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Category: Business/Technology

With first-round funding in hand, Madison startup Realta Fusion aims to bring first reactor online within a decade

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Forget the well-worn adage that fusion energy and the promise of virtually unlimited green power is three or more decades away — a Madison startup believes it can develop a market-ready fusion reactor in a third of that time.

The longer time frame generally applies to utility scale reactors that some day could power the electric grid; Realta Fusion, a Madison company that spun off from the University of Wisconsin in September has more modest goals — modular reactors that within a decade could supply abundant energy for heat-intensive industries like plastics and fertilizer manufacturers, oil refineries and other companies that need massive amounts of heat for their processes.

Madison nonprofit to offer payday lender alternative

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Wisconsin residents who borrow from payday lenders face some of the highest costs in the nation, according to a 2022 Pew study. The head of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul’s Madison branch discusses its upcoming microloan program as an alternate to traditional lenders. And J. Michael Collins, a UW-Madison professor, talks about the state of Payday lending in Wisconsin.

Historic gains for low income workers during pandemic at risk with end of pandemic policies

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Wisconsin Public Radio

During the pandemic, the income gap actually started to get smaller after decades of stagnating wages for low income workers and faster, bigger gains for the wealthy. But the end of pandemic policies may put these gains in jeopardy. Timothy Smeeding,  a professor of Public Affairs and Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains.

Assembly lawmakers look at allowing pharmacists to prescribe birth control

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Wisconsin Examiner

“As a pharmacist who works in a rural primary care clinic, I’ve seen how challenging it can be for patients to get in for an appointment with their primary care provider,” Marina Maes, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy said. “The provider schedules are booked two to three months out, which limits patients’ access to timely and convenient care from trusted health care professionals.”

Wisconsin state government is struggling to retain employees. Here’s how that affects veterans, state services

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Over the last several years, state workers have been leaving their jobs at higher rates and those jobs are remaining unfilled for longer than they typically do. The analysis shows that turnover and vacancy rates for state workers outside of the University of Wisconsin System rose to record levels in fiscal year 2022, with 16.4% of the 28,000 employees leaving their jobs, including 10.2% who left for voluntary reasons other than retirement.

In addition, 5,770 full-time positions, or 17.7% of the total authorized positions in state government outside of the UW System, were vacant as of June last year.

2 Madison-area companies get federal money to help curb climate change through fusion energy

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Wisconsin State Journal

Realta Fusion, a fusion energy startup founded in the fall of 2022, received $12 million from the federal government and other organizations to design a magnetic bottle device that could help reduce the reliance industries that make common materials like plastic have on fossil fuels, Realta said.

That company was spun out of a two-year project at UW-Madison led by physics professor Cary Forest, who is Realta’s co-founder and chief scientific officer. The money for that project — $10 million — came from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Project’s Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E program.

As Wisconsin continues to lose dairy farms, a national dairy group hopes to make milk more profitable

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: “A lot of things obviously have changed in 15 years, including a lot of cost increases particularly for things like labor and for utilities,” said Chuck Nicholson, an ag economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “So it has become harder and harder to use that old value to accurately represent what it takes to transform a pound of farm milk into a certain amount of cheese.”

Changes to federal financial aid formula would make college more costly for some Wisconsin farm families

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Emma Vos spent much of her childhood feeding calves and milking cows on her family’s 120-herd dairy farm. Now, she’s a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying agriculture business management with plans to run the family farm in Maribel, just south of Green Bay, after graduation.

As working parents, Madison couple created Pound of Ground to solve ‘what’s for dinner’ problem

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Noted: As the test batches for their ultimate quick meal starter grew and they got more serious, they worked out of the USDA-inspected meat processing facility at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Meat Science and Animal Biologics Discovery building. Initially, the Meyers tested the market in Madison and Milwaukee. Last year, JBS bought the brand and product name, allowing the Meyers to grow to national distribution.

Tom Still: New hub for ‘responsible’ innovation tests science, technology

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Wisconsin State Journal

Exploring the boundaries and limits of innovation in an age when breakthroughs are happening at a startling pace is among the goals of the Responsible Innovation Hub, a new center within the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery on the UW-Madison campus. It’s an effort to examine how different disciplines — scientific, technical and business — can better work together for society.

The politics and economics of the debt limit standoff

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Wisconsin Public Radio

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned lawmakers earlier this month that the federal government could default on its debt by June 1st. We examine the political options available for Republicans and Democrats, as well as the potential economic consequences of failing to increase the debt limit. Interview with Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Weather station expansion seeks to aid Wisconsin farmers

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Noted: Thanks to more than $3 million in grant funding, the University of Wisconsin-Madison now plans to establish 90 sites to monitor weather and soil conditions throughout the state by fall of 2026. The state currently has 14 weather stations.

