likely came in with infected nursery stock to a garden center or big box store in that part of the state and was then purchased by customers who moved the plants elsewhere, said entomologist PJ Liesch, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab.
The explosive popularity of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound is transforming the way Americans treat obesity, with demand soaring beyond doctors’ offices and into online marketplaces, med spas and unregulated gray-market vendors. And while the medications are helping many people lose significant weight and improve their health, one Madison doctor warns the trend is outpacing the science.
Every Phish show generates its own mythology. In Madison that mythology dates back to 1998, when the band’s last appearance at the Kohl Center was nearly upstaged by an onstage streaker.
This week, some 28 years later, the Vermont-based jam band icons returned to Madison and the Kohl Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to open their summer tour. They delivered another performance fans are likely to be talking about for years — an expansive, 18-song marathon spanning two sets and an encore over more than three hours.
Wisconsin athletic director Shawn Eichorst hasn’t set specific expectations for the Badgers football program this season yet but admitted coach Luke Fickell checks a couple of boxes.
The long-awaited finale of the University of Wisconsin football team’s series against Notre Dame will feature special uniforms.
Wisconsin will wear a red jersey and pants combination that is darker than its usual cardinal, with larger, silver, drop-shadowed numbers on the front and back, when it takes on the Irish at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 6 at Lambeau Field. The Badgers also will wear a red helmet with a silver motion W decal. Under Armour, the apparel sponsor for both Wisconsin and Notre Dame, also crafted a uniform for the Fighting Irish. The game will be televised on NBC.
Over the course of a day, Americans spend six hours and 40 minutes on average looking at a screen, with the average person spending two hours and 40 minutes on social media alone.
“It starts with a message from your friend or checking your email, and then you slide into TikTok, and it’s like 30 minutes gone out of your day, eventually, without even realizing,” Prafull Sharma, a 2023 University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate and co-founder of Spool, told The Daily Cardinal. “I built [Spool] as a way to fight back against that and reclaim my focus.”
When Chris McIntosh was athletic director, the University of Wisconsin started limiting the vacation payouts it owes coaches who elect to depart the school before the end of their contract.
Language to that end started appearing in contracts with newly hired coaches in 2025, a BadgerExtra analysis showed.
Wisconsin also asked coaches already on staff to amend their contracts to insert a sentence taking away pay for banked vacation time if the coach ended the agreement. Some signed the clause into their contracts in amendments with routine extensions given in 2025; some didn’t.
Chris Solinsky always wanted to get into coaching. But were there overt signs of that while he was becoming a five-time NCAA track champion at the University of Wisconsin?
“That’s an interesting question,” pondered Ed Nuttycombe, the UW track and field head coach during Solinsky’s sterling Hall of Fame running career with the Badgers.
Additionally, the University of Wisconsin-Madison was awarded $322,500 for 36 projects, including a $48,000 grant to the Odyssey Project, which offers adults who never had a chance to attend college the opportunity to take college-level classes. Among the university’s grants was one that includes students from the Madison school district’s Shabazz City High School in a project monitoring chlorine in the east side’s Starkweather Creek.
Shawn Eichorst believes in the University of Wisconsin way. There should be no question about that after the event introducing him as the Badgers’ new athletic director or the news conference that followed it at Camp Randall Stadium.
In fact, Eichorst spent so much time talking about the importance of education that anyone who stumbled upon the Big Ten Network’s live coverage Tuesday afternoon may have thought they were watching UW-Madison’s new chancellor — not its new athletic director — holding court.
In February – in the wake of federal agents shooting and killing two Minneapolis residents – Milwaukee council members were defiant.
Members introduced ICE Out, a package of legislation aimed to curtail the federal agency’s work in the city. Within months, Milwaukee Common Council members unanimously passed one of the key pieces of that package, an ordinance that prohibited ICE agents from wearing masks while working in the city,
UW-Madison will warn a student animal advocacy organization about improperly posting a flyer after investigating the group’s support for activists’ attempted April raid on the research and beagle-breeding facility Ridglan Farms.
The university’s investigation found that Animal Advocacy UW-Madison did not solicit others to attend activists’ illegal attempt to seize Ridglan Farms’ nearly 2,000 beagles, but the group is guilty of the less severe violation of improperly posting a flyer for an event, according to a Tuesday letter obtained by the Wisconsin State Journal.
Wisconsin residents battling itchy eyes, runny noses and relentless sneezing this summer might figure this year’s allergy season is worse than years past. They would be right.
For as long as motorsports has existed, gas has been perhaps the most important part of raceday.
The cars depend on it, teams hire high-level analysts to maximize it and companies go into bidding wars to ensure their fuel goes into each competitor’s tank.
So what happens when you remove gas from the equation? You get the Sunburst.
The history of the Laufenberg family farm has roots in the year Wisconsin became a state.
It was a time when the size of most dairy herds could be counted on your hands, and horses and oxen were used to pull plows, rakes and wagons.
