Chuck Nicholson, an associate professor of animal and dairy sciences and agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shared insights on the potential ramifications.
His research, recently featured in Time magazine, highlights the challenges posed by the back-and-forth nature of tariffs on the economy.
Some researchers, including John Womersley, a former chief executive of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, and Tulika Bose, an LHC physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, want to see higher-energy machines developed as quickly as possible.
“We thought this was a one-off: one bird to one cow, and we wouldn’t see that again,” says Peter Halfmann, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Influenza Research Institute.
Yet the more severe human cases are concurrent with the spread of a recently mutated, potentially more dangerous version of the virus called the D1.1 genotype. D1.1. is now circulating among wild birds and poultry, and it has spilled over into dairy cows at least twice in 2025, according milk testing data from the Agriculture Department. With D1.1, Halfmann explains that the threshold for cross-species transfer is “much lower than we previously thought.”
“By trying to protect certain industries, you can actually make other industries more vulnerable,” Lydia Cox, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies international trade, said during a recent webinar.
The vast majority of raw milk cheese should be safe after the 60-day aging window, according to Keith Poulsen, DVM, PhD, a clinical associate professor of medical sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine.
“We have a lot of history and data to back that up,” Poulsen told Verywell in an email. “Unfortunately, the data from Cornell suggests that if raw milk cheeses were made on an affected farm, they would not be recommended for consumption.”
Already DOGE has canceled many contracts at Social Security, just as it has at many other federal agencies. A DOGE-run website late last week listed $50.3 million in cost savings from these canceled agreements. That included funding for a University of Wisconsin at Madison study project to understand how to prevent impostor scams. Government impostor scams — most commonly pretending to be from the Social Security office — resulted in estimated losses of at least $577 million last year, often by conning seniors into sharing personal data, according to the agency’s IG office.
“When you cut resources like this, there’s always room to make things more efficient. But you also could make things worse,” said Cliff Robb, a University of Wisconsin professor who has studied impostor scams. “You could end up making fraud worse.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison held its annual shark tank-style Arts Business Competition on March 12 at Grainger Hall.
St. Norbert College is the latest Wisconsin campus to face financial challenges in the wake of declining enrollments.
Ethical implications of AI have a wide-ranging scope, Annette Zimmermann — University of Wisconsin Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor of Statistics — said. One of the foremost concerns being the land and resource use, especially if the sites will be on or around native lands, she said.
“Even if this didn’t happen exactly on tribal lands, there could be a kind of cascading damaging environmental effect that affects like surrounding areas,” Zimmermann said. “And so, that would obviously be hard to contain.”
Consumer beliefs affect retail sales, said Menzie Chinn, a professor in the economics department at the University of Wisconsin. He notes that policy uncertainty can shake the economy.
“If enough people and enough companies put things off because of uncertainty, you can tip the economy into recession,” Chinn told NBC News. “It doesn’t happen overnight, but it multiplies out over time.”
A recent UW-Madison grad is shoveling his way to success after launching a snow removal business that’s seeing a flurry of activity.
Jake Piekarski is the CEO and Founder of Snow Scholars. The company offers flexible hours and high-paying jobs to college students that provide snow removal services to homeowners and businesses.
Recently Amanda Gevens, chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Plant Pathology, visited “The Larry Meiller Show” to talk about our love affair with the potato and how to get a successful potato harvest in your own garden.
Wisconsin farmer Andy Diercks sits on a red Memorial Union Terrace chair in the middle of a farm field, holding a potato in his left hand. “It’s amazing all the work that goes into growing this little guy,” he says to Amanda Gevens, UW-Madison chair of plant pathology, who sits across from him. “The research you’ve done over the past decades is critical to grow a good quality crop.”
“When it comes to predicting outcomes that could harm people, you have a moral obligation to share that information,” University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Andrea Lopez Lang said.
Lang — who formerly did consulting work for hedge funds and commodities traders — said she was recruited for at least one high-paying job since leaving the private sector, where she translated weather forecasts into actionable guidance ahead of cold weather outbreaks and other weather phenomena.
The manufacturing sector lost about 75,000 jobs as a direct result of the metals tariffs, according to a 2020 study by University of California, Davis economics professor Kadee Russ and University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor Lydia Cox for Econofact.
