We talk with a member of the Governor’s broadband task force about hurdles to more people adopting the service. Then we discuss the tricky balance between managing pests and promoting pollinators. And a disabled UW student and advocate reflects on Disability Pride Month coming to a close.
Though Rust Belt states can be mapped out, Simeon Alder, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s not all about geography.
“It’s a set of industries that happened to be concentrated around the Great Lakes,” Alder said.
“Every time the numbers drift a little bit further down, it does worry me,” said Dr. James Conway, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the medical director of UW Health’s immunization program. “That means there’s that many more kids that are vulnerable.”
Howard Schweber, who for years taught political science and law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told WPR that Wisconsin once had a reputation for having “mostly apolitical courts, but that fell apart in the 2000s.” He said he believes the politicization of state Supreme Court elections started in 2007 with the election of conservative Chief Justice Annette Ziegler.
“It really took the Democrats Wisconsin a long while to realize that these were not your father’s judicial elections anymore, and they have indeed become highly politicized,” Schweber said. “Because, just as with the Supreme Court, people realize that if you can capture the court, you can promote your ideology in a very effective way.”
Karen Oberhauser, professor emeritus in entomology with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told “Wisconsin Today” this data on insecticides is “exciting” because it measures the impact humans have on monarchs and other species.
“A lot of people come up to me and say, they’re just not seeing as many monarch butterflies as they have in the past,” she said. “(This study) is really our ability to dig into the data and think about the changing practices in agriculture.”
When opposing politicians discuss immigration and crime, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Michael T. Light said they often “talk past one another.”
“Very often these tools can invent false facts,” said UW-Madison Assistant Professor Annette Zimmermann. “That’s very misleading and very dangerous, particularly in professions that impact a lot of people.”
Zimmermann researches the ethical implications of AI at UW. She says it’s crucial to give workers a seat at the table when making decisions about how to use AI.
Gregory Nemet, professor of public affairs at UW-Madison, and Morgan Edwards, associate professor of climate policy at the school, are two of the lead authors on the 222-page report. Titled “The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal,” it is the second in a series of annual reports and shows how steep the battle against climate change is.
In 1996, Congress added language to include the distribution of child pornography over the internet, not just the mail. This section is important to pay attention to, said Howard Schweber, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Let us assume, in the moment that Donald Trump wins reelection … a Trump Justice Department could choose to enforce the law and make it an actual crime to post on the internet any information about abortion,” Schweber said.
On a sunny fall morning, as he strolled to work along the Howard Temin Lakeshore Path near the Memorial Union, Jake Vander Zanden looked into the water and noticed something you don’t typically see in October: the beginnings of an algae bloom. The director of the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Center for Limnology was both fascinated and concerned.
“That’s really unusual — even for Lake Mendota, which has a lot of algae blooms — to see significant blooms late in the season,” Vander Zanden says. “We’ve been seeing that more lately.”
Somesh Jha, a computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison researching artificial intelligence, said the rapid development of AI is expected to lead to more efficiencies in the workplace. But he said it could also lead to job losses in some industries, as well as lead to the creation of new jobs.
He praised the task force for taking on “questions, like, ‘okay, what are we doing now that can be done much more efficiently using AI? And what new positions which we might need, given that new capability?’”
Madison is one of the most populous areas of the country where the local transit agency is run entirely by a city, according to Chris McCahill, managing director of the State Smart Transportation Initiative housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Madison Metro is not necessarily in a sustainable position, especially as we face population growth,” McCahill said. “But that is true of all major transit agencies across the country.”
County fairs around the state have already gone through the additional testing requirements for avian flu this summer. The Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory has received nearly 400 samples every week since June, according to director Keith Poulsen.
Poulsen said they could accommodate more tests, but there hasn’t been the demand.
Murv Seymour talks with Stephen Kantrowitz at the Wisconsin Historical Society about his writing on Black and Indigenous struggles, the politics of racism and the importance of learning about history.
The Weather Guys, Steve Ackerman and Jon Martin, are back to put into context just how hot and wet this summer has been in Wisconsin. They’ll also explain why more severe weather events are becoming the new normal.
