Some researchers, including John Womersley, a former chief executive of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, and Tulika Bose, an LHC physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, want to see higher-energy machines developed as quickly as possible.
Category: Experts Guide
The Amish farmer who ignited outrage over raw milk and rose to MAGA fame along the way
No dairy is pathogen-free, even with the best precautions, said John Lucey, a food science professor who has studied raw milk extensively. Harmful bacteria are in the soil, in the digestive tracts of cows and in the poop they deposit, Lucey said.
Small Wisconsin libraries might be hit hard as Trump targets federal funding
Louise Robbins, a retired professor of library studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the money might be the only source of funding for some tribal libraries.
“It’s very heavily used by people of all ages, income levels, needs, abilities, and [the order] would really severely damage services and have a huge impact, a multiplying impact, because people often use the funding from ILMS to match other funding,” Robbins said.
Wisconsin Supreme Court race sees millions in untrackable spending
Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said while there are potential conflicts of interest with the volume of money in court races, funding that is less traceable presents a different challenge.
Delivering career wellness education for student thriving
To help students engage in career wellness, a group of students from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona—supported by advisers from Cal Poly Pomona—created Tune In to Strive Out, which encourages students to channel their inner potential for future success and collective well-being.
Measles vaccination rates may be lower than thought, risking U.S.’ ‘elimination status’
“This temporal boundary, however, was nearly breached in 2019,” said Dr. Jonathan Temte, professor of family medicine and community health at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Temte was part of the team who declared measles eliminated in 2000.
Who will build the next giant particle collider?
Some researchers, including John Womersley, a former chief executive of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, and Tulika Bose, an LHC physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, want to see higher-energy machines developed as quickly as possible.
UW Madison expert shares data concerns for 23andMe customers
A UW expert is advising people who used 23andMe, a DNA genetic testing company, to delete their accounts after the company filed for bankruptcy.
Dorthea Salo is a distinguished teaching faculty at the UW-Madison information school. She says people’s genetic information could be at risk if 23andMe has to sell their data.
Uncertainty over visas, political climate worry prospective UW-Madison international students
Director Samantha McCabe runs International Student Services at UW-Madison. She said international students are worried about a potential travel ban, their visas and federal funding uncertainty. She is concerned recent federal actions could ultimately shrink the international student population at UW-Madison.
Get ready, Wisconsin. Tuesday’s election begins six straight years of state Supreme Court races.
“We could see this kind of back-and-forth at fairly short terms — a year, two years, three years in between them — in a way that deprives the court of one of the key things that is supposed to separate law from politics, which is stability,” said Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Leave the hurt behind! How to let go of a grudge
Robert Enright, professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a pioneer of forgiveness research, says short-term anger is “probably a good thing because it shows: ‘I am a person of worth – people should treat me that way.’” Your anger may be justified and if it does turn into a grudge, that probably comes with enjoyable feelings such as a sense of empowerment or self-protection. “But then there’s this tendency, if we’re not careful, for grudges to turn on us. Grudges are rather deceptive little things. Once they take hold in the heart, they become the unwelcome guest that doesn’t know how to leave.” They can transform into anxiety or blanket mistrust.
Even as French Island makes progress on safe drinking water, effects of PFAS contamination remain
“I like to always say that we know less than what we don’t know,” said Gavin Dehnert from Wisconsin Sea Grant and University of Wisconsin-Madison. “That’s partially due to the fact that the PFAS have really hit the scientific radar in the last seven [or so] years.”
Wisconsin epilepsy research stalls without federal funds
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison said they are struggling to advance study of a potential new epilepsy treatment after the Trump administration’s pause on grant review meetings by the National Institutes of Health.
Wisconsin family battles Social Security Administration to secure son’s funds before he dies from cancer
Karen Holden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who researches social security and pensions, said that in most cases, if an individual dies before their payment distribution date, there is no workaround.
“When people apply for compassion allowances, their doctors clarify when the individual was first impacted by their illness; however, even if that date falls before the date of application, the person is subject to a five-month waiting period,” Holden said.
As Trump aides celebrate deportations, chilling message sent to migrants
Sara McKinnon, a professor of rhetoric, politics and culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that the images of the deportations are intended for the Trump administration to show its power to remove migrants.
