Jason Fletcher, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said during the early 20th century, producers of tree crops like apples commonly used the chemicals when preparing for an emergence.
“Because cicadas are known, when they’re coming and where they’re going to be in general terms, certainly in the past, farmers tried to protect their crops by dousing everything with pesticide,” he said.
We Wisconsinites who value the natural world and outdoor recreation hold Aldo Leopold in especially high esteem.
Not only was Leopold a pioneering ecologist, forester and author who profoundly influenced the modern conservation movement, but he spent much of his adult life in the Badger State as a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and cultivator of his family’s “shack” on an old farm near Baraboo along the Wisconsin River.
The study, conducted by UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health researchers, was funded in part through a partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook. The company, according to UW-Madison, played no role in the study’s design, analysis or reporting.
There’s a farm in the little town of Arlington, 20 miles north of Madison, that looks and smells like any other Wisconsin dairy operation. Its 550 cows are milked twice daily, once before dawn and again in the afternoon, like they are at thousands of dairy farms across the state.
But at this farm — the University of Wisconsin’s Agricultural Research Station — when a cow eats, gets milked and burps, a data point is created. That data collection is helping researchers at UW-Madison adapt Wisconsin’s herd to the challenges of climate change.
Mental illness isn’t just a pervasive problem in the U.S.—one in five adults experience it each year, per the nonprofit National Alliance on Mental Illness—it’s also an expensive one, costing the economy $282 billion annually. This, according to a new study by economists at Yale and Columbia universities and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A study conducted in December by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center found 17% of state residents would support a sandhill crane hunting season while 48% oppose the idea.
The work, funded by the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo and the UW-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, was the first controlled, science-based look at public support for crane hunting in the state. It polled 2,769 members of the UWSC’s WisconSays survey panel.
The study, conducted by UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health researchers, was funded in part through a partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook. The company, according to UW-Madison, played no role in the study’s design, analysis or reporting.
New research from UW-Madison shows smartphone use could have benefits for young people.
Written by Mariel Barnes, an assistant professor with the La Follette School of Public Affairs. Her research examines everyday forms of violence against women, gender, and the politics of the welfare state.
Director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Insect Diagnostics Lab PJ Liesch received the first reports of Brood XIII cicadas in Wisconsin this year out of the Lake Geneva area just over a week ago. With some of the best-documented historical cicada activity in the state, Lake Geneva could very well be Wisconsin’s “bug central” this summer. Residents have already shared photos of cicadas covering tree trunks, sidewalks and other surfaces.
The Main Street Agenda is a project designed to focus on the issues Wisconsinites rank as most important heading into the 2024 election. The topics come from a survey of nearly 4,000 residents conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Survey Center in partnership with the La Follette School of Public Affairs.
While researching a book on ruffed grouse in the late 1980s, I discovered that scientists from the University of Wisconsin had similarly identified a parasite (Dispharynx nasuta) that they hypothesized was causing populations of the woodland gamebird to decline.
Now, Matt Minich and Megan Moreno at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have gone further, showing a positive association with smartphones. They enlisted 253 children in the US to take part in a six-day study, sending them 30 short surveys via text at random times between 9am and 9pm.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the state’s Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory used milk samples collected from infected cows on farms in New Mexico and Kansas.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are partnering with the Friends of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and the National Park Service to launch the buoys. It’s a relaunch of a program that was discontinued last year because of a lack of funding.
Researchers with the University of Wisconsin-Madison are looking to take 3D printing out of this world, successfully manufacturing computer components in zero gravity.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Texas A&M Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Laboratory gave droplets of raw milk from cows that were infected to five mice. On the first day they showed signs of sickness, according to the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“Don’t drink raw milk — that’s the message.”Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led a study that added to existing evidence that unpasteurized milk may bring a risk for bird flu in mammals, including humans.
The research, conducted by the University of Wisconsin–Madison, involved feeding raw milk to mice and stimulating different approaches to pasteurization, which uses heat to inactivate pathogens in milk, to see whether they could grow active virus from the heat-treated samples.
That’s actually worse because of the waste. True. It also raises questions about whether nudging has any effect or benefit in the long run. Now, marketing academics Evan Polman from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Sam Maglio from the University of Toronto have done some research into this and written about it in the Wall Street Journal.
In the end, though, the main takeaway from our research is that nudges may be a great first step. But that’s all they are: a first step. Much of the hard work is what comes next.
