Consolidation continues to be the biggest factor shaping the number of farms in the state, according to Steven Deller, agricultural and applied economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“If you’re in your mid-60s, it just doesn’t make sense to be operating a dairy farm with 150 cows,” he said. “That’s demanding work, that’s really hard labor, and you hit a certain point where you just say, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers are studying whether a drug used for organ transplant patients could slow aging in humans.
Some compelling evidence in recent decades shows rapamycin — also known as sirolimus — can increase the quality and quantity of life in animals, said Adam Konopka, a UW-Madison assistant professor of geriatrics and gerontology.
“This got people really excited that maybe this drug could be used to improve human healthy longevity,” he said.
A few years ago, a small baker from the West Coast had a problem. A day or so after baking chocolate chip cookies, the chocolate chips would develop an unpleasant white haze. Confused, she reached out to Richard Hartel, a professor of food science at the University of Wisconsin.
Hartel studies foods like chocolate and ice cream, and he gets questions like this all the time. So what was going on with those chocolate chips?
The bill is “is a Band-Aid to stop the bleeding,” said Ryan Poe-Gavlinski, director of UW-Madison’s Restraining Order and Survivor Advocacy Clinic. She said it could fill a critical funding gap until lawmakers figure out a long-term solution.
But the number of victims in need of services is continually on the rise. Wisconsin broke records for domestic violence-related deaths in 2024.
“We’re going to always have victims who need assistance, and there’s just not enough people to help the victims,” Poe-Gavlinski said.
Political experts have said it’s possible, but not likely, congressional candidates will run on new maps this year.
“I think it’s not impossible, but a court would really have to give dedicated attention to the case and prioritize it over others,” Barry Burden, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the university’s Elections Research Center, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last month. “There would just have to be a kind of rapid-fire set of events to get through all those steps in time for the 2026 cycle.”
Still, University of Wisconsin Law School professor and co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative Rob Yablon noted, “it’s conceivable” the plaintiffs in the case brought by Elias Law Group will push for a speedy process. The plaintiffs’ attorney, Julie Zuckerbrod, argued during a scheduling conference that the case could in fact be decided in time for the 2026 election.
“They try to make you scared by making you feel like you’re the victim, and they’re calling to help,” said Rick Wash, professor of information science at the University of Wisconsin, in a phone interview. Wash is a computer scientist who researched the possibility of electronic breaches two decades ago. He then began mixing his vast technical knowledge to focus on the personal side of the scam.
“I began to realize the human factor was often the most critical factor of computer scams,” Wash said.
“Oh, no,” lamented Sarah, “Is it going to happen again?” She was responding to the possibility that her partner, Joshua, would lose his temper once again, which was a frequent occurrence. She did not trust him, and the result was anxiety, leading to sleeplessness, worry, and irritability. Research reviewed by Tomlinson and Mayer (2009) supports the view that mistrust can be accompanied by anger and fear. Joshua’s temper and Sarah’s response of anxiety were affecting their relationship.
Written by Robert Enright, Ph.D., a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Research by Ben Fisher, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor who reviewed 32 evaluations of school-based police programs, found some students say they feel safer with police in their buildings while others say a police presence makes students more attuned to a sense of danger and some see police as a source of violence.
Yi Fuxian, an obstetrician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an expert on Chinese demographics, said during an interview with the Financial Times: “The decline in China’s fertility is inevitable, like a giant rock rolling down a hill. China’s one-child policy accelerated the process. It will be very difficult to move it back up hill.”
Last year, around 300,000 Wisconsin residents qualified for and used the enhanced subsidies, said Dan Sacks, associate professor of risk and insurance with the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It’s just going to be a lot harder for many people to get coverage,” he said.
“It is exciting to bring back something so impactful and reimagine it for a new audience,” said König-Tarasevich, a professor of flute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
According to experts, the average person who works for tips could save up to $1,300 on their taxes.
“But in practice, $25,000 in tips is a lot of tips to be receiving, and so very few people are going to find themselves in that situation,” said Ross Milton, an associate professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Some people who even who receive tips, might not really be saving anything because they may not really have too many people who receive tips, actually don’t have enough income to pay a significant amount of income taxes.”
Avtar Roopra’s research has effectively stalled since President Donald Trump started his second term and upended the federal research funding landscape. Agencies have cut projects, delayed grant reviews, fired thousands of federal employees who offer guidance to researchers and reduced the number of new projects getting funding.
“This is like the Holy Grail of epilepsy, what we’ve been looking for for hundreds of years,” Roopra said. “All of it is on hold. It’s extremely frustrating.”
“The court is very clear that the Constitution gives no authority to the president to do any of these things, and that federal law doesn’t either,” Derek Clinger, a senior staff attorney with the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative, told Votebeat.
