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.”
Professor Michael Childers specializes in labor education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said he thinks the likelihood of the case going to the Wisconsin Supreme Court is all but guaranteed.
“This finding — if it was allowed to stand — would, in essence, remove the changes to collective bargaining laws and allow for the provision for all the public sector workers to again collective bargain similar to all the private sector workers in Wisconsin are able to do,” Childers said.
Includes interview with Natasha Paris, Regional crops educator, UW-Madison Extension.
For Allison Prasch, a scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies political communication and presidential rhetoric, the crafting and publication of a platform tells a lot about the direction a political party will go in.
“There’s a shift of power from the (governor’s) administration to the Legislature,” said Andrew Reschovsky, professor emeritus of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on public finance. “And is that good or bad? It depends on one’s politics. But in a very fractured political environment, the consequences could be substantial.”
Steph Tai, law professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said the decision means that litigants, regardless of whether they’re conservative or liberal, will likely bring cases before courts that align with their own political preferences despite claims that judges are impartial.
“They’re going to pick judges that are more likely to be sympathetic to their argument that whatever federal regulation should be overturned,” Tai said.
Every patient is a unique individual. They have their own genetics, their own exposures to the environment that they have been in,” said Dr. Muhammed Murtazais, associate director of the Center for Human Genomics and Precision Medicineat the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And, so, precision medicine is this approach that could we actually learn more about each individual patient, so that each patient gets the right drug at the right time.
“They’re under more scrutiny in a presidential race, when Wisconsin will be one of the key swing states in the Electoral College,” said Barry Burden, who directs the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “An error, a small mistake, or a delay caused by a clerk can lead to suspicion or misinformation or even conspiracies about something that’s going wrong in the election.”
UW-Madison researchers on the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, including MDMA. Madison was the only Midwest site for phase 3 trials of a psychedelic-assisted therapy treatment for Post-traumatic stress disorder. We learn about the potential for these substances in improving mental health.
PJ Liesch, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab, began seeing reports of Japanese beetle activity the last week of June, which is typical. Numbers will increase during their prime feeding months of July and August when they damage (but usually don’t kill) roses, grape vines, basil, raspberries, crabapples, birches and ornamentals, among others, by skeletonizing the leaves.
The reintroduction of wolves has only had temporary effects on other small carnivores at Isle Royale National Park on Lake Superior, according to new research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Heather Kirkorian is a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies how kids and parents interact with digital media. Warning labels are good for raising awareness, she said, but “my sense is that most teens and parents have heard about the potential risks and are aware that that might be a concern.” Treating social media “as analogous to cigarettes is unhelpful, because there are potential benefits of using social media as well, and I don’t think we can make that same argument for smoking cigarettes.”
“Republicans are having a harder time when it comes to picking a city for their national conventions. Big cities have become more Democratic in recent years and the GOP’s messaging is increasing about the ills of big cities, including problems like crime, culture and failing schools,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the university’s Elections Research Center. “Being in a big city is an opportunity for Republicans to emphasize their arguments about Democrats having failed to govern urban centers effectively.”
Thomas O’Guinn, professor emeritus in marketing at UW-Madison, said businesses typically gain cult-like followings by accident. But it’s the businesses that help fulfill a person’s need to belong that stick out from the pack, he said.
Mariel Barnes, a founding faculty member of UW–Madison’s Sexual Violence Research Initiative, joined host Allen Ruff to talk about the Supreme Court case as well as statistics of domestic violence in Wisconsin.
UW-Madison scientists have developed a new technique for identifying and analyzing a single molecule.
The new development, published in the May edition of the journal Nature, is the most sensitive way of identifying single molecules yet. With a variety of applications in a wide variety of scientific fields, it offers a future of “new microscopic perspective of unprecedented detail.”
With a population explosion going on in the flowerbeds, what is a gardener to do? UW-Madison entomologist PJ Liesch says gardeners have several options in combating the hungry horde.
“If the population of aphids is not harming the plants or competing with the monarchs, you can just tolerate them. However, if it’s getting out of hand, blast them off with a jet of water (which causes the aphid’s mouthpiece to break off and eventually starve), or you can squish them and wipe them off the plant,” he said.
We look at how electronic absentee voting works and why it’s not more common. Interview with Bryna Godar, a staff attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Written by John Shutske, a professor of biological systems and engineering and also an Extension specialist at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Jake Vander Zanden is director of the Center for Limnology at UW-Madison, a research center focused on Wisconsin’s inland waters. He is exploring whether lake ecosystems can themselves keep invasives in check. But for now, a lake district’s best bet is to “manage to minimize” the negative impacts, Vander Zanden said.