“We didn’t see visualities of the deportation flights really at all during the first Trump administration,” McKinnon said. “We’re living in a different moment of spectacle, a different moment of visuality, and I think because there’s such a blurriness between what is entertainment media and what is news media, the administration is really playing on that.”
We’ve entered a forever war with bird flu
“We thought this was a one-off: one bird to one cow, and we wouldn’t see that again,” says Peter Halfmann, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Influenza Research Institute.
Yet the more severe human cases are concurrent with the spread of a recently mutated, potentially more dangerous version of the virus called the D1.1 genotype. D1.1. is now circulating among wild birds and poultry, and it has spilled over into dairy cows at least twice in 2025, according milk testing data from the Agriculture Department. With D1.1, Halfmann explains that the threshold for cross-species transfer is “much lower than we previously thought.”
Personal Finance Tariffs are ‘simply inflationary,’ economist says: Here’s how they fuel higher prices
“By trying to protect certain industries, you can actually make other industries more vulnerable,” Lydia Cox, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies international trade, said during a recent webinar.
Leopard dined on the shortest-ever early human relative, 2 million years ago
Travis Pickering, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who helped discover, identify, and describe the fossil, says he was “ecstatic” when he saw the bones.
“A find like this, in this context — that is, millions of years old and from a cave, which is extremely dynamic in terms of things like the build-up sediment, rockfall from the roof, the activities of prehistoric animals that dwelled in it, including eating and chewing bone — is as rare as finding hen’s teeth,” he says. “I couldn’t be happier.”
Bird flu virus can survive in raw milk cheese for months, study finds
The vast majority of raw milk cheese should be safe after the 60-day aging window, according to Keith Poulsen, DVM, PhD, a clinical associate professor of medical sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine.
“We have a lot of history and data to back that up,” Poulsen told Verywell in an email. “Unfortunately, the data from Cornell suggests that if raw milk cheeses were made on an affected farm, they would not be recommended for consumption.”
Zero gravity greens: How Earth’s farmers could benefit from spaceflight cultivation
Simon Gilroy is a professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who regularly designs spaceflight experiments with NASA. When asked if he thinks we are using astrobiological research enough to improve our sustainability on Earth, Professor Gilroy pointed to the discourse around urban farming, an approach which involves moving some elements of cultivation and productivity into cities instead of using agricultural fields.
Speaking to Interesting Engineering, Professor Gilroy observed that urban environments have many of the same problems as growing plants in space, including challenges around water delivery, maintaining environment within the desired parameters and dealing with pathogen outbreaks. “So there’s a lot of technology development going on in space, which has real applications when you come back to thinking about those kinds of applications on Earth,” he noted.
‘I’m just so incredibly excited’: UW Med students placed in residencies on Match Day
Match Day — the long-awaited moment when medical students nationwide learn where they’ll begin their residencies — arrived Friday at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
For Samantha Bush, it wasn’t just about where she’d spend the next few years of her training, it was about continuing a mission she started years ago.
Elon Musk and Gov. JB Pritzker among billionaires spending in pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court race
While the dollar figures have become eye-popping, electing one judge to a 10-year term on a seven-member court can have a greater influence on a range of policy issues than electing a single lawmaker to a larger legislative body for a shorter term, said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
“So maybe it’s surprising it took this long for the money and the parties and the ideological groups to find these races, but now it seems impossible to unwind,” Burden said.
A cure for her daughter’s epilepsy was getting close. Then Trump froze health spending.
Anne Morgan Giroux is pretty sure the cure for epilepsy ‒ or at least a long-term solution for millions ‒ is sitting in a university lab in Madison, Wisconsin. She and a team of researchers need just $3.3 million to push it across the finish line.
The problem: That $3.3 million solution is on indefinite hold as President Donald Trump and his administration slashes government spending. The money would have been awarded as grants from the National Institutes of Health to launch human trials. Epilepsy affects about 1% of U.S. adults, or around 3 million people.
Federal protections help students with disabilities succeed. They may be under threat
Kimber Wilkerson, a professor of special education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said 504 Plans tend to be less formal than an IEP. They usually represent a collaboration between parents and school leaders to figure out what the student needs to be successful at school. For a student with ADHD, that might be extra time to take tests. For a student with Type 1 diabetes, it could be access to snacks during the day.