Experiments by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison show that viruses and bacteria behave differently in near-weightless conditions. In space, they develop genetic changes not typically seen on Earth.
Lead study author Dr. Phil Huss, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, noted that interactions between viruses that infect bacteria — known as phages — and their hosts play an “integral” role in how microbial ecosystems function, per the SWSN report.
States have broad power to regulate within their borders unless the U.S. Constitution bars it, but many of these laws raise novel issues that courts will have to sort out, said Harrison Stark, senior counsel with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
“There’s not a super clear, concrete legal answer to a lot of these questions,” he said. “It’s almost guaranteed there will be federal litigation over a lot of these policies.”
Federal officials may be prosecuted if they “acted beyond the scope of their duties, violated federal law, or behaved in an egregious or unwarranted manner,” Bryna Godar, an attorney at the State Democracy Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin Law School, wrote in a brief explainer.
States have broad power to regulate within their borders unless the U.S. Constitution bars it, but many of these laws raise novel issues that courts will have to sort out, said Harrison Stark, senior counsel with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
“There’s not a super clear, concrete legal answer to a lot of these questions,” he said. “It’s almost guaranteed there will be federal litigation over a lot of these policies.”
Vatsan Raman never expected he would send a research experiment to outer space.
“This is like a box that’s sitting on our lab bench one day, and the next day it’s on a rocket that’s going up to (the International Space Station). … It was really quite surreal,” said Raman, an associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The organization is set to provide $206.9 million in total support to UW-Madison and the Morgridge Institute for Research this school year, including $50 million toward research projects and nearly $36 million for faculty, graduate students and staff.
Now in its second century, the nonprofit faces challenges, though. The Trump administration’s widespread cuts to federal research funding could limit the number of discoveries coming to WARF.
To better understand how microbes may act differently in space, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studied bacteriophages — viruses that infect bacteria, also called phages — in identical settings both on the ISS and on Earth. Their results, published recently in the journal PLOS Biology, suggest that microgravity can delay infections, reshape evolution of both phages and bacteria and even reveal genetic combinations that may help the performance against disease-linked bacteria on Earth.
“Studying phage–bacteria systems in space isn’t just a curiosity for astrobiology; it’s a practical way to understand and anticipate how microbial ecosystems behave in spacecraft and to mine new solutions for phage therapy and microbiome engineering back home,” said Dr. Phil Huss, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the study’s lead authors.
Her family still in Iran has chosen to join the latest wave of anti-government protests, which are largely focused on the country’s soaring inflation.
“There are very few people in the United States who can wrap their mind around an inflation rate of 42%,” said James Davis, a professor emeritus in the College of Engineering at UW-Madison.
Franciska Coleman, an assistant professor of constitutional law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said the First Amendment places firm limits on when speech can be treated as disorderly conduct.
Coleman said courts usually look for evidence of incitement – a call for immediate lawless action – before speech can be punished as disorderly conduct.
“Here, there’s no advocacy of lawless action, period,” Coleman said. “So, it’s hard for it to meet the incitement standard.”
Other categories of unprotected speech, such as threats or “fighting words,” also do not appear to apply here, she said.
“Data centers are a new issue that has not taken on a partisan edge in the public mind,” Barry Burden, a political science professor at UW-Madison, said. “This is likely to change because among politicians Democrats are more skeptical about data centers and Republicans are more enthusiastic about them. If this partisan divide continues or even becomes sharper, the public is likely to begin mimicking the positions taken by party leaders. But at least for a while the issue is likely to cut across party lines.”
Red light therapy, sometimes called photobiomodulation, applies specific wavelengths of light (usually around 630 nanometers) onto your skin. These wavelengths can penetrate two to three millimeters below the skin, and cause positive reactions in the cells just under your skin, says Dr. Apple Bodemer, a board-certified dermatologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
There aren’t a lot of high-quality scientific studies available, and many of the red light therapy studies are funded by companies that make red light products, which should be taken with a grain of salt, says Bodemer. But there seems to be enough evidence that red light therapy may be helpful for some people, she says.
Co-authored by Tony LoSasso, the Robert F. and Sylvia T. Wagner Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Barry Burden, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the Elections Research Center, noted, generally, there simply aren’t many districts that Republicans can win and that are “swingable.”
“There aren’t very many competitive districts, whether we’re looking at the period before this latest round of mid-decade redistricting or since some states have put new maps in place,” said Burden. “Either way, there just aren’t very many districts that are truly up for grabs.”
Written by Maryellen MacDonald, a professor emerit of psychology and language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “More Than Words: How Talking Sharpens the Mind and Shapes Our World.”
Quentin Riser pursued academia, earning a PhD and eventually joining the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s School of Human Ecology, where he studies child development and family outcomes. Quinlan went into the financial world, spending nearly a decade at Principal Financial Group before becoming a financial advisor and later leading an insurance business.
