So far this decade, the state has experienced about a quarter of the population growth it saw between 2010 and 2020. But the COVID-19 pandemic led to a spike in deaths that altered the state’s trajectory, said David Egan-Robertson, demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Applied Population Laboratory.
“It actually may be a case that population will grow a little bit faster because there will be fewer deaths going forward in the state,” Egan-Robertson said.
University of Wisconsin-Madison was awarded a fellowship to research and write a book on European socialist politics in the context of economic decolonization.
The project title is Failed Globalists: European Socialists, the Global South, and the Struggle for Economic Decolonization, 1945–2008. Giuliana Chamedes, associate professor of history at UW-Madison, was awarded $30,000 in funding for the fellowship.
Loss of vision over time is a particular interest for study author Freya Mowat, a veterinary ophthalmologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. Mowat studies how dogs’ vision declines over time and what factors contribute to it. She said that research may have applications for humans, as well.
“If we are finding risk factors for unhealthy dog aging, we may also find risk factors for unhealthy human aging — because we live with our dogs,” Mowat said.
No longer tied to milking cows herself twice a day, Hinchley says both she and her dairy cows are happier with the robotic milkers operating 24 hours a day.
“It’s not necessarily something that you would have to do in order to stay in the dairy business,” said Chuck Nicholson, a UW-Madison professor of animal and dairy sciences. He noted only about 8% of Wisconsin’s dairy farmers have implemented the new technology, typically family farms that want to save on labor costs. “The labor shortage is definitely a key motivating factor.”
“This judge seems to be a very activist judge,” said John Gross, a clinical law professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “He seems to want to insert himself into the resolution of cases in ways that are often not appropriate, or at the very least, not authorized by any statute.”
Gross also raised concerns the restitution order, which directed money to the county that supported the victim after the assault, could set a dangerous precedent in which judges or district attorneys could use restitution to fill government coffers.
In less than six years, the number of dugout canoes known to exist in Wisconsin rose from 11 to nearly 100. Locating and studying these vessels, ranging from about 150 to 4,000 years old, is the mission of the Wisconsin Dugout Canoe Survey Project. Interview with Sissel Schroeder, a professor of anthropology with a specialization in archaeology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose lab hosts the Wisconsin Dugout Canoe Survey Project which she heads up with state maritime archaeologist Tamara Thomsen.
The current increase in COVID-19 cases is a continuation of an increase in the illness that began in August and started to take off after children returned to school in September, said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. The surge also follows along with other respiratory viruses, although its pattern is not identical, he added.
“For someone who has symptoms for a respiratory virus infection, they may not have COVID-19 — it could very well be influenza or could be RSV,” Sethi said Thursday. Wherever they are given, “COVID tests are still useful, because it would be nice to know what virus you might have.”
Studies show that early intervention and integrated, team-based mental health services are an effective way to treat schizophrenia. However, many patients still can’t access the new approach to care. We talk to Ronald Diamond, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at UW-Madison and former medical director of the Mental Health Center of Dane County, about what’s standing in the way of patients getting the treatment they need.
The National Institutes for Health is awarding a $150 million grant to UW-Madison researchers to study how Alzheimer’s and other dementias are affecting the brain. We talk with the study leader about Alzheimer’s and the future of dementia research.
“That language is pretty categorical, so my sense is that no recall election could be held until new maps are adopted or the court takes some other authorizing action,” Robert Yablon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who specializes in election and constitutional law, said.
“When many talk about ‘totaling a car,’ it is often taken to mean that the car is a total wreck and cannot be salvaged, certainly not driven. However, in the insurance world, ‘totaling’ is when the insurer declares the book/cash value (e.g., Blue Book Value) of the car just before the accident is less than the costs of covered repairs from the accident,” says Karen C.A. Holden, professor emeritus, Department of Consumer Science and Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin – Madison Institute on Aging.
Despite documented systemic barriers, a new UW-Madison study shows mothers with low incomes find the credit system in the United States legitimate. We speak with Sarah Halpern-Meekin and J. Michael Collins, two of the researchers.
This week, Republican legislators unveiled a proposal to legalize medical marijuana in Wisconsin. We get reaction to the proposal from Lucas Richert, a pharmaceutical historian at UW-Madison.
A bill that would prohibit higher education institutions in Wisconsin from conducting “gain of function” research on “potentially pandemic pathogens” received a public hearing on Wednesday.
The bill — AB 413 — was introduced by Rep. Elijah Behnke (R-Oconto) and Sen. André Jacque (R-DePere), who cited several incidents at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and controversy over the origins of COVID-19.
