Mariel Barnes, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of public affairs whose research has focused on the effects of the “manosphere,” says that the latest survey results were to be expected, as she has seen “a pattern of continued misogyny and patriarchy through multiple surveys in last decade,” she says. “I think social media plays a huge role and needs to take a lot of responsibility.”
Some young people are using chatbots “to test out being flirty or being romantic or being a little bit sexy and seeing how the chatbot responds to that,” Megan Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies technology and adolescent health, told me.
That kind of experimentation may be more common among boys, who generally engage in more risky behavior online than girls, Moreno said.
Bamboo is more absorbent and “can hold more moisture without feeling wet, compared to cotton,” Majid Sarmadi, textile expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.
So are these sheets actually bamboo? Technically, yes. They’re made from the bamboo plant, but that’s not the full picture. Sarmadi compared the process of creating bamboo rayon to making spaghetti noodles. “When you make spaghetti, it is 100% wheat, but it’s in a different shape,” Sarmadi said. In short, you grind wheat into flour, then mix it with other ingredients to create dough. So, think of bamboo cellulose as wheat. There are different ways to extract and treat it, but the cellulose eventually becomes the yarn you weave into fabric. The result is far different from bamboo stock, but it’s still part of the origin.
The link to mental health also has a physiological basis that researchers like Dr. Charles Raison are trying to understand.
“High heat administered for a time-limited period is an antidepressant and a pretty good one,” says Raison, a professor of psychiatry and human ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Regular guests and wildlife specialists Jamie Nack and David Drake are back to tell us about the return of migratory birds, coyotes in towns and cities, research on foxes and more. They also answer your questions about wild animal sightings and behavior.
:The bigger and broader your network is, the earlier you’re going to get data and direct access to global outbreak intelligence and alerts,” said Janis Tupesis, a Madison public health official and a global health expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “That is super beneficial to the state.”
Wisconsin currently has 274 licensed hemp growers, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Last November, that number was 470.
The decline could be due to people waiting to see how the law plays out and if the loophole will close or not, said Shelby Ellison, an agricultural professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It might be clearer in another month how many people reapply for licenses through the USDA.
UW-Madison Data Science Institute associate professor Anna Haensch raised concerns with the potential electrical demands of data centers. In 2024, Wisconsin’s peak demand was 14.6 gigawatts, and the Wisconsin Policy Forum expects it to increase about 17 gigawatts by 2030.
Additionally, Haensch emphasized the need to separate hyperscale data centers from the broader cultural narrative surrounding artificial intelligence.
“Connecting data centers so explicitly to AI has made these projects almost untenable,” Haensch said, noting that AI is often framed in apocalyptic terms.
“The siting study includes looking at nuclear energy systems, anything from similar to today’s reactors that are operating to a variety of advanced reactor concepts, including microreactors and other smaller reactors, as well as fusion energy systems in the future,” said nuclear engineering professor and department Chair Paul Wilson.
Researchers can’t definitively say whether any of the men buried in the Kazakhstan mausoleums were related to Khan because they “still do not have a reference genome from Khan’s true relatives,” says lead author Ayken Askapuli, an integrative biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to the Badger Herald’s Allison Hayden.
“It’s going to hang in that $18 to $19 per hundredweight price for 2026. It doesn’t look like it’s going to rebound very strong this year,” said Aerica Bjurstrom, a regional dairy educator with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension. “Everybody has a different breakeven point; that’s not breakeven for a lot of dairy producers. It’s going to be a tough year.”
Political science professor emeritus Howard Schweber of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said several factors play into why students are protesting.
One of those factors is that ICE raids have taken place near schools. In some school districts, teachers have been arrested and students have disappeared. In some areas of Minneapolis, schools have had to switch to remote learning because students feared ICE raids, Schweber said.
UW-Madison School of Education professor Erika Bullock describes how the daily necessities of life — from family and food to housing and health — can impact how children learn in classroom settings.
Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said this race is drawing less money and attention than recent cycles, in part because the ideological balance of the court is not at stake this time.
“It looks this year like at least some conservatives have kind of thrown in the towel and have said this is not a race that we’re likely to win. So they’re really putting their efforts into the fall election, especially in the governor’s race behind Tom Tiffany,” Burden said.
“Colorectal cancer is the number two most common cancer in the United States,” Dr. Noelle LoConte, M.D., said. “It is decreasing, but not fast enough.”
University of Wisconsin-Madison President Edward Birge did not want the university to be known as a dancing school.
But after physical education instructor Margaret H’Doubler began teaching dance classes in 1918, that’s the direction things were headed. Hundreds of students signed up each semester, and H’Doubler and her students were being invited to colleges and universities across the country to share their methods.
Birge took away H’Doubler’s travel privileges, to no avail.
“It was too late. Other institutions were inviting H’Doubler all the time, and if she couldn’t come to them, they would come to her,” said Andrea Harris, professor of dance history and Buff Brennan faculty fellow in dance at UW-Madison. “The interest outweighed any pushback that there was at that time.”
“It’s a huge problem,” UW-Madison journalism professor Katy Culver said about the sheer volume of artificial intelligence-fueled misinformation online. “It predates AI, but AI is making the information more believable for a lot of people.”
On Feb. 25, UW Madison assistant professor of Latin American and Caribbean History Jorell Melendez-Badillo shared his research on Puerto Rico for UW’s premier history honor society, Phi Alpha Theta.
Puerto-Rican superstar Bad Bunny understands the importance of Puerto Rican history and is incorporating it into his music, which is currently the most streamed in the world. Melendez-Badillo’s study of Puerto Rico is so comprehensive that Bad Bunny himself reached out for assistance for his Grammy-winning album “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” after reading his work.
Melendez-Badillo shared how he was asked to provide a historical lens for the album as a public historian. His main task was to create 17 historical narratives to accompany the songs’ YouTube visualizers, from “conquest to present.” These videos reached a massive audience, with the video for the “DtMF” alone reaching 115 million views.
“It’s hard to control the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, right, at the local level. But you can think about the things you can control,” says Zach Feiner, a fisheries biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Maybe that means you make different harvest decisions. You keep fewer walleye. Maybe you decide to go fish for something … more resilient to harvest like a largemouth bass or bluegill that are more of a warm-water fish.”
James Davis, a UW–Madison professor emeritus who studies Iranian politics, said speculation about regime change overlooks key political realities inside Iran.
“Coming back to the present, at this time, there is no recognized opposition movement. There is no recognized leader,” Davis said. “So, if the current regime were to collapse, what would take its place? At this time, we have no idea. I don’t know. The U.S. government doesn’t know. The CIA doesn’t know. Nobody knows.”
“I only recommend devices that are cleared by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). FDA-clearance indicates that the product was submitted to and reviewed by the organization,” says Dr. Apple Bodemer, a board-certified dermatologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Milwaukee School of Engineering came out on top, which apparently did not sit well with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Two UW-Madison economists dove into earnings data by program. Their recent report, “Degrees of Deception,” found their university came out on top for the most majors of any Wisconsin school. But this point of pride was obscured in the overall rankings because the university offers some lower salary-producing programs that MSOE doesn’t offer, such as music and social work.
Dorota Grejner-Brzezinska, a board member and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s vice chancellor for research, expressed concern that fewer solicitations will lessen junior faculty’s ability to receive awards that jump-start their careers. She also said the agency’s practice of frontloading the funding of previously multiyear grants further reduces how many researchers receive grants in a year.
A study led by a University of Wisconsin researcher shows the first empirical documentation of digital voter suppression on social media and foreign election interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The study was published Jan. 26 in the official journal of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
Historically, people valued the ice for other reasons. “There’s a long history of ice harvesting in this region,” says Hilary Dugan, a limnologist — someone who studies inland waters — at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “So [there was] just a lot of commercial activity on these lakes, cutting blocks of ice out of the lakes all winter.”
