What does the Madison school district need to ensure students, staff, the local workforce and the broader community are all thriving 10 years from now? That was the opening question Marcelle Haddix, dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, asked Tuesday at a sponsored Cap Times Idea Fest session about the district’s preparations for the future.
Network cameras filmed the president in the 1950s, when aides to President Dwight D. Eisenhower maintained editorial control of the footage, according to Kathryn McGarr, a media historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Could the key to understanding Alzheimer’s disease be hiding in your gut? In this fascinating conversation, Dr. Barbara Bendlin, PhD — Professor of Geriatrics and Gerontology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a member of the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Institute — breaks down more than a decade of groundbreaking research on the gut-brain connection.
Before students can solve a word problem or follow written instructions, they must be able to read.
And for many kids across the country, that’s a challenge.
“Most kids are really not proficient readers. And that’s been true in the United States for many years. It’s gotten a little worse recently,” said Dr. Mark Seidenberg, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor.
The Nation’s Report Card shows that only 31% of fourth graders are at or above the proficient level. Professor Dr. Mark Seidenberg says screen time and socioeconomic status contribute to this decline.
Over the past several years, gridlock between the Republican Legislature and Democratic governor’s office means election legislation in Wisconsin has hardly seen the light of day.
Timothy Paustian has tried everything to stop his students from writing essays with AI. When ChatGPT first came out, Paustian, a biology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, tested AI detectors that promised to flag machine-generated prose.
As solar power makes up a bigger piece of our electricity puzzle, there’s a worry about a trade-off, especially in rural areas: If we build more solar farms, are we losing land for crops? But University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists are asking the question: Why can’t we have both?
As a pulmonary physician-scientist who studies nicotine addiction and the health consequences of tobacco and nicotine products, I am concerned about claims that nicotine can enhance wellness, productivity and cognitive performance.
This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Prof. David Noyce, director of the Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory at UW-Madison.
Noyce, the executive associate dean and Arthur F. Hawnn professor of transportation engineering at the university’s College of Engineering, discusses the work being done around self-driving vehicles and other advanced technologies at UW-Madison.
Concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence have escalated after a former researcher at Anthropic and OpenAI wrote a viral social media post last week claiming that artificial intelligence could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”
“We’ve long suspected that your living environment affects your brain, but until now it’s not been proven at scale in clinical populations,” John-Paul J. Yu, MD, PhD, associate professor of radiology, psychiatry, biomedical engineering, biostatistics and medical informatics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s school of medicine, said in an RSNA news release on the findings. “We’ve shown very robust, measurable metrics that our living environment has an outsized impact on the brain at the molecular and cellular level.”
That’s according to Dr. Jonathan Patz, director at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Health, Energy and Environmental Research.
UW-Madison researchers will study thousands of brains to determine whether exposures to environmental toxins increases the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia.
“Constipation is one of the most common GI [gastrointestinal] symptoms people complain about, and it’s not uncommon for it to be related to a medication someone is taking,” says Mark Benson, MD, an associate professor of medicine and gastroenterologist at UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin.
About 3 million people in the United States live with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, or HFpEF. Unlike better-known forms of heart failure, HFpEF does not necessarily prevent the heart from squeezing normally. Instead, the heart becomes too stiff to fill properly and supply the body with enough blood during activity.
Dr. Nathaniel Chin was in residency when his father, Dr. Moe Chin, a family physician in Watertown, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2012. The elder Chin retired the next day, ending a 40-year career as a doctor. He died in 2018.
“He saw everyone in his clinic, from young kids to the elderly,” Dr. Nathaniel Chin said recently of his father on WPR’s “The Lee Rayburn Show.” “He was my introduction to health, wellness and providing care for people.”
The price of diesel is hitting record highs just when many U.S. farmers need it to power combines, tractors and other equipment to harvest two of the nation’s largest commodities, soybeans and corn.
The spike adds to an already tough year for these farmers, who also faced higher costs for fertilizer, seeds and equipment.
Diesel hit a record price in the U.S. on Sept. 4, soaring to an average of $5.85 a gallon for the first time as the six-month war with Iran disrupted the world’s flow of fuel. It has gone even higher since then, going for an average price of $6.05 a gallon on Friday, according to AAA.
