“We really rely on NIH funding,” Jon Audhya, a professor and associate dean at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health said. “That reduction would have a huge negative impact on the institution. The university really couldn’t fill the gap.”
Dubbed his “most Puerto Rican album ever,” the record was released with 17 informative visualizers that outlined key moments in Puerto Rican history. Each installment was written by professor Jorell Meléndez-Badillo of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who used his own academic book, “Puerto Rico: A National History,” as a reference.
“Sanitizing the facilities can be a very dangerous job in meat packing and poultry processing,” said Alexia Kulwiec, an attorney and an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School for Workers. “It’s bloody work. It’s dangerous work. Sometimes folks turn on the equipment to clean it, even though they should not. That’s an instance in which people will get harmed.”
Treatment for postpartum mental health issues is also important, said Kathleen Hipke, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. She said suicide and overdoses are leading causes of postpartum death.
Two Republicans who chair state legislative committees on energy and utilities say they want to bring more nuclear power online in Wisconsin in the coming years.
To start that effort, they introduced a resolution calling on the Legislature to publicly support nuclear power and fusion energy.
A new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has revealed that soft-shell helmet covers do not reduce concussions for Wisconsin high school football players.
We learn how new restrictions on communications by federal health agencies could affect public health. Then, we look at how the ongoing bird flu epidemic is affecting farmers and whether it could surge. Then, we talk with a pianist inspired by Wisconsin’s landscape.
“They hit the jackpot,” says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and principal investigator of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. “We have been taking data with a much bigger detector for 10 years. We’ve never seen such an event.”
There is no human-to-human transmission right now, which is a good thing,” said Peter Halfmann, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Pathobiological Sciences in the School of Veterinary Medicine. “The one concern is that the virus likes to mutate.”
“This executive order raises a lot of issues over who really controls public education,” said Suzanne Eckes, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor whose work focuses on K-12 legal issues and school policy. Public education has historically been a state and school board function, she said.
“Typically, the federal government isn’t saying, ‘You’re going to do this social studies curriculum, and you’re going to use this book, and everybody in the United States is going to learn about slavery or World War I or the American Revolution in this way,'” said Eckes, speaking from her perspective and not as a representative of the University of Wisconsin.
“It basically literally means we are stepping back in time decades, that we are now gonna look at data on CDs, they’re gonna be mailed out across the country instead of stored securely in an online data platform,” said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of education policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies college access and success. “It’s gonna be a huge waste of my time and a huge waste of the department’s time to have to process all of these new applications.”
“We tend to be going more and more towards a real brutal capitalism, I think everywhere,” said Barbara Bowers, a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Nursing. “And it’s fine if it’s about the quality of your television set. But it’s a different issue when it’s the quality of somebody’s life. I think we treat this as any other commodity, which is really unfortunate.”
How safe is the personal information of millions of Americans while the computer systems of federal agencies are accessed by an outside team looking for waste and fraud? Then, we ask if personal devices purporting to track our fitness actually work.
“Cutting the rate to 15% will destroy science in the United States,” says Jo Handelsman, who runs the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “This change will break our universities, our medical centers and the entire engine for scientific discovery.”
Soybeans is one of the major commodities purchased by USAID, according to agricultural economist Paul Mitchell at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
But Mitchell said foreign food aid also includes shelf-stable foods that may be produced by Wisconsin farms and food processors. With the agency’s website largely down, he said it’s almost impossible to determine what products could be affected.
It’s unclear how long it will take for consumers to feel the impact and to what extent. That’s in part because it depends on how much steel or aluminum is used to make the product, said Lydia Cox, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
It’s also on the businesses to decide what added costs they should pass along to their customers, she said: “If you had a 25 percent increase on 50 percent of your costs, that’ll be a pretty sizable [potential] increase” in prices.
Dr. Robert Golden, the dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said indirect costs aren’t just administrative tasks, or “waste,” but the physical structures and equipment needed to do “top tier” research.
“I’ve been at several public institutions, including the NIH early in my career, and never saw waste to a striking degree,” he said. The NIH’s change, Golden said, “will have a profound significant impact on everything,” including utility charges, building out the laboratories where scientific experiments are done and finding cures for patients.