Dr. Paula Cody, medical director of adolescent medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, warned about the dangers of diet pills and supplements more than six years ago after hearing enough patients ask about supplements to lose weight or gain muscle — and the issue has only grown.
“The incidence of eating disorders has increased pretty dramatically after the pandemic. We’ve seen the numbers skyrocket,” she said. “So I do think that the concern I had before, which was not a small matter then — I’m even more concerned now.”
UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences Dean Glenda Gillaspy reflects on her first three semesters on campus. She says the two most common issues that come to her desk from stakeholders are decreasing enrollment trends and the status of production agriculture education on campus.
Kathryn McGarr, an associate professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is also affiliated with the Department of History, pointed out the regional differences too, and then that there has been a shift since the Civil War for both of the parties. One example is the stance on equal rights.
“At the time of the Civil War, most members of what was then called the Democratic party supported slavery, and most members of what was then the newly formed Republican Party were anti-slavery,” she wrote in a December 28, 2023 email. “But what each party stood for has shifted dramatically over time, with the biggest realignments occurring in the middle of the Twentieth Century over civil rights. So someone like the segregationist senator Strom Thurmond was a Democrat until 1964 when he switched affiliation to the Republican Party.”
UW-Madison professor and editor Nate Jung describes how students can approach using generative AI to improve reading and writing skills while remaining mindful of its limitations as a teaching tool.
Stem cell biologists are gaining new insight into the human brain — thanks to technology developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dr. Randolph Ashton is the associate director of UW-Madison’s Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center and says they can use that research to screen for numerous conditions like spina bifida and autism; and, according to Dr. Ashton, RosetteArray technology could eventually help scientists develop more specific medical treatments – and perhaps even a cure. When it comes to medical ethics, he says his primary concern is the prohibitive cost of such treatment.
Dietram Scheufele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor whose work includes looking at AI and political communication, noted the new technology comes at the same time there’s been a rise in disinformation delivered by foreign adversaries to disrupt the U.S. electoral system.
Simon Goldberg, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studies the effects of meditation, including research among people who have psychological problems such as depression and anxiety. He noted that because of Dunn and Folk’s strict criteria, they omitted hundreds of studies on meditation’s benefits. “It’s, in the spirit of rigor, throwing lots of babies out with the bathwater,” he says. “It’s really very obvious that meditation training reduces symptoms of anxiety and depression.”
For more than 150 years, debtors prisons have been illegal in the United States. However, that restriction only applies to private debts; a recent study found that between 2005 and 2018, eight thousand Wisconsin residents were jailed for failing to pay court debts each year. We talk to John Gross, director of the Public Defender Project at UW Law School, about the causes and consequences of modern-day debt imprisonment.
“Ranked choice voting doesn’t have an obvious partisan advantage in places where it’s been implemented. It hasn’t helped the Democrats or the Republicans in any consistent fashion,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But it’s become sort of a folk wisdom in Republican circles that ranked choice voting is a plan by Democrats to help them do better in elections and to hurt Republicans. I don’t know where that has come from exactly.”
Howard Schweber, a political science professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, said the lawsuit is essentially moot because he believes the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately have the final say.
“There’s no question that this issue is going to go to the United States Supreme Court, so all of this is kind of performative,” Schweber said.
We assess several bills working through the Wisconsin legislature that would seek to reform predatory — yet legal — payday loan operations, including one that could cap interest rates, and another that would expand the definition of a “payday loan.” Interview with Sarah Orr, clinical professor and director of the Consumer Law Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Megan Moreno is a University of Wisconsin adolescent medicine physician and co-medical director of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health. She often warns parents against romanticizing their own methods of socialization as adolescents over what their kids do to make and keep friends.
“I have a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old, and one thing I think a lot about is checking my own biases of how they’re supposed to be spending their time,” Moreno said.
Jonathan Martin, professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UW-Madison, points to a “robust” El Niño, which refers to a warming of the ocean’s surface, or above-average surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.
To Howard Schweber, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert in constitutional law, there are two separate issues at play: the legal and the political.
“There have been no reported appellate court cases in Wisconsin dealing with the issue of how housing is addressed in local comprehensive plans,” said Brian Ohm, a retired professor in the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture at UW-Madison, calling the lack of legal challenges “a surprise to a lot of people.”
In an opinion column in the Wisconsin State Journal, two University of Wisconsin-Madison professors wrote that the additional births caused harm to Wisconsin communities.