As more students enter classrooms with no firsthand memory of the Sept. 11 attacks, educators are changing how they teach the events and their impact to a new generation.
The 9/11 attacks took place seven or eight years before most high school seniors were born.
Rosh Hashanah is often treated as a time to reflect on the previous year and focus on hopes for the coming year, according to Jordan Rosenblum, the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism and Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The new study, published in JAMA Health Forum last week by Zack Cooper of the Yale School of Public Health and National Bureau of Economic Research, and Stuart Craig of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business, analyzed state-level premium increases in the large-group, small-group and health exchange markets.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering team has developed a hybrid fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite “blanket” designed to reduce lightning strike damage and improve protective coverage on aircraft and other high-flying vehicles. The research was published in the June 2026 issue of Composites, Part B: Engineering.
NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe speaks with professor Jeremy Stoddard of the University of Wisconsin about how to teach the September 11th attacks to middle and high school students.
Questions: One of our readers awoke recently to some beautiful clouds in the summer sky and two excellent questions popped into her mind. First, what holds the clouds up in the air. And then what makes some clouds appear to be fluffy on top but flat on the bottom?
“There are so many things that happened after 9/11 that are still sort of affecting us today, but young people wouldn’t know what those are,” Stoddard said.
No high school students today were alive on 9/11. Increasingly, many teachers weren’t either. That’s changing how the attacks are taught, Stoddard said, with states taking different approaches to the required curriculum on the topic.
The lake is Peter Lake, a long-serving subject of one of ecology’s most patient experiments, and the person tipping pigment over the gunwale was Danny Szydlowski, a PhD candidate and CASC graduate fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Center for Limnology, working with a colleague, Dat Ha. Their account of the season, published on the Midwest Climate Adaptation Science Center blog on 22 January 2025, reads less like a triumph than a puzzle: the dye went in, the fertiliser followed, and the water still bloomed.
“PBMCs can be isolated clinically really easily, and they’re already used in the clinical workflow,” says Melissa Skala of the Morgridge Institute for Research and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, senior author of the study. “So, the question is, what can we get from them that we aren’t already getting?”
The Director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison), Jorge Osorio, added that it is important to think about the concept of “One Health (onehealth)”, which involves human health, environmental health, plant health, and animal health.
“At UW-Madison we work on the implementation of one health centers in different parts of the world“…where various disciplines are involved to address global health issues. We need to move forward with topics for the university, but also for industry, improve local capacities, and prepare for future pandemics,” he said.
Many Wisconsin orchards are preparing to open their fields to apple pickers across the state. But after a year of late frosts, drought and hail damage in some areas, many apple orchards are not expecting a large yield this fall.
Mark Christopher is an owner of Maple Leaf Orchard in Spring Valley. He said warmer temperatures in March and April caused the trees in his western Wisconsin orchard to start blooming earlier. When temperatures dropped again, it damaged the crop.
Dresser: “Inflation, the rate of inflation ,is higher than the rate of wage growth. This is what happened in 2022. Wages, workers’ wages, went up in nominal terms, but the cost of living just wiped that right out. That looks like what we’re heading into for 2026. So while we got a high in 2025 and that’s great news, 2026 looks much less likely that that will be a strong gain and possible that it will be a loss because of the high inflation.”
esearchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that Michigan’s EV policies place significant emphasis on expanding charging infrastructure and increasing EV adoption, but pay less attention to whether low-income residents can afford to participate in this transition.
“Access to an electric vehicle is not just the ability to buy a vehicle. It is access to the entire system that makes using that technology possible,” said Chelsea Schelly, a co-author of the study and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Jon Levine, dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine, told WPR that the college is currently maxed out on how many new students it can accept each year due to space constraints, but he is hopeful that the program will be able to increase enrollment in the near future.
“It’s the same physical phenomenon as fiber optics,” says Pupa Gilbert at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was not involved in the work. She does, however, study biomineralization (By-oh-min-er-al-ih-ZAY-shun). It’s how living things build structures out of minerals.
TOWN OF CHRISTIANA — Residents of this small farming community in eastern Dane County spent years fighting what was then Wisconsin’s largest solar farm.
They lost that fight, and now, the same developer is looking to add onto that project.