Patrick Remington, emeritus professor at UW-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health who began his career at the CDC, said some who oppose fluoride because of its risks aren’t weighing them against the benefits — something people do every day when they choose to drive a car, have a drink or make other choices.
The benefits of fluoride are clear: less tooth decay, Remington said, while the science doesn’t yet show neurodevelopmental problems for children who ingest fluoride at the level in the U.S. water supply.
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, an assistant history professor, revived the Puerto Rican history course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison last spring. It hadn’t been taught in seven years, and the university planned to cut it, he said.
This year, he’s teaching Puerto Rican history to a global audience
“It’s really an amazing medicine that deserves more attention,” says Tawni Tidwell, a biocultural anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, where she specializes in pharmacological innovations in Tibetan medicine. Tidwell, who spent years studying across the Indian subcontinent, says the mushrooms don’t supercharge her sex drive—she just feels energized after taking them—but she has seen dramatic results in other people’s libidos. “Men report their erections are more functional, stronger and longer,” she says. “It works for women, too.”
Callaci, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written a book, Wages for Housework, which chronicles the radical 1970s feminist campaign that argued for recognition of the economic value of domestic labour. In truth, she explains, it was a recipe for revolution, designed to smash capitalism and its underpinning myth that women just love keeping house so much they’ll do it for nothing.
People continued to move into fire-prone foothills and valleys. Between 1990 and 2020, the number of homes in the metro Los Angeles region’s wildland-urban interface, where human development meets undeveloped wildland, swelled from 1.4 million to 2 million — a growth rate of 44%, according to David Helmers, a geospatial data scientist in the Silvis Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The study authored by Howard together with Mengqi Wang and Dayin Zhang of the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that the “staggered rollout of a national increase in immigration enforcement” could send “negative shocks” through the construction sector.
Improving crop productivity is on the United Nations’ list of Sustainable Development Goals for the 21st century, and a recent discovery by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers may be able to help.
“For the first time, we realized that the effect of these photoreceptors is not everywhere along the stem and that different photoreceptors control different regions of the stem,” as Edgar Spalding, a professor emeritus of botany at UW–Madison, explained in the piece.
“Unprecedented! Even in 2020, due to Covid 2019, marriages only decreased by 12.2%,” said Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He noted that the number of marriages in China last year was less than half of the 13.47 million in 2013. If this trend continues, “the Chinese government’s political and economic ambitions will be ruined by its demographic Achilles’ heel,” he added.
As it stands, there have been no moves by the Trump administration or the Supreme Court to do away with equal marriage rights for LGBTQ+ couples. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, said Howard Schweber, a political science professor and law school affiliate faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Health officials say that the peak in respiratory illnesses hit Dane County late this year, leaving hospitals and urgent care facilities packed.
“It did start late and it really came on like wild fire,” said Dr. Jim Conway, pediatric infectious disease doctor with UW Health Kids and medical director of UW Health’s immunization program.
But UW Health Kids pediatrician and researcher Dr. Megan Moreno said schools should take care to do what’s best for their students. She said when it comes to social media and mental health, there isn’t a population-level impact.
“So when kids are feeling really anxious or over stimulated, a lot of patients that I see have really well-developed mechanisms that they can use their phone to calm down,” Dr. Moreno said.
Volker Radeloff, a fire expert and professor of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University Wisconsin-Madison, conducts research on wildland-urban interfaces (WUIs), which are fire-prone regions on the cusp between wildland vegetation, often woodlands or grasslands, and civilization. Nearly half of the world’s population lives in a WUI, and all of the areas that burned in the Los Angeles area belonged to a WUI, Radeloff said.
Farm economists and industry experts weighed in on these impacts during the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Agricultural Outlook Forum, an annual event for farm and food industry leaders in the state. Chuck Nicholson, associate professor of agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison, was one of the speakers.
“If we substantively implement some of the policy ideas that have been proposed and talked about prior to the inauguration, I think that will pose some pretty significant economic challenges for the farmers of Wisconsin and the U.S. generally,” Nicholson said.