Chris Kucharik, a UW-Madison agronomy professor, is overseeing the university’s effort to build the new network. He recently joined Wisconsin Public Radio’s “The Morning Show” to discuss how more weather and soil reports could be used and how researchers will decide where to build the new stations.

Survey: Value of Wisconsin farmland continues to climb in 2023

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Wisconsin Public Radio

A report from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension found the average price of agricultural land sold in the state last year was $5,551 per acre. That’s 11 percent higher than in 2021 and nearly 24 percent higher than in 2020.

Heather Schlesser, the Extension agriculture educator who prepared the report, said the sustained increases trace back to the cash farmers received from federal COVID-19 assistance programs. She said at the same time, many farmers decided it was the right time to sell land.

“It’s all about give and take, supply and demand,” she said. “There’s not a lot of ag land out there. So if there’s more money out there and there’s less land, the farmers that are selling are going to want more for it. So I think that started driving it.”

Report: Child care in Wisconsin can be more expensive than attending college

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Spectrum News

Noted: Data from the Department of Children and Families’ 2022 Child Care Market Rate Survey showed that in Milwaukee County, the average annual child care cost for a 4-year-old is $12,142; for an infant, it’s $16,236.

Comparably, the annual tuition cost at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2022 to 2023 was $9,273.

Buildings continue to rise in Milwaukee while its finances dry up. What explains a tale of 2 cities?

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The potential Milwaukee and Milwaukee County sales taxes that could be implemented under the Assembly bill would not be without consequences, said Andrew Reschovsky, professor emeritus of public affairs and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“You don’t pay attention if you have plenty of money,” he said of the increased prices that come with a sales tax. “But if you’re having trouble getting through the month, those extra pennies can make a big difference.”

A better whey? Researcher wants to convert cheese byproduct into eco-friendly plastic

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Wisconsin Public Radio

John Lucey, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research, wants to turn whey into the chemicals used to make plastics, adhesives and other consumer products that are currently being derived from petroleum. Just like our reliance on oil and gas, Lucey said the chemical building blocks made in oil refineries are holding us back from a greener future.

“We’ve got to replace those too unless we want to keep using fossil fuels,” he said. “These basic chemistry kinds of things, the stuff you would have learned in organic chemistry like butanol — we want to make those kinds of compounds because they can feed into the existing industry.”

Four things to know about some of the most overlooked educators in Wisconsin: child care workers

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Appleton Post-Crescent

Family child care providers make an average of $7.46 an hour, while center-based teachers make an average of $12.99. Both make less than the average Wisconsinite with a high school diploma, according to research by Alejandra Ros Pilarz, an assistant professor at the Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

She found poor wages and lack of career advancement opportunities are top reasons why 18% of family child care providers and 28% of ECE teachers plan to leave the field within a few years.

State lawmakers proposed solutions to the state’s housing crisis. Here’s what to know

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

These changes would cut back on delays and roadblocks that drive up prices, said Kurt Paulsen, professor of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Housing dies a death of a thousand cuts because every change, every delay, just adds costs,” Paulsen said.

Wisconsin has seen several hospital mergers in the last year. How could they affect patients?

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Ashley Swanson, associate professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said hospital mergers — on average — increase prices, while having a negligible effect on patient care.

“It seems like they primarily increase prices when the merging hospitals are located close to one another,” she said. “But there is some relatively new evidence suggesting that cross-market mergers can sometimes increase prices as well.”

Wisconsin ‘prime working age’ labor force participation among best in the nation

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Wisconsin Public Radio

The rate at which Wisconsin’s “prime working age” adults are either working or looking for work is among the best in the country, according to a recent report from the University of Wisconsin-Extension.

“It speaks a lot to our work ethic,” said Matt Kures, the report’s author and a community economic development specialist for UW-Extension. “Traditionally, we have had high participation rates and I think that’s just kind of ingrained in us.”

According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average cost of infant care in Wisconsin is $12,567 annually, or $1,047 per month. Laura Dresser, associate director of the COWS economic think tank at UW-Madison, said women in the workforce feel the effects of that most.

“Moms tend to carry the burden of care disproportionately in families,” she said. “The years before the kid goes to school … are really expensive years to work.“

This Green Bay business wants to help commercialize an innovative way to recycle plastic

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Green Bay Press-Gazette

Noted: Green Bay is poised to become the home of the first commercial STRAP plant, which would take these kinds of plastics and make them into materials that can be used again.