Question: What causes a thunderstorm?
Answer: Thunderstorm development requires three basic ingredients: moisture, unstable air and upward motion.
Moisture comes from regions like oceans, lakes and vegetation that provide the water vapor necessary for cloud formation and precipitation.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison law school made misleading statements to The College Fix about its plans to remove a racially discriminatory fellowship description.
As previously reported, a third-party database advertised a law school faculty fellowship as targeted for “candidates of color.” After being pressed for answers, Associate Director of Communications Jennie Broecker told The Fix on May 15 she would ask ProFellow to update the listing.
Community members gathered to remember a young man from Edina whose life touched many people across Minnesota.
Poisoned, killed, skinned and dissected. In 2023, six beagles purchased from Ridglan Farms were injected with methylene blue by researchers at University of Wisconsin–Madison before being euthanized and dissected for research.
Photos obtained through public records during a recent Rise for Animals investigation show the six dogs unconscious before being killed, their organs on display. The images are too graphic for news organizations to publish, and the university unsurprisingly fought to conceal them.
As the founder and executive director of The Playing Field in Madison, I am seeing programs struggle with the reduction and planned elimination this month of Child Care Bridge Payments from the state. A UW-Madison report estimates that as many as 1 in 4 Wisconsin childcare programs could close with significant consequences for families already struggling to find care.
“For many years, we’ve had this testing program that basically looks at mice first as a first step to see what happens in an actual live organism, then rabbits, then dogs, then going on to humans,” said Nicole Nelson, UW-Madison associate professor of medical history and bioethics.
Within the next five years, Wisconsin should have more workers who can help run clinical trials for important research.
That’s the aim of a new program that Madison Area Technical College and the UW-Madison School of Medicine are launching in 2027.
Casey Brown and his father spoke at the May Parks Commission meeting. Aaron Bird Bear, a former UW-Madison director of tribal relations who created the university’s Indigenous land landscape tour, also appeared and spoke about mounds in Madison more broadly.
Brown, who graduated from UW-Madison and is familiar with local politics, said he has never seen a meeting turn around the way this one did.
Wisconsin’s business climate continues to position the state as a competitive location for companies seeking manufacturing strength, cost stability, and long-term operational reliability. Anchored by a deep industrial heritage and a highly productive workforce, Wisconsin offers businesses a favorable environment defined by competitive operating costs, strong infrastructure access, and close connections between industry, higher education, and technical training systems.
During a panel discussion at the U.S. News Healthcare of Tomorrow conference today in Washington, D.C., Antman; Dr. Sanjay Desai, vice dean for education at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Maryland; Dr. Robert N. Golden, professor and dean emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Dr. Alison J. Whelan, chief academic officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges, discussed ways to reduce the financial burden for aspiring doctors.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison will host a free pop-up field day on Thursday, July 9, 2026, at the Arlington Agricultural Research Station’s Plant Pathology Office in Arlington, Wisconsin.
The hands-on educational event will focus on corn and soybean diseases as well as herbicide injury, providing valuable information for farmers, crop advisers, and agricultural professionals.
A Madison man was arrested Wednesday morning after police say he attempted to sexually assault a hospital employee at UW Health University Hospital while armed with a knife.
When Kris Marconnet was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Nicholas Recreation Center didn’t exist. Instead, she remembers taking an aerobics class in the Natatorium, a “hideously hot” building near the Lakeshore dormitories with no air conditioning.
She didn’t imagine that years later, she would play a hand in designing the new athletic center as part of her work with Thysse (pronounced TIE-See), a facility branding company located in Oregon, Wisconsin — just 10 miles away from the university.
While rising prices can put a strain on both farmers and consumers, interest in organic products continues to remain high. In 2025, U.S. organic food sales grew three times as fast as the overall food market. This interest extends to organic beef, eggs and dairy, a trend that bolsters demand for organic feed grain.
Wisconsin’s protracted political redistricting fight took two turns in May: a federal court affirmed Wisconsin’s congressional district map and the U.S. Supreme Court further curtailed safeguards that have governed redistricting nationally.
A three-judge panel dismissed a lawsuit in the federal court case that challenged the congressional maps for Wisconsin. The case argued that the state’s congressional maps are “anti-competitive” and favor a Republican majority. The court ultimately ruled for the district maps to retain the district lines that resulted in a congressional delegation of six Republicans and two Democrats.
Wisconsin is among 20 states that secured a federal court ruling against a Trump administration policy imposing a $100,000 fee on certain H-1B petitions.
The Wisconsin Department of Justice says the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts vacated the policy Monday, finding it unlawful. Wisconsin joined the multistate coalition challenging the policy late last year.
Attorney General Josh Kaul says, “This ruling stops an unlawful policy that shouldn’t have been adopted.” Kaul says the federal government should be addressing workforce shortages in health care and education, not worsening them.