Beyond Lake Mendota, Ho-Chunk ancestors left their mark on the landscape through a massive collection of effigy mounds used for gathering, ritual and burial, with at least 4,000 remaining throughout Wisconsin. Today tourists can visit the roughly 200 mounds in Madison, and take the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s First Nations Cultural Landscape Tour – a walking tour that explores upwards of 12,000 years of human history (running between 1 March and 30 November).
“I think the tours are so important for campus,” said Omar Poler, an Indigenous education coordinator in the Office of the Provost and a member of the Sokaogon Chippewa Community. “They’ve changed the way that UW-Madison sees and understands its own place,” Poler notes, adding that this is especially true of the tour guides.
The Weather Guys return to talk about the back-and-forth forecast we had at the end of the month. They also talk about Groundhog’s Day and the latest news about the Paris Climate Agreement.
“They don’t solve the long-run problem of higher input costs and low prices; they are a Band-Aid to get us through this short-term problem,” said Paul Mitchell, the director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Agriculture professor and economist Steven Deller, also of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had a similar view.
“We’re hemorrhaging thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, and they’re giving us pennies,” Deller said, adding that farmers want “fair markets” and a “level playing field.”
R. Alta Charo, professor emeritus of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said proving causation is “incredibly hard” and would make it very difficult to win such a case.
Co-authored by rofessor of environmental medicine, and djunct associate professor of Population Health Sciences, both at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The preparation of this year’s guidelines deviated from the past years’ processes, according to associate professor in the University of Wisconsin Department of Food Science Brad Bolling.
“There was a new scientific review process that didn’t follow the established public accountability and measures that typically the dietary guidelines goes through,” Bolling said.
The revised guidelines are lacking review and thought, retired senior clinical nutritionist of UW Hospital and Clinics Donna Weihofen said. The adaptation of the guidelines into effect is scary, given the existing controversy behind them, according to Weihofen.
The layout and suggestions presented in the new guidelines also confuse Weihofen. The graphic is completely flipped, and the placement of whole grains, an important source of fiber, on the bottom is a confusing choice, according to Weihofen.
“Fiber is really an important part of our diet … so to put that at the bottom of the pyramid doesn’t seem to make nutritional sense,” Weihofen said.
“Health risks are increasing because human-cause climate change is already upon us. Take the 2021 heat dome for example, that killed (more than) 600 people in the Northwest,’’ said Dr. Jonathan Patz, a physician who directs the Center for Health, Energy and Environmental Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The new climate attribution studies show that event was made 150-fold more likely due to climate change.”
“We are often so externally focused that we don’t recognize what is going on in our minds, and when we begin to pay attention to that, it’s genuinely exhausting for most people,” Richard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin psychologist who studies meditation. It also can make us more anxious, at least at first.
Sara Richie, who works to promote aging-friendly communities as the Life Span program manager at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, said it’s important for communities to be inclusive and healthy places for older residents.
“(The community groups) are ensuring that people have an opportunity to lead fulfilling and connected lives and have access to the things that they need to age in place,” Richie said. “They provide an opportunity to celebrate the strengths and contributions of older adults, and have an infrastructure that supports them, and the services to meet their needs as well.”
“For schools that were looking for ways to provide cheap and nutritious meals for school children, one of the easiest ways to do that was just to provide milk, even before they were able to provide meals,” explained Andrew Ruis, research scientist in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the book “Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States.”
How Bad Bunny became the global voice of a generation in crisis — and what it means when resistance becomes profitable. Includes interview with Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a professor of Puerto Rican, Caribbean and Latin American History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s the author of Puerto Rico: A National History. He is also the author of the history visualizers for Bad Bunny’s DTMF album.