A legislative study group has been formed to discuss the future of the Universities of Wisconsin. We talk to two committee members, a state senator and a UW-Green Bay professor, about what’s at stake for higher education in Wisconsin.
There is a limited number of weather reporting stations in Wisconsin, leaving some areas like New Berlin in data gaps.
A new weather station network run by University of Wisconsin-Madison is hoping to change that. It is called WiscoNet and New Berlin just got one of the newest weather stations.
Mauriel Rodriguez Curras and UW-Madison ecology professor Jonathan Pauli collected DNA from foxes’ and martens’ scat and hair to investigate spatial, dietary and behavioral habits before wolves were introduced, within the first year of introduction and as packs coalesced on the island.
“Repeated messages tend to be stickier than things you only see once,” Dr. Michael Wagner, director of the Center for Communication and Civic Renewal at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The Daily Cardinal. “Seeing the same kind of misinformation over and over, is more likely to have a sustained effect on somebody’s attitudes.”
The Wisconsin turkey reintroduction was a partnership of the DNR and NWTF. Tom Yuill, a University of Wisconsin professor and wildlife disease expert, provided health testing of the birds.
Christine Remucal, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UW-Madison, graduate student Sarah Balgooyen and other researchers looked at foam and surface water samples collected between 2020 and 2023, from areas across the state.
As a graduate student at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wicks created ice cream that doesn’t melt even after four hours at room temperature. While her concoction isn’t ready for consumption, her work could change the way we eat, store, and transport the beloved dairy treat.
Barbara Bowers, a long-term care researcher and professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing, said she is “astounded” by the medical complexity of the people in assisted living today.
“They look a lot like, 10 years ago, the people in nursing homes,” she said.
“I just always wondered: Does the money really get where they’re telling me it’s going?” Grimm asked Public Investigator. “Do they get a tax break?”
The short answer is yes and no.
Yes, the money customers donate at the cash register does go to the appropriate organization or cause, said Ross Milton, assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and tax expert.
“Assuming that they are following the law,” Milton added. And no, businesses can’t receive a tax break for donations raised by customers, Milton said. If the donations aren’t made with the business’s money, it can’t collect the tax benefits, Milton explained.
Jeffrey Hadachek, a UW-Madison economist who studies agriculture, called the case a milestone in the state’s oversight of a growing sector in farming. Nationwide, researchers estimate 90% of American livestock is now raised at a CAFO with each having over 1,000 animals.
“This sets a precedent, not only for the DNR, but for the public in general that these are cases which can be brought forward,” Hadachek said. “These regulations, laws and policies are in place for a reason.”
A partnership led by the Great Lakes Intertribal Food Coalition and the University of Wisconsin-Madison received $10 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Sustainable Agricultural Systems program earlier this summer.
It used to be that mainstream news media would develop narratives about who candidates were, and those narratives shaped attitudes about the candidates. But social media has upended that model, according to Michael Wagner, a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We have two candidates who use social media well, but in different ways: Trump uses it to get attention. Harris uses it to shape attitudes,” Wagner said.
Co-authored by Morgan Edwards, an assistant professor with the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison. She also leads the Climate Action Lab and holds an affiliation with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Zachary Thomas is a graduate student in UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and member of the Climate Action Lab.
Jaime Goldberg, a clinical assistant professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has observed the growth of green burials throughout her decades of hospice social work. Green burials were slowly added to pamphlets she shared with patients.
Allison Prasch, a UW-Madison associate professor of rhetoric, politics and culture, said Harris will likely seek to highlight the contrast with Trump in coming days.
“More than anything I think she is going to really lean into the broad concerns about what another four years of a Trump presidency would do to institutions of U.S. democracy, and make a case that we can be concerned about issues and policy, but also now is the time for unity amongst the Democratic Party to fight together to defeat Trump.”
UW-Madison’s Shawn Robinson shares his journey with dyslexia and creation of the “Doctor Dyslexia Dude” comic book superhero.