Chicago-based Invenergy, the nation’s largest private energy developer, filed initial paperwork with the Wisconsin Public Service Commission in June for a second solar farm that will sit on roughly 770 acres, about half the size of the first facility, in Christiana, a town of 1,235 about 20 miles east of Madison.
Question: Do all hurricanes have an eye?
Answer: Seen from space, a hurricane appears as a vast spiral of clouds stretching across hundreds of miles. Near the center of strong hurricanes is the eye, a roughly circular region of comparatively calm weather, light winds, and low pressure.
Efforts across the globe to kill gray wolves as a means of protecting domestic animals have had little to no known impact on preventing wolf-related deaths to livestock, according to a new study.
With Wisconsin in the midst of a yearslong debate over what protections, if any, should be applied to the estimated 1,200 gray wolves in the state, Adrian Treves, a professor of environmental studies at UW-Madison and co-author of the latest study, said his hope is the research helps guide public policy when the next debate over wolf populations arises.
With the current academic year now well underway, some Spanish-speaking and bilingual parents may worry about their children losing their “home” language as they interact with peers and participate in school lessons solely in English.
“I think that the real concern is that the clock is ticking,” said Derek Clinger, with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. “Really, any last minute change to mail voting procedures this close to the election could create a lot of chaos and confusion for election administrators and for voters.”
A Monday emergency opinion from the high court paused a lower court ruling that blocked parts of Trump’s March executive order directing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to create state lists of U.S. citizens eligible to vote. The order also directs the U.S. Postal Service to prevent mail-in ballots from going to anyone not on those lists.
According to our friends at the Marquette Law School, 19% of Americans say they can never trust the government while only 18% say they can trust the federal government to do what is right all or most of the time.
While the reasons for this crisis in confidence are many, as a leading public policy school, we recognize that many Americans — including many Wisconsinites — feel cynical about the government.
Question: Is it dangerous to fly through a thunderstorm?
Answer: Thunderstorms pose several hazards, whether you are on the ground or in the air, namely lightning, hail, turbulence, icing, downbursts and even tornadoes. Because of these potential hazards, planes don’t fly through thunderstorms. Instead, they fly around them.
From towering stalks of maize to floods of rice paddies and waves of golden-colored wheat, grass plants cover ecosystems around the world and provide more than 40 percent of the calories people consume.1 Researchers have long wondered how grasses became such successful plants and outcompeted other species to dominate the natural and agricultural landscape.
Thousands of people across Wisconsin are not keeping up with repayment of student loans. According to a Wisconsin Watch and AP report, more than 100,000 borrowers in the state carry loans that are in default, as defined by not making payments in more than 360 days. Collins said the student loan default rate is a bellwether for the overall economy right now given the cost of other obligations many people have.
Approximately 3 million people in the United States are living with a condition called heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, or HFpEF. The number of people with this form of heart failure, which is more common in women than men, is growing alongside a rise in risk factors like aging, hypertension, diabetes and obesity. Additionally, more than 80% of HFpEF patients also face pulmonary hypertension, or increased blood pressure in the vasculature of the lungs.
“It’s impossible to say there’s one cohesive feeling,” said Joel Coyne, a business and marketing teacher at Sun Prairie School District and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Teachers are going to have to reevaluate what are we teaching, how are we teaching and how we are assessing the learning.”
Hospital costs in Wisconsin are about 26% higher than in Illinois, according to a new study comparing the two states, but a hospital trade association questions the report’s methods and disputes its conclusions.
The reason for the difference isn’t certain, says the report’s co-author, University of Wisconsin economist Anthony Lo Sasso. But he says it could be because most metro areas in the state have one dominant hospital and healthcare system.
Violent outbursts are so common that they’ve been dramatized on the popular medical TV series The Pitt. “Emergency rooms right now are like a powder keg,” said Rachel Odes, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing.
The road to opening a copper-nickel mine in Minnesota is long and uncertain, but it’s a path Twin Metals is exploring every day.
Their exploratory drilling brings them further below the surface than 16 stacked Statues of Liberty, all to refine a plan to mine out the copper and nickel on the land here, if they ever get the proper approvals.