To get a clearer picture of what the Constitution says on this point – and what such a proposal might entail, Decision Points reached out to Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the school’s Elections Research Center.
“The U.S. Constitution gives the states the lead role in conducting elections,” Burden said. “Although the document also allows the federal government to set the regulations for administering elections, states are granted a lot of autonomy for running elections, even more if the offices on the ballot are not federal ones.”
It’s like the World Cup. The stadium is on edge, and a player kicks the ball, scoring the winning goal.
The crowd erupts.
But at UW-Madison in Morgridge Hall, the soccer stars are autonomous humanoid robots.
Josiah Hanna, a UW-Madison assistant professor of computer sciences, leads the university’s student RoboCup team, which uses artificial intelligence to teach soccer-playing robots humanlike behaviors, all while producing research to advance the field.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discussed ethical concerns stemming from the rise of generative artificial intelligence in academia and research at a Jan. 30 panel.
The panel, which included experts from the UW-Madison Data Science Institute, Libraries and Institutional Review Boards Office (IRB), provided recommendations for researchers, offering definitions and opportunities for ethical AI use in research.
Many people think that the amount they spend on a gift is directly associated with how much the receiver will appreciate it. But as long as it meets reasonable expectations, the people you are gifting are unlikely to care too much about how you spend, said Dr. Evan Polman, professor of marketing at Wisconsin School of Business at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He also focuses on gift-giving decision-making.
The goal of gift giving should be relationship maintenance, especially on a holiday so focused on love, and gifting an activity or experience you and your loved one can do together is a great way to spend quality time together while communicating your level of care, Polman said.
Birds have different kinds of feathers, and one type is especially important in cold weather: down feathers. These feathers are very fluffy and grow close to the skin, essentially acting like a thermal base layer. “Of the several types of feathers birds possess, down feathers are excellent at trapping body heat,” says Anna Pidgeon, professor of forest and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It is arguably harder today in 2026 than at any other time in American history to sue federal officials for money damages if they violate your constitutional rights,” said Harrison Stark, senior counsel at the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
The scribe who copied Phaenomena, which details how various constellations rise and set, onto the parchment integrated descriptions of the stars’ positions that were probably based on Hipparchus’ work. The celestial objects’ coordinate system and accuracy align with references to the ancient astronomer’s writings, reports Science News’ Adam Mann. “There’s an appendix which includes coordinates of the stars discussed in the poem, and then little sketches of the star maps,” Minhal Gardezi, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who is working on the project, tells the outlet.
Health officials confirmed a second measles case in Wisconsin earlier this week — this time in Madison — and one local expert says there’s a reason to be concerned but clear ways to stay safe and healthy.
The Cap Times spoke with Dr. Joseph McBride, an infectious disease specialist at UW Health, after public health officials reported a University of Wisconsin-Madison student contracted measles, likely through international travel, and potentially exposed people on campus.
Scott Craven, emeritus professor and UW Extension wildlife ecologist, joins us for another Wildlife Wednesday.
Tensions rose in discussion over a bipartisan bill that would require state agencies, including the University of Wisconsin System, to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism for any “law, ordinance or policy” when evaluating possible discriminatory intent at a Jan. 28 public hearing.
Daniel Hummel, a research fellow with the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on U.S. relations with Israel, said there has been increased “antisemitic rhetoric around campus” since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.
Dane County health officials continue to contact hundreds of people who may have been exposed to measles after a University of Wisconsin–Madison student tested positive for the highly contagious virus.
Public Health Madison & Dane County posted a growing list of exposure locations on its website, including several UW-Madison buildings such as Union South, the Genetics and Psychology buildings, multiple Madison Metro bus routes, Qdoba on Park Street and the Waisman Center.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Global Health Institute convened experts from around the world with UW-Madison faculty for a Jan. 27 webinar examining the growing complexities of infectious disease control.