Op-Ed by John Gross,a clinical associate professor of law at University of Wisconsin Law School and director of the Public Defender Project.
But UW-Madison Donald Hester Professor of Economics Charles Engel told the Wisconsin State Journal “the overall effect on the cost of living would be relatively small” because the price consumers pay doesn’t only cover the cost of the good itself.
“If you think about when you buy a t-shirt, say that’s made in China,” he said. “The actual t-shirt is really a relatively small part of the cost that we pay, and a much bigger part is the cost of the design, which is probably done in the U.S., and then the cost of bringing the shirt from the port to the store where you get it.”
Dorothea Salo, academic librarian and faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The Register we’ve been here before, citing how the prior Trump administration all but disappeared the US Environmental Protection Agency.
“That apparently made him happy enough to try to disappear half the federal government this time,” she said. “As happened last time, lots of citizens and citizen groups are rescuing what they can. It’s organically fairly decent preservation practice – the rescued work is being duplicated in widely geographically disparate places, which lowers the odds that sheer bad luck wipes it out. The difficulty is discovery – who’s got what data [and] where? If, as I hope, US leaders someday return to a belief that government transparency is important to democracy, putting the jigsaw puzzle back together will be a huge lift.”
The Laken Riley act requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain people who are living in the U.S. without legal permission who have committed crimes or have been accused of committing a crime, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School Clinical Professor of Law John Gross.
Kathryn McGarr, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says she doesn’t think there’s much more to learn. “We already know quite a bit about how much the government was surveilling and looking at [MLK] … and how many enemies he had within the government,” she says. “I don’t think that the narrative is going to significantly change, although of course, we could get some more details here and there.”
As the bird flu strain continues to threaten animals and public health, the U.S. government has stepped up its response. But Tom Friedrich, a professor of virology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine, isn’t sure the scale and speed of the response are equal to the potential impact of the problem.
“The net impact is that it really improves insurer profitability,” said Tyler Leverty, a business professor who studies risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Whether the Trump administration will restart the U4U program is an open question, according to Yoshiko Herrera, political scientist professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on Russia.
“I think they wanted to show that they were acting quickly on immigration right from the start. So my sense is that they just are like, ‘OK, we’re pausing everything’,” said Herrerra. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if … in the next couple of weeks, (they) decide that United for Ukraine is OK.”
The formations, called ice heaves, often happen in the spring along the shorelines as ice begins to melts and wind pushes it up into solid, jagged waves. But they can also be seen where water levels and temperatures fluctuate, said Hilary Dugan, professor with UW-Madison’s Limnology Department. As water freezes it expands, with sections pushing against one another to create pressure ridges between a few inches to a few feet high, Dugan said.
For 80 years, Madison’s lakes have gotten saltier, according to Hilary Dugan, an associate professor and researcher at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Limnology.
The salinity of Madison’s lakes was close to zero a century ago and road salting has been the biggest source of contamination, she said. Researchers like Dugan closely monitor chloride levels in local waterways because it’s easier to track the environmental impacts than sodium.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison launched a new study this month to reveal the lasting effects vaping may have on people’s hearts and lungs.
“Although e-cigarettes have been on the U.S. market for over 15 years and used by millions of Americans, we do not really understand their long-term health effects,” said Dr. James Stein, a professor of medicine at the university.
Urban planning professor Kurt Paulsen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that Madison is a tech hub with a university, which drives housing growth.
“It’s also driven by companies like Epic that employ thousands of people,” he said.
Dr. Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr., a recently tenured professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Leadership and Policy Analysis, exemplifies how personal experience can shape academic pursuits and social justice advocacy.
Seventy-five percent of CWD-positive deer necropsied were in poor nutritional condition, according to Marie Pinkerton, clinical professor of anatomic pathology at the University of Wisconsin.
Two years ago, Dr. James A. Bigham, a clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, began teaching medical students on the issue, not just providing statistics around firearms injury but also arranging for instruction from firearms trainers on how guns function and why someone may want to own one.