In reality, Wilkerson said, many teachers would be willing to extend those kinds of accommodations to students who needed them, even without documentation. But the advantage of a 504 Plan is that families don’t have to re-explain their situation to a new teacher every time the student advances to a new grade, she said. That’s especially important when students reach middle and high school, where they have several teachers throughout the day instead of just one.
Why DOGE is struggling to find fraud in Social Security
Already DOGE has canceled many contracts at Social Security, just as it has at many other federal agencies. A DOGE-run website late last week listed $50.3 million in cost savings from these canceled agreements. That included funding for a University of Wisconsin at Madison study project to understand how to prevent impostor scams. Government impostor scams — most commonly pretending to be from the Social Security office — resulted in estimated losses of at least $577 million last year, often by conning seniors into sharing personal data, according to the agency’s IG office.
“When you cut resources like this, there’s always room to make things more efficient. But you also could make things worse,” said Cliff Robb, a University of Wisconsin professor who has studied impostor scams. “You could end up making fraud worse.”
This is the rarest kind of sunset you can see. Here’s how to spot them in Arizona
The bright evening colors come when small particles in the atmosphere cause light to scatter, explained Steven Ackerman, professor of meteorology at University of Wisconsin–Madison, in an online article.
“If the path is long enough, all of the blue and violet light scatters out of your line of sight,” Ackerman said. “The other colors continue on their way to your eyes.”
Retaliatory tariffs target Wisconsin’s top industries
But Wisconsin’s agricultural exporters may have a harder time selling their products to foreign markets in the face of retaliatory tariffs, said Jeff Hadachek, assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“At a very basic level, it means there will be a glut of food and food products that can no longer leave or leave the country at a higher cost than they previously did,” he said. “That means lower prices at the farm gate and lower prices for the food processors as well.”
Wisconsin hit record migration in ’24. Will it last under Trump’s immigration policies?
Wisconsin in particular also is seeing fewer leave, according to Ananth Seshadri, director of the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Between 2012 and 2016, Wisconsin lost about 8,000 taxpayers a year to other states, according to data from the Internal Revenue Service. But, between 2017 and 2020, that number neutralized to about 0 — meaning about the same number of taxpayers moved in as moved out. Seshadri said falling tax rates could be one reason why.
“We still tax our residents more than most of our neighboring states, but the tax structure in Wisconsin is a little more friendly,” he said.
Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates keep attacking each other on sentencing. Is it relevant?
The “soft-on-crime” moniker is absurd, said Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Anyone who has been a prosecutor, defense attorney or judge in enough criminal cases knows it’s easy to find cases in which the outcome looks bad to members of the public, who have none of the context needed to understand why it turned out as it did, he said.
Are Wisconsin Supreme Court rulings taking too long?
“Now we often have stalemate and finger pointing and hostility between the branches,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “They just don’t work well together, and so a lot of their disputes have ended up in lawsuits around education policies or election issues or abortion or (gubernatorial) powers. … So it’s made the court a more important venue.”
UW Health doctor speaks on reality of beef tallow
UW Health’s Dr. Jeff Pothof joined News 3 Now Live at Four Tuesday to answer if beef tallow is actually good for you.
Strong winds in Rock Co. cause tornado-like damage
Shane Hubbard, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin, explained that the wind gusts were similar to tornado damage.
“Those are like EF0, EF1 tornado winds in terms of… the dynamics are different, but the wind speeds are the same,” Hubbard said.
‘Farmer’s Ozepmic’: UW researchers work to reduce certain amino acids in soybean, corn plants to create weight loss strategy
A three-year grant funded by Wisconsin Partnership Program, a grantmaking program within the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, is backing research into how the reduction of certain proteins could be actualized through gene editing of soybean and corn, Professor of Medicine and Vice Chair for Biomedical Research in the Department of Medicine Dudley Lamming said.
Treating rotator cuff injuries, and the use of AI in healthcare
New research proposes changes to how rotator cuff tendinopathy is diagnosed and addressed. Our physical therapists weigh in. Then we talk about the use of AI in healthcare with the chief information and digital health officer at UW Health.
How AI revolution is creating ‘democratic legitimacy deficient’
Ethical implications of AI have a wide-ranging scope, Annette Zimmermann — University of Wisconsin Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor of Statistics — said. One of the foremost concerns being the land and resource use, especially if the sites will be on or around native lands, she said.
“Even if this didn’t happen exactly on tribal lands, there could be a kind of cascading damaging environmental effect that affects like surrounding areas,” Zimmermann said. “And so, that would obviously be hard to contain.”