A pacemaker that never needs a battery replacement could soon become reality, thanks to a device that generates its own electricity from the very heartbeat it regulates. University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers built a nanogenerator small enough to slip inside an existing leadless pacemaker, potentially letting a single implant last a patient’s entire lifetime.
Led by postdoctoral scholar Pengfei Chen under professor Xudong Wang, the team designed the device to fit inside the Medtronic Micra, the most widely used leadless intracardiac pacemaker on the market today.
Watching a loved one with Alzheimer’s or dementia slowly lose their cognitive abilities can be heartbreaking. While the person you once knew seems to be slipping away, sometimes people with Alzheimer’s briefly seem like their old selves again. They may remember a long-forgotten name or suddenly regain the ability to have a fluid conversation. What do these moments of lucidity really mean for the progression of the disease? And what implications do they have for those living with the disease, and their caretakers?
Nearly a decade ago, University of Wisconsin–Madison professors Barbara Bendlin and Federico Rey led research showing that people with Alzheimer’s disease have different communities of intestinal microbes than healthy individuals.
“Since then, we’ve been trying to figure out how this difference in the gut perhaps leads to changes in the brain,” says Bendlin, a professor of gerontology in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
Across Madison and beyond, children are spending a significant amount of time on screens and social media.
While there are some benefits of devices, such as certain educational platforms, local families are expressing growing concerns about the harm of too much screen time and social media.
Now is the perfect time for students to start adjusting their sleep schedules before heading back to the classroom.
Dr. Casey Freymiller with UW Health Kids recommends slowly moving up a child’s bedtime and wake-up time rather than making big changes all at once.
Western Wisconsin desperately needs rain, but if you’re looking at your lawn this weekend and wondering whether firing up the mower will help or hurt, experts say the answer may be as simple as taking a walk.
If your footprints remain visible in the grass for more than about 10 minutes, UW-Madison Division of Extension says your lawn is showing signs of drought stress.
And you probably shouldn’t mow it.
That’s one of several recommendations from Wisconsin lawn experts as drought conditions expand across the state and rainfall remains well below normal in Eau Claire.
Recent Wisconsin Farm Related Fatalities reports indicate that injuries and deaths remain a persistent issue.
“This is incredibly unfortunate, given the many other challenges farm families and farm workers are facing here in this day and age,” said one of the reports’ co-authors, John Shutske, University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor and Agricultural Safety & Health Specialist. “We saw a high of 41 deaths in 2017. And, then a low of 28 in 2020, but climbing back in these last three years, we looked at around 30-35 deaths.”
The Democratic primary in Wisconsin is over, but the flattening of Asian American identities in Wisconsin politics is not. And this will likely continue as Francesca Hong, the first Asian woman who ever ran for governor in Wisconsin, continues to serve people in the state.
We discuss the Universities of Wiscoinsin’s latest budget proposals. Then, we hear from researchers about a study into people with dementia experiencing moments of lucidity. And we talk to the 17-year-old Wisconsin resident representing Team USA in the Pan-American Championship for MMA fighting.
“The absence of endorsements from AOC and Sanders was a bit of a warning sign because they had in fact been involved in state-level races elsewhere. Their backing would have given Hong more legitimacy as a candidate and made her platform seem more grounded,” UW-Madison Political Science Professor Barry Burden said in an email.
While much attention has been given to a gubernatorial race that turned rapidly from sleepy to tumultuous in its final weeks, Democrats emerged from Tuesday’s nailbiter primary election with a continued focus on flipping enough legislative seats to wield political power they’ve lacked for more than 15 years in Wisconsin.
Tuesday’s Democratic gubernatorial primary win by David Crowley was a big surprise.
The Milwaukee County Executive narrowly defeated democratic socialist Francesca Hong. Crowley will face Republican Tom Tiffany Nov. 3.
Hong had a groundswell of grassroots support, while Crowley dropped out of the race in July. At that time, Crowley was behind in the polls.
He jumped back in a week later, after Sara Rodriguez dropped out due financial mismanagement by a campaign staffer.
UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden spoke with WUWM’s Ann-Elise Henzl about Crowley’s turnaround.
iffany faces his own headwinds. For one, the party that holds the White House historically struggles in midterm election cycles.
“Tiffany is going to be hampered by that, and Trump is even more unpopular now,” said UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden.