-Evan Polman is an associate professor of marketing and Kuechenmeister-Bascom professor in business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sam J. Maglio is a professor of marketing at the University of Toronto.
UW–Madison’s Kevin Lawrence Henry Jr., an assistant professor in the School of Education’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, has been working to improve educational outcomes for underserved students and shares his experiences and recommendations.
“Studies have shown that students who were engaged in longer periods of distance learning or virtual learning fared far worse than some of their counterparts,” he explains. “And that particularly hurt Black and brown students in the state of Wisconsin.”
Yes, but: Further research is needed to confirm their findings and University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Ellen Zweibel, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an accompanying editorial that the modeling was “highly simplified,” but “sure to inspire future studies.”
The mission, called PREFIRE, short for Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment, includes two shoebox-sized satellites or ‘cubesats’ to find out how much heat Earth’s polar regions radiate out to space and how that influences our climate. University of Wisconsin professor, and principal investigator for the mission, Tristan L’Ecuyer spoke to Corin Dann.
University of Wisconsin Law School professor Sumudu Atapattu discusses how the idea of environmental justice applies to people and communities whose basic needs are affected by the changing climate.
A study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus John Fleming published in 2017 found that “potentially favorable MRI outcomes and immunoregulatory changes were observed” in patients who ingested whipworm eggs, “however, the magnitude of these effects was modest, and there was considerable variation among the responses of individual subjects.”
WARF Therapeutics’ portfolio includes innovations tied to “theranostics,” a term for delivery of radioactive drugs that can be diagnostic and therapeutic in the same dose. In short, it’s about pinpoint targeting of potentially malignant cells for both diagnosis with one drug and destruction with another.
“A climate haven is the idea of a place that’s a refuge or a safe spot from the impacts of climate change,” said Steve Vavrus, the state climatologist and co-director of the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts.
University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences professor Ankur Desai and his lab conduct ecometeorological research, a cross-pollination of meteorology and ecology. At Seven Seeds Farm, they investigate how cattle farming on silvopastures impacts climate.
In a new study published in the journal Psychological Science, Nedergård and colleague Gary Lupyan from the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to investigate whether this lack of inner voice—which the duo have named anendophasia—could affect how people solve problems and retain information.
Citizen science projects could help map the Wisconsin locations of noisy but benign cicadas and far less welcome ticks. Entomologist Phil Pelliterri explains what researchers hope to learn.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) released eight satellite images of the storm on Tuesday, photographed by the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) fleet early Saturday.
Jackie McCarville is a regional dairy educator for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension in southwestern Wisconsin. She also feels like concern around avian flu has died down, especially as many farms begin work in their fields this spring.
“But I think it’s still in the back of a lot of minds: what happens if it does get into Wisconsin?” McCarville said. “What considerations should we be looking at? It’s a great time to look at your biosecurity plan to see what you can do to protect your farm.”
Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, said much of the national dairy industry has been opposed to doing more testing for the virus on farms. He said the number of avian flu tests in cattle across the country has actually declined since the federal order requiring them went into place.
Trish O’Kane calls herself an “accidental birder.” After surviving Hurricane Katrina in 2005, O’Kane moved to Wisconsin with her husband to start a new chapter. She had spent years as a human rights journalist in Central America and was now setting her sights on a Ph.D. in environmental natural resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A paper on the research – which also involved scientists from Case Western University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the Rhode Island School of Design – was recently published in the journal Advanced Materials.
KP.1.1 and KP.2, nicknamed FLiRT (pronounced “flirt”), are considered omicron variants, said University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of population health sciences Ajay Sethi. The “FL” and “RT” in the name refer to the mutations present in the variants that allow them to evade some of the immunity people have built up from past infections or vaccines.
The milestone transplant excites Dr. Anna Gaddy of the Medical College of Wisconsin and Dr. Didier Mandelbrot of UW Health who work with patients living with chronic kidney disease.
“The burden of chronic kidney disease in the United States is just enormous and the vast majority of people with chronic kidney disease don’t know that they have it,” Gaddy said.
The connection between humans and dogs has long been studied by researchers in fields like anthropology and psychology—but not by many economists. Interview with David Weimer, author of a new book that studies human-canine relationships through an economic lens.
We talk to authors of new book “Chasing the Stars,” James Lattis and Kelly Tyrrell, about the history and astronomical impact of the Washburn Observatory on the UW-Madison campus.