“It’s designed to be a two-generational book,” Quentin Riser said. “The kids are going to ask their parents, ‘Mom, Dad, what is estate planning?’ And if the parents don’t know, they’re going to have to go look that up.”
“Rare earths” is a misnomer, as the elements are relatively ubiquitous in the Earth’s crust, according to Julie Klinger, geographer and associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. But extracting them and refining them is the difficult part.
“Federal officers do not have absolute immunity for actions taken on the job but they do have some immunities,” said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
The idea behind the concept of immunity for federal officers is to prevent a situation where states could grind the federal government to a halt by commonly arresting its agents, Godar said, but the protection is not absolute if the facts of the case support that the officer was acting unreasonably.
Federal courts have sometimes blocked state prosecutions under that provision, out of concern that state authorities are using their prosecutorial power to frustrate the federal government from legitimately exercising its own powers, according to Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.
Godar wrote in the Lawfare legal publication that federal courts have repeatedly blocked state prosecutions when the federal official was reasonably carrying out lawful federal duties. But, outside those circumstances, courts have allowed the prosecutions to go forward.
“In many cases, the federal officer may ultimately walk away with immunity. But not always,” Godar wrote.
Co-authored by rofessor in the Information School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Chiara Cirelli, a neuroscientist who researches sleep at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved with the new work, tells Nature that she was impressed by the study. “Every time somebody adds to the list of species that sleep, it is a very important step for the field,” she says.
But, for comparison, she wishes the researchers had kept some of the creatures awake after inducing the DNA damage to their neurons. She wonders if similar DNA repairs might be taking place while the creatures are awake but not actively learning.
“The legal standard basically is that a federal officer is immune from state prosecution if their actions were authorized by federal law and necessary and proper to fulfilling their duties,” said Robert Yablon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Yablon, who is the faculty co-director of the school’s State Democracy Research Initiative, said state prosecutors would have to consider both state and federal laws to overcome the hurdles of immunity. They would first need to show a violation of state statutes to bring charges, but also that the use of force was unconstitutionally excessive under federal law.
“If the actions violated the Fourth Amendment, you can’t say those actions were exercised under federal law,” he said, referring to the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.
David Drake, a forestry and wildlife professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, likens them to America’s “sacred cow.” As Drake and a colleague have outlined in a paper proposing a model for commercialized venison hunting in the U.S., any modern system would be fundamentally different from the colonial-era approach because it would be regulated, mostly by state wildlife agencies. But powerful coalitions of hunters and conservationists remain both faithful to the notion that wild game shouldn’t be sold and fearful that history will repeat itself.
John P. Gross, a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Law who has written extensively about officers shooting at moving vehicles, said while more departments have added explicit policies regarding use-of-force and moving vehicles, officer training also needs to improve.
“If this woman was blocking the street and a law enforcement operation, they are entitled to arrest her. What they are not entitled to do is to use deadly force to arrest her,” Gross said. “From just watching the video, this seems like an egregious example.”
While conflict can feel messy, it’s not a sign something is broken. According to Hernando Duarte, farm labor outreach specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it’s a reality of farm work.
“In labor-intensive environments like farms and other agricultural operations, conflict between employees [and family] can happen,” Duarte explains. And on farms, that friction is hard to avoid.
“Conflict doesn’t have to be a negative thing,” Duarte says. “When handled properly, it can lead to stronger communication, better teamwork and long-term improvements and innovation.”
“It is unprecedented,” said Allison Prasch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who studies presidential communication. “I really tried to use that word sparingly, because everything is unprecedented, but I think that’s apt.”
Trump has shifted from a foreign policy approach that advertised military interventions as a way to deliver freedom and democracy, done in conjunction with other western nations. On Wednesday, U.S. officials announced its plans to sell Venezuelan oil as news outlets reported a crackdown on dissent by the government the United States left in place.
“Just try to imagine George W. Bush standing up and boldly proclaiming that he has started this war because of the oil alone,” Prasch said in an interview.
The high court ruling is narrow, according to Bryna Godar, an attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. The ruling finds that “most matters relating to judicial disqualification [do] not rise to a constitutional level,” Godar noted in an email to WPR.
“Typically, state supreme courts provide the final word on attorney discipline proceedings. But where an attorney raises federal constitutional issues, like due process, that can in some cases open a path for federal court involvement,” Godar wrote.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have unlocked a potential new treatment to target an incurable form of childhood cancer with the help of a fast-reproducing pest known for swarming kitchen produce.
Professors Melissa Harrison and Peter Lewis used fruit flies to to study how cellular pathways are misregulated by a cancer-causing mutant protein. The pesky bugs were perfect lab subjects for the project because two-thirds of the cancer-causing genes in humans are shared by fruit flies.