Are we heading into a recession? Here’s what the data shows
Consumer beliefs affect retail sales, said Menzie Chinn, a professor in the economics department at the University of Wisconsin. He notes that policy uncertainty can shake the economy.
“If enough people and enough companies put things off because of uncertainty, you can tip the economy into recession,” Chinn told NBC News. “It doesn’t happen overnight, but it multiplies out over time.”
Does eating grass-fed beef help the planet? Research says not so simple
Randy Jackson, a professor of grassland ecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study, said he has found similar results in his own research showing that grass-fed beef has higher emissions assuming the same demand. In fact, Eshel’s team cited his work. But he worries that the study is too focused on minimizing emissions “without concern for the environmental impacts beyond GHG load to the atmosphere,” like biodiversity and soil and water quality, he wrote in an email.
Study: Long-term use of pain relief medications may lower risk of Dementia for some people
“It wasn’t that they were taking higher or lower doses, but that they were taking it, which does speak to this idea of dampening inflammation,” said Nate Chin, MD, medical director for the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
‘Endless series of contradictions’: Girls open up about complicated relationships with social media
Kate Phelps thinks the way society talks about how young girls use the internet is too simplistic. A big part of that, she says, is because culture spends a lot of time scrutinizing pre-teen girls, but we rarely talk to them about their experiences. Phelps, a University of Wisconsin-Madison women and gender studies researcher, wanted to change that.
Her new book, “Digital Girlhoods,” is based on her conversations with 26 different girls between the ages of 10 and 13 — an age group often referred to as “tweens” — about their feelings about social media.
LOUD to host Wisconsin Conference of Latino Arts and Culture
Featured artists and speakers include Armando Ibarra, a professor in the School for Workers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Suzanne Eckes on deep cuts to the US Department of Education
UW-Madison School of Education professor Suzanne Eckes discusses the Trump administration reducing U.S. Department of Education staffing by nearly half and a multi-state lawsuit filed in response.
Love potatoes? Grow them yourself this spring
Recently Amanda Gevens, chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Plant Pathology, visited “The Larry Meiller Show” to talk about our love affair with the potato and how to get a successful potato harvest in your own garden.
Trump administration cuts threaten UW-Madison ag studies, state farmers
Wisconsin farmer Andy Diercks sits on a red Memorial Union Terrace chair in the middle of a farm field, holding a potato in his left hand. “It’s amazing all the work that goes into growing this little guy,” he says to Amanda Gevens, UW-Madison chair of plant pathology, who sits across from him. “The research you’ve done over the past decades is critical to grow a good quality crop.”
Two healthcare systems merged, then closed the only birthing center for miles.
Closures are common after mergers, and a particularly sticky problem in more rural communities, which have fewer people and thus make less financial sense for profit-driven organizations, said Peter Carstensen, a professor emeritus in the UW-Madison Law School who focuses on competition policy. When competitors merge, they look for areas to reduce cost.
“It almost always means eliminating some overlapping activities,” he said.
10 hot facts about Venus
According to Sanjay Limaye, a scientist working at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Space Science and Engineering Center, “Venus has a potential to harbor conditions for iron- and sulfur-centered metabolism.”
Buzzed into Madison with the UW-Madison School of Nursing
Celebrating 100 years of excellence at University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing! With a growing nursing shortage, Badger nurses are stepping up—pursuing advanced degrees to educate, advocate, and transform healthcare for the future.
Doctors see influx of requests for long-acting reversible contraception
Dr. Laura Hanks is an OB-GYN with UW Health and an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in the department of OB-GYN. She says they have seen an uptick in people requesting both LARC and permanent sterilization since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
“We did a study at our hospital to looking at the increase in permanent sterilization rates, and we saw 106% increase in the year following the Dobbs decision,” Hanks says.
Will cicadas swarm Wisconsin again this year? What to expect with spring pests
The cicadas will likely be most active in areas ranging from southern Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and parts of western North Carolina, according to P.J. Liesch, director of the UW-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab. However, people can expect to spot them as far east as Boston and as far west as southern Indiana, Liesch said.
“Based on historical records, we know there’s going to be a little bit of activity in a few counties in Indiana,” he added. “Those would be about the closest to us up in Wisconsin.”