This is done through a process called STRAP — which stands for solvent-targeted recovery and precipitation — developed from early work done by undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Now, George Huber, a professor in chemical and biological engineering at UW-Madison, is leading a team at the Center for Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics, or CUWP, working to take STRAP from the lab to a commercial setting.

The center is funded by a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and is made up of people from UW-Madison and five other universities, a national laboratory and more than 20 industrial partners.

UW-Madison hopes for further computer and data sciences innovation as new building starts

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Wisconsin State Journal

A “ground blessing ceremony” — which couldn’t accurately be called a groundbreaking ceremony, as a pit already exists where two former maintenance buildings stood — was held Tuesday, with university officials celebrating the growth of the school and emphasizing the importance of data analytics to UW-Madison and society going forward.

“That is what I’m most excited about this building and what we’re doing here,” Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said Tuesday. “To solve real, important problems in the world, so often we must engage across. We can’t do that if we’re siloed. We can’t do that if we’re wearing blinders.”

Wisconsin kids could see a curfew for social media use under proposed legislation

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Wisconsin Public Radio

It’s also not clear that social media use contributes to young people’s emotional struggles, said Heather Kerkorian, who researches the effects of media on children’s development and family interactions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“If we look at individual kids, some kids might benefit a lot from social media, some might be harmed by social media and most of them are not affected much,” Kerkorian said.

Wisconsin businesses want more workers, but barriers prevent many from joining the labor force

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Laura Dresser, associate director of the COWS economic think tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said another approach could be addressing the issues that prevent people from joining the workforce, like child care, transportation and mental health.

“The central question is: Do we support workers and … (build a) system that supports their engagement in the labor market, and, therefore, economic development in our communities? Or do we try and pretend that there’s just a lot of lazy people?” Dresser asked.

Why we celebrate: Essayists offer reasons for hope from Wisconsin, birthplace of Earth Day

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Greg Nemet continues the tradition of environmental scholarship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison through the La Follette School of Public Affairs, studying energy, climate change and public policy. He says despite a gloomy international report, the capacity to tackle problems has never been greater:

“If there were ever a time to have optimism about our collective capacity and will to address climate change, this is it.  This idea was threaded through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which emphasized that we can still effect transformational change that could stave off the worst possible outcomes and lead to a sustainable, equitable world. Globally, we’ve made considerable progress in a broad range of technologies that are making the transition to a low-carbon economy more affordable and feasible than ever.”

Froedtert, ThedaCare plan to merge, hope to launch combined health system by end of 2023

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Wisconsin Public Radio

In December, University of Wisconsin-Madison Economist Alan Sorensen told Wisconsin Public Radio that mergers may give hospitals more leverage in negotiations with insurance companies.

“Those negotiations are enormously important for the bottom lines of these companies,” Sorensen said at the time. “A lot of times what’s driving the mergers is that (hospital systems) feel like if they’re bigger, they’ll do better in those negotiations, they’ll have more bargaining power, they’ll be more indispensable to the insurance company.”

Video games as educational tools

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Wisconsin Public Radio

The Field Day Lab in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research is creating online video games to be used as learning tools for students. We talk to Sarah Gagnon, creative director for the Field Day Lab in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the UW–Madison School of Education, about their latest games and how they work.

Following PFAs from toilet paper to the Great Lakes

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Wisconsin Public Radio

The growing research into PFAs contamination finds sources in everyday consumer goods like toilet paper and traces PFAs into Green Bay and the Great Lakes. We talk to Christy Remucal, is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and the director of the Water Science and Engineering Laboratory at UW-Madison, about where we’re finding PFAs in Wisconsin’s waters.

Business group pulls pro-Kelly Supreme Court ads featuring a rape victim’s case

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Ads are rarely pulled in races even when they’re really controversial,” said Michael Wagner, a University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism professor who directs the school’s Center for Communication and Civic Renewal.

“It’s not common for a candidate to ask for an ad to get pulled. But it’s uncommon for it to happen in a race,” Wagner said.

Economic impact of federal spending on Wisconsin veterans rivals the state’s beef farming industry

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Noted: A report from University of Wisconsin-Extension found that while the number of veterans in Wisconsin is declining, spending on veteran services by the U.S. Department of Veterans Administration, or VA, is increasing.

Steven Deller, a professor of applied and agricultural economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the report, said those funds return federal tax dollars to the state and inject money into local economies.