“Dobbs is just the latest abortion restriction to harm Wisconsinites, especially low-income Wisconsinites,” wrote Tiffany Green, associate professor of population health sciences and obstetrics, and gynecology, and Jenny Higgins, director of the Collaborative for Reproductive Equity. “In our role as scientists and public health professionals, we conclude that the evidence is clear: Restrictions and policies in our state that make abortion inaccessible and unaffordable harm the health and well-being of Wisconsin families
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many health experts were concerned about the new disease’s impact on older adults and people who are immunocompromised.
Jenna Nobles, sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was interested in another potentially vulnerable group – pregnant people.
“We know that emerging infectious diseases can be extremely consequential for pregnancies, both people who are carrying the pregnancies and the infants who are born from them,” Nobles said.
Quoted: “There can be some ability to trace that, because each company would be producing, potentially, different types of PFAS that could be linked back to them,” said Steph Tai, a law professor and associate dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an expert on environmental law.
Krishanu Saha, a bioengineer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose lab is working on gene therapies for treating blindness, says the precision allowed by CRISPR-Cas9’s programmability is its singular selling point.
“Traditional gene therapy, which we call gene augmentation, is essentially flooding the cell with extra copies of a normal gene; in some cases, this doesn’t work,” Saha tells Inverse. “We found in a few cases, it’s really important to destroy the mutant copy of the [gene] or fix the underlying mutation and that’s where you have to have the precision of CRISPR to go in and specifically do that.”
“Now’s the perfect time to set a New Year’s resolution to rethink your interest in quitting tobacco use,” Dr. Michael Fiore, a UW-Madison tobacco expert, said in a statement. “You can reach out to the Quit Line and go at your own pace. You get to decide how you change your tobacco use and when.”
As destructive as they are, plant diseases can be intriguing. Brian Hudelson, known as ‘Dr. Death’ to Garden Talk fans, has published a fanciful book of limericks based on common and uncommon plant diseases. Hudelson is director of the Plant Disease Diagnostics Clinic in the Department of Plant Pathology at UW-Madison
“Forgiveness is a moral virtue basically; it is a merciful response toward those who have not been good to us — without excusing the people, without forgetting, lest it happen again, without necessarily reconciling,” said Robert Enright, a pioneer in the field of forgiveness science and professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“There are companies out there lending to Wisconsin consumers at really just exorbitant interest rates. I mean, I’ve seen 400 percent, 300 percent APRs,” said Sarah Orr, director of the University of WIsconsin-Madison Law School’s Consumer Law Clinic.
“And although the repayment terms are more like an installment loan, they’re really just terrible financial traps for people,” Orr continued. “A person who gets one of these products really spells ruin. I don’t know any other way to express it.”
A new study by a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that a lack of nurturing as a child is associated with accelerated aging later in life. The research looks at changes to a person’s genome that have been linked to their environment or behaviors — what’s called epigenetics. These markers can indicate a person’s biological age, or how much their body has aged physically.
Lauren Schmitz, professor at UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, said the field of research around these epigenetic changes is still new because data is limited. Studies require both survey data on people’s health experiences and a blood sample.
“It’s important who wins the White House for a whole host of reasons,” said Michael Wagner, the director of graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, who has published research on how abortion became a partisan issue in the news. “But for those who have become pregnant and don’t want to be, the election does not come in time to provide them a remedy.”
In order to get the U.S. Supreme Court to look at the case, the Legislature and its allies will need to make the argument that there was a violation of federal law. That’s because, explained Rob Yablon, University of Wisconsin Law School professor and co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative, the core legal claim in the case — contiguity — is a matter of state law.
The case brought to the court argued the maps violate Wisconsin’s Constitution because some legislative districts include pieces of land that are not connected. “The Wisconsin Supreme Court has the last word on state law questions,” Yablon said.
Had the Wisconsin Supreme Court found only a couple of districts with noncontiguous territory in violation of the Constitution, it could have called for a tailored approach to fix just those boundaries, UW-Madison Law School associate professor Robert Yablon said.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School professor Robert Yablon gives insight into why the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out the state’s election district maps and where things could go from here.
Wearing a smile on your face can be interpreted differently depending on where you live. We talk with UW-Madison professor of psychology Paula Niedenthal who’s explored smile culture around the world for decades.
A calorie is not just a calorie. That’s the lesson University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers said they demonstrated in a new study where mice lost weight while eating more.
“And they’re fitter throughout their lifespan, too,” said professor and metabolism researcher Dudley Lamming. “So they’re still able to run and climb, and they don’t grow as frail as normal animals do as they age.”