While these duties may “relieve” struggling U.S. industries, it comes with a cost, Lydia Cox, an assistant economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and international trade expert, wrote in a 2022 paper. Tariffs create higher input costs for other industries, making them “vulnerable” to foreign competition, Cox wrote. These spillover effects hurt other sectors of the economy, ultimately costing jobs.
There isn’t even the slightest hint of a domestic energy crisis, especially when compared to actual crises that occurred in 1973, 1979 and 2022, Gregory Nemet, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin’s Energy Institute, told ABC News.
“Prices for gasoline are mid-range over the last, say, 20 years,” Nemet said. “There’s plenty of supply. We’re not having electricity outages. We’re not having lines of gas stations.”
While tariffs’ protection may “relieve” struggling U.S. industries, it comes with a cost, Lydia Cox, an assistant economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and international trade expert, wrote in a 2022 paper.
Tariffs create higher input costs for other industries, making them “vulnerable” to foreign competition, Cox wrote.
Farmers may prevent blight by spraying their fields with fungicides, but if overdone, this practice has its drawbacks, University of Wisconsin professor of plant pathology Andrew Bent said. To prevent blight and overspraying, professor and Department of Plant Pathology Chair Amanda Gevens uses a tool called Blitecast to communicate to farmers the appropriate time to spray fungicides.
Economists fear that Trump’s approach could unleash forces that have unintended consequences extending far beyond his time in office.
“This is the biggest change to tariff policy that we’ve seen in recent history,” said Lydia Cox, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
An estimated 70% of the labor on dairy farms in Wisconsin are carried out by unauthorized immigrants, according to a 2023 survey from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School for Workers.
Co-authored by Paul Wilson, the Grainger Professor of Nuclear Engineering and the chair of the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s department of nuclear engineering and engineering physics, and Michael Corradinia, a former member of the U.S. Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, a former president of the American Nuclear Society and a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
“I’m looking at whether we’ll get into a tit-for-tat type of trade war,” said Steven Deller, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies Wisconsin’s agricultural and manufacturing economy. “One of the things the Canadian Prime Minister was talking about is cutting off the electricity supply to the U.S. If we get into that kind of tit-for-tat, then things are going to start to deteriorate rapidly. So I’m just going to be watching how our trading partners respond.”
So far, Wisconsin’s bird flu outbreaks have been among turkey flocks, not hens, according to University of Wisconsin-Extension poultry specialist Ron Kean. Still, the state has felt the strain of egg shortages, with some Milwaukee grocery stores even setting egg purchase limits in recent weeks.
“Unfortunately, I don’t see prices improving in the near future,” Kean said. “We still don’t have a handle on stopping bird flu.”
About 20% of U.S. milk production is exported annually, with about 40% of that going to Canada, Mexico, and China, according to Chuck Nicholson, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. If the domestic dairy industry gets only a little more milk than traders were expecting, prices drop as a result, Nicholson says. So if the dairy industry started trying to sell that 20% domestically instead of exporting it, prices would plummet, making it difficult for farmers to continue to operate.
“In theory, you should be able to freeze and thaw something forever,” said Allison Mahvi, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The only practical limit is the lifespan of the batteries’ pumps, valves and heat exchangers, which can last for decades.
Sources included: Email, Andrew Reschovsky, UW-Madison, Feb. 18, 2025.
Written by Jonathan Patz, the Vilas Distinguished Professor & John P. Holton Chair of Health and the Environment at the Nelson Institute & Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Between 1990 and 2020, the number of homes in these California areas grew by 1.3 million, according to data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Since last summer, senior managers have hired technicians, and scientists from the University of Wisconsin and Cornell University have completed rotations at the lab, Ontiveros said.
John Rosenow, a fifth-generation farmer in Waumandee, Wisconsin, owns more than 900 acres and over 600 dairy cows. He said about 90% of the work on the farm is done by immigrants.
Those immigrants include Kevin, who was born in central Mexico and crossed the U.S. southern border illegally when he was 18. Now 21, Kevin, who did not provide his last name during an interview with CBS News, is among the 11 million undocumented migrants living in the U.S. More than 10,000 of them work on Wisconsin dairy farms, according to a report by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Apartment prices surged most this month in college towns like Syracuse, New York; New Haven, Connecticut; Lexington, Kentucky; Madison, Wisconsin; and Lincoln, Nebraska. Those towns, all of which were in the top 10 of year-over-year rent growth in August, are home to Syracuse University, Yale University, the University of Kentucky, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, respectively.