The effort is somewhat comparable to solving a modern serial killer mystery by looking for the same DNA across different crime scenes, says John Hawks, an anthropologist and a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who was also not involved in the study.
“If you can find the same DNA pattern on paintings, drawings or even places connected with Leonardo,” he says, “you would have some confidence you are looking at his genome—even without being able to find genealogical relatives today.”
Paul Mitchell, chairman of the Agricultural and Applied Economics program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said many farmers weren’t prepared for the drop seen in soybean prices in recent years, and the tariffs compounded the situation.
“It creates a lot of uncertainty,” he said. “That’s the effect of these trade wars.”
In 2025, the Universities of Wisconsin had another packed year.
The fallout from the Trump administration canceling students’ visas, federal funding uncertainty for research, the closure of a branch campus and downsizing of another, the rollout of new policies faculty called controversial and campuswide budget cuts at UW-Madison are just a few of the moments the State Journal covered.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison class started the fall semester with a big question to tackle: Which families are opting not to enroll their children in the Madison school district, and why?
After a semester of conducting background research, analyzing data and reaching out directly to Madison families for interviews, one key finding was that nearly 1,600 middle and high school students open enrolled out of Madison schools into another public school district over the last three years — with white families being the most likely to leave.
“Low wage folks were saying ‘the minimum wage is going up, but my groceries are going up, my rents going up. Like I don’t necessarily have more left over, right?’ And so, raising the wage is a big political deal, but it’s only one tool we have to help people deal with the rising cost of living,” said Callie Freitag at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Using fruit flies, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are uncovering a new way to think about treating an aggressive and deadly form of childhood brain cancer.
By understanding how different proteins affect genetic mutations in the flies’ wings and eyes, the researchers say it could lead to new ways to silence genes behind the disease
Written by Steve Ackerman and Jonathan Martin, professors in the UW-Madison department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.
Research suggests that even if you don’t actually meet up with someone or send them an email or text, it can be enough to simply send good thoughts their way. “You can start with a simple appreciation practice,” Cortland Dahl, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, previously told HuffPost. Just bring a friend or loved one into your mind, then consciously focusing on the things you really cherish about them.
Nedergaard and her colleague Prof Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the US, decided to explore the potential effects of lacking inner speech, recruiting people who scored low on a questionnaire with statements such as “I think about problems in my mind in the form of a conversation with myself.”
By coining the term ‘anendophasia’ – from the Greek an (lack), endo (inner) and phasia (speech) – Nedergaard and Lupyan hope to create a similar keyword that will help to catalyse research into those lacking inner speech.
“They could draw the districts as they wanted, and they went to town,” said Barry Burden, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the university’s Elections Research Center. “They were very successful in drawing districts that advantage their party in the state Legislature and in the congressional districts, but they also wanted the process to be different if there was going to be litigation.”
A common quip about nuclear fusion is that the technology is perpetually 30 years from deployment. Fusion research has not been funded to the same levels as other, already-realized clean technologies like solar, wind and fission, but new billion-dollar investments signify interest is picking up.
University of Wisconsin-Madison fusion spinoff company Type One Energy aims to bring nuclear fusion to the grid within a decade, backed by funding and a physics-based model.
Despite the proposed changes, Wisconsin wetlands are likely to fare better than most states. A 2001 law provided robust protections for isolated wetlands or those that aren’t directly connected to streams and rivers, said Steph Tai, a law professor with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School.
“Anyone who’s looking to fill in wetlands within Wisconsin is still going to have to go through permitting through our DNR,” Tai said.
Julie Klinger, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin who studies extraction and resource frontiers, says these things deserve more scrutiny. “Particularly as we’re moving into a time where there is much more overt taxpayer-funded support of critical mineral mining and processing projects, the taxpayer does need to have quite a bit more information,” she said.
Established in 1960, the center says it provides “state-of-the-art resources, including supercomputers, research aircraft, sophisticated computer models and extensive data sets” to the atmospheric and related Earth system science community. It’s funded through the National Science Foundation.
Among other things, the center has helped improve early warnings in weather forecasts and air safety, the American Meteorological Society said in a statement.
The marquee race in this battle for control over Wisconsin’s government is the gubernatorial race, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden.
“It feels as though either party could win that race. And statewide races for governor have been very close in recent years, and it’s likely to set the tone for everything else on the ballot,” Burden said.
UW Health’s Med Flight also started a whole blood transfusion program last year. Dr. Ryan Newberry, assistant medical director for UW Health Med Flight, said around 90 patients have been given over 160 units of whole blood in the first year of the program.
Launched in February, the lab is a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. It provides an opportunity for students from across the university to try emerging technologies — including AI, blockchain and virtual reality — and use them to potentially solve real-world problems.
“I love it because I see students progress remarkably,” said Sandra Bradley, the lab’s executive director. “When you give them a lot of … space and then hand them things that they need, the magic happens.”