“It’s an exciting time for hibernation biology,” said Hannah Carey, UW–Madison professor emerit of Comparative Biosciences. “People from outside of traditional hibernation world are wanting to come in and collaborate.”
In a commentary published alongside the study, Andrea Dutton, a professor in the department of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Robert M.
DeConto, a professor at the School of Earth and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, called the new research “pioneering.”
They noted that while geological evidence had been mounting that the icy expanse of the West Antarctic ice sheet may have collapsed during the Last Interglacial period, “each study’s findings have come with caveats.”
Washing meat likely originated in cultures around the world as a way to get rid of the inedible material left on freshly slaughtered meat, says Kathleen Glass, associate director of the Food Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before industrialized food processing (and today in communities that still butcher their own meat), washing was an important line of defense against dirt, animal debris, and perhaps also the host of pathogens that live in raw meat.
“In some sense we’re seeing a continuation of this tendency that we see at the national level, that whatever slow down there is coming, it keeps on getting pushed further and further into the future,” University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor Menzie Chinn said.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the first lab-grown chicken meat for commercial sale. It’s the first cell-cultivated meat to be approved in the country, and it’s grown from stem cells in a bioreactor—no slaughter required. We talk to Jeff Sindelar, a professor and extension meat specialist in the department of Animal Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, about whether lab-grown meat could eventually compete with the factory-farmed meat that dominates the industry.
Over the last few decades, Wisconsin and the U.S. have seen divorces lead to a growing rate of equal joint custody of children, instead of one parent gaining sole custody. We talk to Quentin Riser, an assistant professor of human development & family studies at UW-Madison, about how this shift has affected families and the child support system.
Susan Ridgely is a professor of religious studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said Francis has wanted to portray the church as welcoming since early in his papacy. She pointed to his symbols of service, such as washing the feet of young inmates.
The declaration is a “natural extension” of Francis’s olive branches to a changing world, she said. “That’s a major step towards kind of an openness of the church and an acknowledgment that people reaching out for God should get that blessing through the church,” she said.
Kenneth Streit, a clinical professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Law School who has been involved with Wisconsin’s corrections programs for more than 40 years, said it would be extremely unlikely for the state to close one of its prisons without first addressing violent crimes.
“Closing prisons without first reducing gun-related homicide and injury will never happen in Wisconsin,” Streit said, noting that New York was able to release thousands of older incarcerated men when it eliminated its 1970s-era drug sentencing laws.
New research by a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor suggests police in schools don’t reduce violence, diminish crime, or have any impact on the presence of weapons or drugs in a school.
If anything, having police in schools has an impact on young people’s mental health, according to Ben Fisher, a UW-Madison associate professor who reviewed 32 evaluations of school-based police programs, said he found that police in schools weren’t shown to diminish school violence, crime, or the presence of weapons or drugs.
“This should have more bipartisan support, because it is something that should, at least theoretically, help improve the voting process and be a better reflection of what voters’ true intentions are,” said David Canon, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“There’s really nothing like the efforts of the fake electors in 2020,” said UW-Madison Political Science Professor Barry Burden. “That was an orchestrated effort across multiple swing states, including Wisconsin, to present false electors on behalf of the party that had lost in every one of those states.”
“If oil prices are going to stay at the levels that they are, then we can continue to see at least not an upward movement in gasoline prices, and that’s gonna allow us to have inflation continue to fall,” said Menzie Chinn, a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
What’s currently being called atypical canine respiratory disease started showing up around the state in late October, according to Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at UW-Madison, with clinics seeing between six and a dozen cases each. It began showing up in Colorado, Massachusetts and other parts of the country earlier in the year.
Adam Stevenson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and an expert in criminal law and sentencing, said while this type of sentence is extremely rare, many states are banning the practice, including Texas, Arkansas, Minnesota and Iowa.
This bill “generally follows with both the Supreme Court’s commentary that kids are different — they change, they mature, both emotionally, but also, scientifically,” Stevenson said. “It also follows the greater trends across the country.”
Underage sales of nicotine products have more than doubled in Wisconsin since 2019, the year when the federal age for purchasing tobacco products was raised to 21. Wisconsin has kept the minimum age at 18 in spite of research showing that raising the smoking age reduces nicotine addiction. Dr. Michael Fiore, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, explains.
How farmers handle their cows can have a big impact on their health and safety. We talk to Jennifer Van Os, an animal welfare extension specialist at UW-Madison who developed a new tool to help farmer’s practice better methods.