As three alleged planners of Wisconsin’s fake elector scheme pleaded not guilty Tuesday to 11 forgery-related criminal charges in Dane County court, the criminal charges against them are moving forward in a national legal and political landscape that looks dramatically different from the one in which they were filed.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison designated 2026 as the “Year of AI Readiness and Competency” on May 21, formalizing the university’s effort to better prepare students and faculty for thoughtful use of AI.
The campus-wide announcement builds off of previous university investments to further AI use and understanding this year, including a hiring blitz of 50 faculty for the new College of Computing and AI (CAI), which will open July 1, 2026 — bringing the total new faculty hired through the university’s RISE-AI initiative to over 100.
Rural areas of Wisconsin typically rely on volunteers to staff their EMS and fire departments. While the courage of those individuals is necessary, it can translate to longer wait times for patients in critical condition.
The towns of Manitowish Waters, Boulder Junction, Presque Isle and Winchester in Vilas County used to rely on volunteers, and have collaborated in a first-of-its-kind way to solve that problem.
“You’re hoping on people that are working full time jobs and they have families, and are they available?” said Jason Joling, Chief of the Northwoods EMS District.
Chris Solinsky isn’t afraid of the competition his University of Wisconsin cross country and track and field teams are going to face, and he doesn’t want his athletes to be, either.
Take this interaction between the new Badgers director of cross country and track and field and his former boss at the NCAA Championships last week in Eugene, Oregon, as an example.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department (UWPD) announced a renewed call for information about a 58-year-old unsolved murder case of a University of Wisconsin-Madison freshman on May 28.
On the morning of May 26, 1968, UW-Madison freshman Christine “Chris” Rothschild was found strangled and stabbed to death next to Sterling Hall. UWPD attempted to solve the case but it was overshadowed due to anti-war protests on campus and no suspects were arrested. This year marks the 58th anniversary of Rothschild’s murder.
Wisconsin has one of the leading nuclear physics programs in the United States at UW-Madison’s College of Engineering. One of a handful of academic reactors in the United States sits on the UW-Madison campus and its graduates are largely coveted by companies hoping to build a talented workforce.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison offers a course that teaches students to analyze topics such as prisons, welfare, racial justice, and terrorism through the lens of ‘queer of color critique.’
The public university offers a Bachelor of Arts in Gender and Women’s Studies, a program that provides ‘a platform for students to study how equity and social justice are connected to gender, sexuality, and identity.’
We found no authoritative estimate that the number of Ku Klux Klan members in Wisconsin in the 1920s was 40,000.
That’s the current population of Wausau in central Wisconsin.
“No one knows for sure how many Americans joined during the 1920s but the best estimates are around 2 million members, some 15,000 of whom were in Wisconsin,” according to the Wisconsin Historical Society.
At the end of a 20-minute conversation, focused until then on Chris Borland deservedly going into the UW Athletic Hall of Fame, the questioning took an abrupt turn.
“The University of Wisconsin-Madison has done a great job of research and finding a path to help and hopefully someday cure Alzheimer’s,” Lenz said. “So we’re here supporting that initiative to raise funds for everyone so that the research can continue and so that we can find an end to Alzheimer’s.”
A Smithsonian museum specialist will visit Madison later this month for a free lecture focused on the military service of Native Americans.
Rachelle B. Pablo, who is Diné and serves as a Museum Specialist with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, will present “The National Native American Veterans Memorial: Honoring the Military Service of Native Americans” on Tuesday, June 23rd, at 7 p.m. at the Fluno Center on the UW-Madison campus.
Broadway legend and University of Wisconsin-Madison alum André de Shields says he’s dropping a “joy bomb” on the world with his work in a reimagined revival of a classic musical.
Last weekend, de Shields performed at the 2026 Tony Awards, where he was nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical. The nomination was for his portrayal of the wise and respected Old Deuteronomy in “CATS: the Jellicle Ball” a new version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s play.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used optogenetics, a technique that controls genetically modified brain cells with pulses of light, to recreate the brain rhythm of deep sleep in mice that were fully awake and moving.
It was the second and final day of the Democratic State Convention and all seven democratic candidates running for governor were given five minutes to tell their party why they should be the democratic nominee for governor.
Democratic activists today approved a slate of resolutions that call for the abolishment of ICE, the support of gender-affirming care for young people, and an end to the state’s choice and voucher programs.
The resolutions were largely approved by voice vote without debate. But the party broke out two resolutions for discussion, including one that called for raising the minimum wage to a living wage of roughly $21 an hour.
I walk into a lecture hall that seats nearly a thousand students and do something I never used to do: I look for shadows in the corners. It’s the first day of class, and there are 971 students enrolled. The room rises in tiers, balconies fading into darkness. I scan the space, trying to see faces, and checking for my blind spots. Concealed carry is legal in Wisconsin, but getting shot at isn’t my greatest fear.