For the first time, a fusion device at the University of Wisconsin in Madison has generated plasma, inching one step closer toward using nuclear fusion as a a new source of carbon-free energy.
The university’s physicists and engineers have been building and testing the device at a lab in Stoughton for the last four years, which is referred to as the Wisconsin HTS Axisymmetric Mirror or WHAM. The magnetic mirror device became operational on July 15.
A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists has taken a major step toward creating a clean, reliable and powerful source of energy.
Four years in the making, it is part of a broader approach to using nuclear fusion energy that, unlike existing nuclear technology, does not create large amounts of radioactive waste.
“In the short run, I think it trips up the Republicans, who have had a really wonderful week (with the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee),” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.”(Biden’s) age, his feebleness, his mental capacity, those were the things that the public had major concerns about. … that’s now gone as an issue.”
For the first time, a fusion device at the University of Wisconsin in Madison has generated plasma, inching one step closer toward using nuclear fusion as a a new source of carbon-free energy.
“It seems like Biden has released (the delegates from their pledges). He didn’t say that formally, but they’re also not formally bound to him,” Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the university’s Elections Research Center told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
UW Madison Cybersecurity Expert Dave Schroeder says this was not a security or cyberattack, but it left many vulnerable.
“You don’t have to be a CrowdStrike user or customer to be impacted by this.”
“When I first learned of this, my initial reaction was, here we go again, another major IT incident,” said Dave Shroeder, a cybersecurity expert at UW-Madison. “You wouldn’t expect a routine software update to cause such a severe issue.”
“It does seem like we have an awful lot of them out and about this year,” said P.J. Liesch, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab.
Known on social media as “The Wisconsin Bug Guy,” Liesch grew up in Wisconsin and has worked at the lab for about 10 years.
“The suddenness with which this announcement was made, the lack of preparation or ceremony and the lack of institution that is there aren’t senior Democratic Party leaders making this announcement or gathering with him somewhere. It wasn’t a press conference. The almost casual way it was done feels very personal, very much like he woke up this morning and said, that’s it,” said Howard Schweber, political science professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A dwindling amount of undeveloped land and an inability to expand puts limits on new single-family home construction in Madison. But in the broader metro, high land and construction costs, labor shortages and changing bank lending standards have stifled new building, said Kurt Paulsen, a professor of urban planning at UW-Madison.
Wisconsin had become a national outlier in the authority that it gives to legislative committees, according to Miriam Seifter, a UW-Madison law professor and co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative.
Steph Tai is also a UW-Madison law professor and associate dean for education and faculty affairs at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. They said the ruling gives more free rein to agencies.
Cheese consumption is one of several lifestyle choices and circumstances that improves the mental health of aging Europeans, concluded a recent study out of China. Unsurprised is John Lucy, director of UW-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research, who joins us.
“Even in water bodies that had relatively low PFAS concentration in the water, we still found concentrations in the foam that could be potentially concerning,” said UW-Madison civil and environmental engineering professor Christina Remucal, who co-authored the study.
“If anything, we’re gaining from undocumented immigrants,” said Karen Holden, a UW-Madison professor emerita of public affairs and consumer science who focuses on Social Security.
COVID-19 is “still circulating and continuing to mutate on a fairly regular basis,” said Dr. Jim Conway, medical director of the UW Health immunization program.
“It opens up a whole new world of possibilities,” said Kate Walsh, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and part of a team assessing the effectiveness of the statewide pilot project.
The UW-Madison team is gathering survey data from 68 housing recipients across the program’s nine pilot sites. More than half of the participants across the nine sites reported a reduction in exposure to domestic violence and higher satisfaction with their living situations, according to preliminary findings.
Anna Pidgeon, an avian ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said cross-fostering is used in many different ways among domestic and wild species. In this case, a common species chick — a sandhill crane — is raised by a vulnerable species — blue cranes — to help them gain parenting skills.
“Figuring out how to work as a pair, as coparents, is something that just like in humans or other species where it takes two, they get better with time and with practice,” Pidgeon said.
Eight years and 130 observations: that’s all it takes to prove the winds coming from supermassive black holes have accelerated.