“We tend to lose money to Washington,” Deller said. “Making sure that the veterans that are in the state are taking full advantage of all the benefits that are offered to them is one way of getting some of that money back into the state.”

How the Gun Became Integral to the Self-Identity of Millions of Americans

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Scientific American

University of Wisconsin–Madison researcher and assistant professor Nick Buttrick studies the psychological relationship that millions of Americans have with their guns. Buttrick’s research builds on the historical record to show that in the U.S.—the only country with more civilian firearms than people—white Southerners started cultivating the tradition of the home arsenal immediately after the Civil War because of insecurities and racial fears. During the rest of the 19th century, those anxieties metamorphosized into a fetishization of the firearm to the point that, in the present day, gun owners view their weapons as adding meaning and a sense of purpose to their lives.

Scientific American spoke with Buttrick about the psychological roots of the gun culture that has contributed to the more than 100 mass shootings that have occurred in the U.S. so far this year.

The Catch-22 for Working Parents

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The Atlantic

Quoted: If the U.S. is unwilling to help unemployed parents, then it should make a far greater effort to ensure that parenting and work are compatible. Expanding funding for the child-care-subsidy program to meet the needs of eligible families would be a great place to start, said Alejandra Ros Pilarz, who studies working families with low incomes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We have to look for solutions both on the child-care side and on the employment side,” Pilarz said.

FTC proposes banning non-compete agreements for American workers

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Wisconsin Public Radio

The Federal Trade Commission has proposed banning employers from requiring workers to sign non-compete agreements. The FTC argues they suppress wages by $300 billion annually and prevent 30 million Americans from pursuing career opportunities. Martin Ganco, a professor in the Department of Management and Human Resources at the Wisconsin School of Business and an expert on non-competes, joins us.

Tyson Foods plant closure raises antitrust concerns among US farmers, experts

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Reuters

Noted: The planned closure of the plant has left dozens of Virginia chicken growers scrambling to find new buyers in a region with few other options. It could also expose Tyson to fines under the century-old Packers and Stockyards Act (PSA), the U.S. antitrust law requiring the minimum advance warning, according to Peter Carstensen, a professor of law emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School who previously served in the antitrust division at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Energy Update: Microgrids might be part of our future solution to power grid problems

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Wisconsin Public Radio

We talk with Giri Venkataramanan, the Keith and Jane Morgan Nosbusch professor of electrical and computer engineering at UW-Madison and director of the Wisconsin Electric Machines and Power Electronics Consortium, about the state of the U.S. power grid, the influence of climate change on its future and a solution being explored at UW-Madison.

Why some lawmakers want to raise the FDIC insurance limit for your savings

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CNN

It would also help eliminate the incentive for large depositors in banks we all share to take their money out at signs of unease, said J. Michael Collins, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who focuses on consumer finance.

“When we know that those big depositors won’t make a run and take all the money out, then we’re guaranteed we can get our much smaller amounts back,” Collins said.

What’s happening at the Foxconn site in Wisconsin five years after the company announced its plans

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

It signed an $100 million agreement with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and several local agreements to build “innovation centers” in Racine, Green Bay and Eau Claire. However outside of signing the agreements, not much else has been done.

The $100 million agreement with UW-Madison is to create the Foxconn Institute for Research in Science and Technology and a new interdisciplinary program in the College of Engineering.

Wisconsin layoff notices up from this time last year, showing signs of possible economic slowdown

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Despite unemployment remaining low, Laura Dresser, associate director of the COWS economic think tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said increased layoffs are tied to the Federal Reserve’s efforts to curb inflation by raising interest rates.

“There’s federal policy focused on trying to cool economic growth,” she said. “I think it’s also the case that the economy remains — in spite of that — quite robust in terms of demand for workers. The unemployment rates are staying low and new workers are coming into the labor market.”

Steven Deller, professor of agriculture and applied economics at UW-Madison, said it remains to be seen whether the economy will experience the “soft landing” the Fed is hoping for.

“The debate is not whether or not the economy is going to slow down, it’s whether or not we’re going to go into a recession or not,” Deller said. “And the general consensus is that we probably are going to go into a recession. The debate really is, how severe will it be?”

Tomah Health, UW-Madison look to address rural pharmacist shortage through hands-on program

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WKBT

A new program for UW-Madison pharmacy students looks to help address a rural shortage while giving students a hands-on experience.

In May 2021, UW’s School of Pharmacy began the Advanced Pharmacy Experience rotation. The program rotates students in their fourth year into rural pharmacies to practice under the supervision of a pharmacist preceptor.