The discussion, moderated by Daniel Shirley, an infectious diseases professor at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, brought together researchers working across human, animal and global health systems to address two converging crises: antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and declining childhood vaccination rates.
Clint Sprott, a UW-Madison physics professor who retired in 2008, started the show in 1984 as a free, public lecture. He still attends the show every year.
“[My] most favorite is seeing the smiles and enthusiasm of the audience,” Sprott said. “The show was a major part of my life for 40 years, and it is certainly fun to be something of a celebrity.”
Left unmanaged, deer can do a lot of damage in the UW Arboretum, which is why it hires sharpshooters who work after dark in winter to control the population.
“We do it to protect our plants, both in our gardens and in our natural areas,” said Michael Hansen, the Arboretum’s land care manager. “We also do it to maintain the health of the deer herd here.”
Written by Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
While there are still two months to go, it’s possible the race will stay muted because the stakes are different with no Supreme Court majority on the line, said Howard Schweber, a professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Neither outcome will change liberal control of the court, though because the winner will replace retiring conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley, it could extend guaranteed liberal control until at least 2030.
Even after 20 years of performing kidney transplants, Dr. Nikole Neidlinger is still awestruck and humbled by the role she plays between the donors and recipients of these organs.
“The operation takes two to three hours,” said Neidlinger, director of Organ and Tissue Donation at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. “When we attach a kidney and open it up to blood flow, it just starts functioning. I’ve seen it thousands of times now, but every time I’m like, ‘This is a miracle. This is amazing.’”
“There is no structural or blanket barrier to states bringing a criminal prosecution against federal officials,” says Harrison Stark, an attorney who works with the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.
“If a state believes that a federal official has violated state criminal law,” Stark says, “the state has broad Investigatory Powers to collect evidence, to explore that criminal action, basically in the same way they would against anybody else.”
Jake Baggott, associate vice chancellor & executive director of University Health Services, said UW-Madison has directly notified around 4,000 people who may have been exposed. Speaking to reporters on Monday, Baggott said immunization data voluntarily reported by students shows many are already protected against the virus.
“We estimate, based on our own data, that about 95 percent of our campus is vaccinated against measles, which is a good place to be,” Baggott told reporters.
On a clear, calm winter night, Earth’s surface radiates infrared energy upward toward space. With the sun already down, there is no shortwave solar radiation (and only a very little infrared energy from the overlying atmosphere) directed downward toward the surface. Consequently, with each passing second, the surface emits more energy than it receives and the surface temperature drops.
As it turns out, expanding our vocabulary as adults doesn’t work as it did when we were children in school, said Kelly Wright, an assistant professor of language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Young people can learn new words by doing reading exercises, acing vocabulary quizzes or listening to the grown-ups around them. But as we get older, we have to approach it differently.
“Our vocabulary grows to a certain point, but then there is something that turns off, in a similar way in which we grow from a child height to an adult height. Something kicks on in our femur, but we don’t end up 11 feet tall, and the same thing happens with our language system,” Prof. Wright said. “It doesn’t mean we can’t learn new things, but after you get past that point, you have to do it actively. Say ‘Hey mind! Wake up a little!’”
Minimum-wage hikes — depending on the size — can bring a mix of positive and negative economic consequences, according to Callie Freitag, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Social Work.
“The good thing is that earnings would go up for workers. Employers would raise wages and be able to pay workers more,” Freitag said. “But the money to pay workers more has to come from somewhere.”
“Because it’s not dependent on the wind or the sun, nuclear energy operates whenever we want it, pretty much,” said Paul Wilson, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But even if we have to shut it down for refueling, that is very, very infrequent. Nuclear power plants today around the country typically operate for 18 months without shutting off.”
Leaders in Wisconsin agriculture are warning the state’s farmers to brace for another tough year for trade and market conditions.
The discussion at the annual Wisconsin Agricultural Outlook Forum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison focused both on the economic hardships weighing on farmers and what some producers are doing to try to get ahead.