$19? We might be at peak strawberry
“In Japan, fruits are not just food. Fruits really have a lot of symbolic meaning and cultural meaning,” said Soyeon Shim, a scholar of consumer and financial behavior who’s studied the country’s fruit market. “High-end fruits are used as a gift. And gifts are a very important practice in Japan.”
A $19 strawberry isn’t unusual there, said Shim, who’s the dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Human Ecology. The high-quality fruit is grown in controlled greenhouses and requires a lot of hand labor, she said.
“I wouldn’t ever buy a $19 strawberry to get my daily intake for vitamin C. So it isn’t designed for everyday consumption,” Shim said.
Layoffs gut Federal Education Research Agency
“Some of these surveys allow us to know if people are being successful in college. It tells us where those students are enrolled in college and where they came from. For example, COVID impacted everyone, but it had a disproportionate impact on specific regions in the U.S. and specific social and socioeconomic groups in the U.S.,” said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
“Post-COVID, states and regions have implemented a lot of interventions to help mitigate learning loss and accelerate learning for specific individuals. We’ll be able to know by comparing region to region or school to school whether or not those gaps increased or reduced in certain areas.”
WI’s ‘nonpartisan’ Supreme Court race is anything but
University of Wisconsin-Madison mass communications professor Michael Wagner said the state’s rule about justices making their own decisions about when to recuse themselves from cases makes the election outcome that much more consequential.
“It’s in a presidential swing state, it’s on a swing court,” said Wagner, “and the cases that are going to come before the court are going to be cases where the donors in the election, most notably Elon Musk, have a clear interest and a clear path they want the winning judge to take.”
UW students get ‘scoop’ on what jobs are really like
The University of Wisconsin Havens Wright Center for Justice, in collaboration with the High Road Strategy Center and the South Central Federation of Labor will present Labor Spring 2025, “Get the Scoop: What jobs are really like,” March 14 at the Old Madison Room in Memorial Union from 1-3 p.m.
Carla Vigue on Native students and ‘Relatives’ at UW-Madison
University of Wisconsin-Madison Tribal Relations Director Carla Vigue describes how a group called “Relatives” offers different types of support to Indigenous students on campus and to student groups.
Study at UW-Madison brings possible placenta treatment closer to clinical trials
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Florida have discovered a treatment for placentas deficient in the growth hormone IGF-1 that may soon be going toward human clinical trials.
Experts break down Wisconsin Supreme Court race ahead of April 1 election
The State Democracy Research Initiative and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Election Research Center hosted an expert panel on Friday to explore funding, impact and the legal context of the upcoming Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
Here’s what to know about the voter ID referendum in Wisconsin’s April election
“There’s still a little uncertainty about that, and so to be voting on it (in April) could be additionally confusing to voters,” University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said.
Deaths of 2 prisoners at Taycheedah occurred during uptick in flu cases
Prisons, hospitals, nursing homes and other “congregate facilities” can accelerate the spread of respiratory illnesses due to overcrowding, said Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“People aren’t always able to control how much space they can have around others, and so that that is one of the ingredients for the spread of a respiratory virus,” Sethi said.
Texas court blocks execution of David Wood two days before scheduled killing
Greg Wiercioch, Wood’s longtime lawyer and a University of Wisconsin law professor, said 150 pieces of evidence remained untested, telling the Guardian in an interview on Monday: “It’s incomprehensible why the state is opposing additional testing … They shut it down I think because they’re afraid of what they’ll find out. We have DNA testing, the most powerful crime-fighting tool ever developed, and we’re not using it.”
Drawing on Dutch masters, NY exhibit explores Christians painting themselves into Purim parable
“It’s tempting to take these great figures of history, these creative and brilliant individuals, and see in them what we want to see,” said Steven Nadler, author of “Rembrandt’s Jews” and a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “With Rembrandt, it’s not just tempting, it’s also comforting, to see him as a friend of the Jews at a particular historical period when Jews did not have a lot of friends in many places.”
Hedge funds paying up to $1 million for weather modelers
“When it comes to predicting outcomes that could harm people, you have a moral obligation to share that information,” University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Andrea Lopez Lang said.
Lang — who formerly did consulting work for hedge funds and commodities traders — said she was recruited for at least one high-paying job since leaving the private sector, where she translated weather forecasts into actionable guidance ahead of cold weather outbreaks and other weather phenomena.