Dr. Sterling Johnson, a study author who leads the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention at the University of Wisconsin, said it would be very important for clinical trials to start to take participants’ APOE4 status into account.
Dr. Keith Poulsen, director of the UW-Madison Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, has been monitoring a strain of avian influenza called H5N1 that has so far been identified in dairy cows in nine states. It has not been found in Wisconsin, but Poulsen said researchers are testing cows that are transported across state lines.
Beth Olson, an associate professor of nutritional sciences in the Department of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recently spoke to WPR’s “Central Time” about
A meteorite found in Wisconsin 15 years ago is now on display at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Geology Museum.
Months later, molecular testing revealed the culprit: human metapneumovirus (HMPV), one of a collection of viruses that presents in people as a common cold but is “a well-known killer” in our closest primate relatives, says Goldberg, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. More than 12% of the community that Stella belonged to died in the outbreak. Others were lost as a result of being orphaned. “Stella had a baby that was clinging to her body for a while after she died,” Goldberg says. “The baby subsequently died.”
Representation for people of color has been steady over the years – books for children and teens that have Asian representation are up from an estimated 2.9% in 2002 to 11.7% in 2023, according to research by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center.
The announcement Tuesday from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force makes official a draft recommendation announced last year. The recommendations were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Several University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers aided in the study, including UW School of Medicine and Public Health professor Amy Trentham-Dietz, who’s the lead author of the study.
An innovative program at UW-Madison is connecting communities throughout Wisconsin to education, outreach, technical assistance and research to help local governments solve challenges and improve livability and wellbeing.
PJ Liesch, an entomologist with the Division of Extension at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said defoliation could slow the growth of trees that may be logged for lumber. From a forest health perspective, it could also leave them vulnerable to secondary pests like the two lined chestnut borer. The insect, a native relative of the invasive emerald ash borer, typically targets weaker oak trees and starts killing branches in the upper canopy.
With spongy moth increasing for several years now, Liesch said there’s a lot of stressed oak trees. “So the secondary insects and problems can start popping up, and then it’s a very slippery slope leading to tree death in some situations,” Liesch said.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison are leading a new nationwide hub for school mental health grants.
Katie Eklund, Stephen Kilgus and Andy Garbacz are in charge of METRICS, a new center dedicated to addressing students’ mental health needs. They’re co-directors of the School Mental Health Collaborative, under UW-Madison’s Department of Educational Psychology.
These critters might also be known as May bugs, June beetles or even screen-thumpers, depending on where you live, and are characterized by a reddish-brown or almost black color, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Fewer construction workers means less — and slower — residential construction, which in turn leads to higher home prices, according to a 2023 report from researchers at the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
With Colorado becoming the ninth state to confirm bird flu in dairy cattle last Friday, Wisconsin farmers are becoming increasingly concerned about the spread of the highly contagious H5N1 avian influenza virus.
It’s having a deep impact on the labor force. According to a 2023 report from High Roads Strategy Center, part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin’s women labor force participation dropped below 60% for the first time since the late 1980s.
“Our relative (workforce) advantage shrank quite substantially over the last two years,” said Laura Dresser, associate director of High Roads Strategy Center. “We know that child care has been in crisis, even before the pandemic. Our structures for taking care of kids tend to weigh heavily on women and on women’s work.”
In their paper, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Wehner and co-author James P. Kossin of the University of Wisconsin–Madison did not explicitly call for the adoption of a Category 6, primarily because the scale is quickly being supplanted by other measurement tools that more accurately gauge the hazard of a specific storm.
Susan Carpenter, native plant garden curator and gardener at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum, told WPR’s “Central Time” that Wisconsin’s native bees have different ecological functions and needs than domesticated honey bees.
UW-Madison professor John Rudolph says instead of focusing on jobs and college prep, educators should teach what science is and establish trust in scientists. Rudolph joins us to discuss his book “Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should).”
Column by Menzie Chinn, professor of Public Affairs and Economics in the UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs and Department of Economics.
A key difference between the two monkey trials was that in the 2009 study, conducted at the University of Wisconsin, the calorie-restricted animals only received one meal a day and the researchers took away any leftover food in the late afternoon, so the animals were forced to fast for about 16 hours. In the 2012 study, run by the National Institute on Aging, the animals were fed twice a day and the food was left out overnight. The Wisconsin monkeys were the ones that lived longer.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is hosting Earth Fest this week to promote sustainability and pay tribute to the mission of Earth Day’s founder.