Howard Temin was a UW-Madison scientist who shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for his discovery of “reverse transcriptase,” which described how tumor viruses act on the genetic material of cells to make copies of themselves before integrating into the host genome.
UW founders first approach plans to transform entrepreneurship, drive statewide economic growth.
Two Republicans who chair state legislative committees on energy and utilities say they want to bring more nuclear power online in Wisconsin in the coming years.
To start that effort, they introduced a resolution calling on the Legislature to publicly support nuclear power and fusion energy.
We learn how new restrictions on communications by federal health agencies could affect public health. Then, we look at how the ongoing bird flu epidemic is affecting farmers and whether it could surge. Then, we talk with a pianist inspired by Wisconsin’s landscape.
“They hit the jackpot,” says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and principal investigator of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. “We have been taking data with a much bigger detector for 10 years. We’ve never seen such an event.”
How safe is the personal information of millions of Americans while the computer systems of federal agencies are accessed by an outside team looking for waste and fraud? Then, we ask if personal devices purporting to track our fitness actually work.
Soybeans is one of the major commodities purchased by USAID, according to agricultural economist Paul Mitchell at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
But Mitchell said foreign food aid also includes shelf-stable foods that may be produced by Wisconsin farms and food processors. With the agency’s website largely down, he said it’s almost impossible to determine what products could be affected.
It’s unclear how long it will take for consumers to feel the impact and to what extent. That’s in part because it depends on how much steel or aluminum is used to make the product, said Lydia Cox, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
It’s also on the businesses to decide what added costs they should pass along to their customers, she said: “If you had a 25 percent increase on 50 percent of your costs, that’ll be a pretty sizable [potential] increase” in prices.
It can take farms months to recover after an outbreak since most chickens don’t begin laying eggs until they are 18-22 weeks old, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Greg Piefer, the founder and chief executive officer of Shine Technologies in Janesville, wouldn’t frown over that punchline. But he’s the first to say fusion for other purposes ranging from fighting cancer to national security, and from inspecting industrial components to recycling nuclear waste, comes first and is no laughing matter.
The UW System is asking for roughly $855 million over two years from the state and urged support for that funding during a discussion with members of the Hoan Group, a private group of about 160 business and community members in the Milwaukee and Madison area.
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.
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.
The study authored by Howard together with Mengqi Wang and Dayin Zhang of the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that the “staggered rollout of a national increase in immigration enforcement” could send “negative shocks” through the construction sector.
Fetch was founded in 2013 by Schroll and Tyler Kennedy. It was inspired by an idea Schroll had as a University of Wisconsin undergrad.
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.
UW-Madison is one of the nation’s leading research universities in terms of receiving federal grants — and levering those dollars with private and other external funds that make it possible to move ideas from the lab bench to the marketplace.
It’s not just about Madison, which is the sixth-leading federal R&D campus in the country. Every campus in the Universities of Wisconsin receives some federal R&D dollars, as do major private institutions such as the Medical College of Wisconsin, Marquette University and the Milwaukee School of Engineering.
But UW-Madison Donald Hester Professor of Economics Charles Engel told the Wisconsin State Journal “the overall effect on the cost of living would be relatively small” because the price consumers pay doesn’t only cover the cost of the good itself.
“If you think about when you buy a t-shirt, say that’s made in China,” he said. “The actual t-shirt is really a relatively small part of the cost that we pay, and a much bigger part is the cost of the design, which is probably done in the U.S., and then the cost of bringing the shirt from the port to the store where you get it.”
Indirectly, U.S. producers might raise their prices because they face less foreign competition for certain goods, Lydia Cox, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said during a recent webinar.
U.S. companies that use tariffed goods to manufacture their products might also raise prices for downstream goods, Cox said. For example, steel tariffs might lead to higher prices for cars, heavy machinery and other products that use steel.
“Early on, Firestone sold itself on corporate social welfare,” said Gregg Mitman, an environmental history professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of Empire of Rubber. It provided free housing, education, and medical care, and sold rice and palm oil to workers at subsidized rates.
Urban planning professor Kurt Paulsen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that Madison is a tech hub with a university, which drives housing growth.
“It’s also driven by companies like Epic that employ thousands of people,” he said.
“Policy and markets in Europe have enabled renewables to drive down the shares of both coal and natural gas,” said Gregory Nemet, an energy researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