Led by University of Wisconsin-Madison Assistant Astronomy Professor Catherine Grier and recent graduate Robert Wheatly, a team of researchers compiled years of data to find that quasars, the cores of galaxies where supermassive black holes are messily feeding, are emitting winds that are speeding up over time. This research may mark the first step in understanding how black holes communicate with the galaxies they’re in, according to Grier.
All that rain will “certainly” affect how many mosquitoes are buzzing around, said Lyric Bartholomay, a medical entomologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“People are saying to me, ‘Seems like the mosquitoes are a lot worse this year. What’s going on?’” Bartholomay said.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison announced Thursday one of its professors, along with a PhD candidate, have made scientific gains in studying how a type of invasive fungus kills North American bats.
UW said Prof. Bruce Klein and PhD candidate Marcos Isidoro-Ayza worked to shed light on the mystery of how the fungus initiates infection and causes “white-nose syndrome,” which has devastated several North American bat species over the years. The pair discovered how the fungus covertly hijacks cells at the surface of bats’ skin.
Dennis Hancock is center director at the U.S. Dairy Forage Research Center, which will administer the new facility in partnership with the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. He said part of the decline in Wisconsin dairy farms can be attributed to workforce shortage and a possible solution is replacing some of the workforce with technology.
“One of the ways to save smaller farms, in my opinion and those that have actually made the conversion would agree, is through the use of robotics,” Hancock recently said on WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” “Robotics are quite expensive, but they do save a lot of labor.”
“We had the warmest February on record and our soil moisture was down to 16% in some areas. And now we’ve gone from one of the most severe deficits to one of the most severe surpluses (of moisture) in just a couple of months,” said Kevin Jarek, University of Wisconsin Division of Extension Crops and Soils educator for Outagamie County. “In my 25 years with Extension, this is unbelievable.”
“When people talk about crime and the proliferation of crime among some communities rather than others, there often is an attempt to explain it very simplistic,” said Alvin Thomas, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s more than just that. There’s racism. There’s the historical impact of racism and race, and how that affects policy, how policy impacts access to resources, impacts access to social mobility, impacts where people live, what kind of schools people go to, the perception of any kind of personal agency, the ability to rise beyond where you’re born.”
In the last week of June, back-to-back U.S. Supreme Court rulings curtailed the power of federal agencies and restricted the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations of air and water pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s the view of Steph Tai, an environmental law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who says Wisconsin will feel the rulings’ effects on issues like drinking water quality differently than other states because some policies make Wisconsin an “unusual state.”
“This summer, all those mosquitoes that were waiting in the ground for water have found it,” says Dr. Lyric Bartholomay, who works in the Department of Pathobiological Sciences at UW-Madison. “So, the nonstop rain that we’ve had, and the warm temperatures just make them for the perfect storm, for the mosquitoes to have a place to grow and reproduce. And then come out hungry to feed on us.”
“We sampled several dozen different lakes and rivers in Wisconsin, and so we were looking at PFAS in foam,” said Christy Remucal, a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and interim director of the University of Wisconsin Aquatic Sciences Center. “It’s the white stuff you sometimes see on the side of the lake or in the river.”
Acne can happen to anyone, even those of us far removed from our teenage years. Dr. Apple Bodemer, a dermatologist from UW Health, tells you what’s causing your adult acne, and what to do if you notice a pimple. Plus, we cover sun protection just in time for the hottest months of the summer.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that naturally occurring foams on state waterways have PFAS levels as much as thousands of times higher than waters that lie below.
The findings are part of a new study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. She said the PFAS concentrations in foam were “jaw-dropping.” Samples of foam collected from Lake Monona showed PFAS levels up to roughly 328,000 parts per trillion.
Whether a church is involved in the broader community is a predictor of its success, said Steven Deller, a professor of applied economics and an expert in rural economic development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Congregations that are internally focused and closed off to new ideas and newcomers are “going to struggle,” Deller said.
“Is this the kind of community that the common response is, ‘Well, you’re not from here, so you don’t understand?'” Deller said. “That kind of attitude can be the kiss of death.”