“Policy and markets in Europe have enabled renewables to drive down the shares of both coal and natural gas,” said Gregory Nemet, an energy researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
From 2005 to 2023, Madison stands out as a top performer in the Upper Midwest in addressing the housing shortage, according to a new analysis. Yet, Texas has 15 cities out-pacing the nation in housing stock growth. Kurt Paulsen, a UW-Madison urban planner, examines the report and offers takeaways.
Karen Oberhauser, professor emeritus of entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been studying monarchs since 1985. She noted the number of monarch butterflies varies widely from year to year driven mostly by weather conditions that have become more extreme due to climate change.
“What we want to do is make the ceiling, or the top of those fluctuations, higher than it has been,” Oberhauser said. “Right now, the population is so low that there’s a chance that, in any given year, a catastrophic event could send monarchs spiraling to a point from which they might not be able to recover.”
Robert Enright, professor of educational psychology in the School of Edcuation at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and co-founder of the International Forgiveness Institute, explains the benefits of mercy on physical and mental health.
Nancy Wong is a professor of consumer science at the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said department stores are grappling with multiple types of challenges at the same time, including demographic changes and economic pressures affecting America’s middle class.
“Given the economic turbulence and challenges that we’ve been facing in this country, the segments that are most financially squeezed are the middle class — the core segments of the customers that most department store chains used to enjoy,” Wong said.
Greg Nemet, energy expert and public affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the president doesn’t decide what to do about spending that Congress has authorized.
“This could end up just being more of a power struggle between Congress and the president,” Nemet said. “But in the meantime, it does reduce some confidence in the funding and the expectations that would go to our state.”
Meanwhile, about five to 10 University of Wisconsin law students are preparing for a visit to the Dodge County Detention Facility, where people facing deportation are detained. Erin Barbato, director of the UW Immigrant Justice Clinic, said the goal is to be thoughtful in the information they share with clients about the Trump orders.
Back in summer 2013, paleontologist Dave Lovelace took some University of Wisconsin-Madison students on a dig in Wyoming. There, they found an ankle bone in an area where fossils typically aren’t found.
Tracking how widely norovirus is spreading can be challenging, because it’s not considered a “notifiable disease” that requires doctors to report infections, said Malia Jones, a public health researcher in the department of Community and Environmental Sociology at UW-Madison.
What started as an impromptu lunch (at two square tables pushed together; the round table came a year later) proved to be such delicious fun that the group returned at 1 p.m., and practically every day thereafter, inviting new lunch companions, until it dissolved in the early 1930s,” wrote University of Wisconsin history professor Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen in the New York Times.
Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, knows his music knows no borders, so, alongside the project, he also released visualizers going over the history of Puerto Rico with the help of Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, assistant professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I’ve always wanted to take academic knowledge outside the ivory tower, and this project has allowed me to share our history on a global platform,” Meléndez-Badillo tells Teen Vogue in Spanish. “Art can’t be decontextualized from the moment it’s produced. There’s no way to escape Puerto Rico’s colonial reality, where we deal with blackouts, displacement, and the appropriation of our historical memory daily. Like a committed Puerto Rican, Bad Bunny is using his platform to amplify the conversations taking place in Puerto Rico.”
“Both ethanol and acetaldehyde are carcinogenic and when they touch the lining of the mouth, throat or esophagus, that can cause cancer,” Dr. Noelle LoConte, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, told Live Science in an email. Like ethanol, acetaldehyde can also disrupt DNA methylation.
“If you don’t have people framing the house, installing the drywall, you cannot have the American electricians and plumbers come in and do their work,” said Dayin Zhang, an assistant professor in real estate and urban economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dinosaur fossils discovered by paleontologists working with the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been determined to be the oldest-known fossils, presenting evidence that the species was in existence millions of years before previously thought.
For enhanced rock weather (ERW) to have a large impact by 2050, it will need to expand quickly, says Gregory Nemet, an energy scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Last May he and his colleagues published a study analyzing the combined potential of novel CO2 removal methods such as ERW, direct air-capture machines and the use of biofuels with CO2 captured from smokestacks. Between now and 2050 these methods need to grow “by something like 40 percent per year, every year,” Nemet says.
