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Category: UW Experts in the News

Why DOGE is struggling to find fraud in Social Security

Posted on
The Washington Post

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

Posted on
Arizona Republic

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

Posted on
Wisconsin Public Radio

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?

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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?

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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?

Posted on
The Capital Times

“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.”

‘Farmer’s Ozepmic’: UW researchers work to reduce certain amino acids in soybean, corn plants to create weight loss strategy

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The Badger Herald

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.

How AI revolution is creating ‘democratic legitimacy deficient’

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The Badger Herald

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

Posted on
NBC News

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

Posted on
ABC News

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

Posted on
Health

“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.

Dark matter might lurk in its own shadow world

Posted on
Scientific American

At the first dark matter conference I attended after graduate school, I took a bet with a primary proponent of the “dark matter haze” idea, Dan Hooper of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Hooper thought we could confirm that these observations were caused by dark matter within the next five years. I took the skeptical position.

‘Endless series of contradictions’: Girls open up about complicated relationships with social media

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Wisconsin Public Radio

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.

Trump administration cuts threaten UW-Madison ag studies, state farmers

Posted on
Isthmus

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.

Posted on
The Badger Project

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.

Doctors see influx of requests for long-acting reversible contraception

Posted on
WKOW - Channel 27

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

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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

Posted on
MarketPlace

“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

Posted on
Inside Higher Ed

“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

Posted on
Public News Service

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.”

Trees in art, as well as life, often follow simple mathematical rules, study finds

Posted on
CNN

The math concept hidden in this tree art — geometric shapes known as fractals — is apparent in branching patterns in nature and may be key to humans’ ability to recognize such artwork as trees, according to Mitchell Newberry, a mathematical biologist at the University of New Mexico, and his colleague Jingyi Gao, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin.

Deaths of 2 prisoners at Taycheedah occurred during uptick in flu cases

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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

Posted on
The Guardian

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

Posted on
The Times of Israel

“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

Posted on
Bloomberg

“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.

Fragments of a face more than a million years old found in Spanish cave

Posted on
The Washington Post

John Hawks, chairman of the department of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was not involved in the study, called it a “really cool paper.” He added, “It’s always great to see a new fossil, of course, but in this case the fossil helps add something to our knowledge of how some of the first human relatives in Europe were connected to other places.”

Is anyone coming out on top of Donald Trump’s tariff wars? Economists weigh in

Posted on
The Latin Times

While these duties may “relieve” struggling U.S. industries, it comes with a cost, Lydia Cox, an assistant economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and international trade expert, wrote in a 2022 paper. Tariffs create higher input costs for other industries, making them “vulnerable” to foreign competition, Cox wrote. These spillover effects hurt other sectors of the economy, ultimately costing jobs.

NIH cuts off more research funding, including for vaccine hesitancy. mRNA may be next

Posted on
NPR

“It appears that there are forces intent on destroying our existing vaccine enterprise,” says Dr. Jonathan Temte, a professor of family medicine at the University of Wisconsin who studies vaccine hesitancy. “Defunding research on vaccine hesitancy is the latest example of this effort.”

Federal research instability risks postdoc careers, American leadership

Posted on
STAT

Trey Wenger, a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin, is funded by the NSF and found himself financially stretched when the agency suddenly halted postdoc stipends, only to be restored by a court order. “I missed a paycheck when rent was due, and remain concerned that my paycheck could be turned off at any time,” wrote Wenger, whose work in astronomy helps us better understand how galaxies form and evolve.

Why the Trump administration is wrong about an energy crisis in the US

Posted on
ABC News

There isn’t even the slightest hint of a domestic energy crisis, especially when compared to actual crises that occurred in 1973, 1979 and 2022, Gregory Nemet, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin’s Energy Institute, told ABC News.

“Prices for gasoline are mid-range over the last, say, 20 years,” Nemet said. “There’s plenty of supply. We’re not having electricity outages. We’re not having lines of gas stations.”

Cuts to Medicaid would affect wide range of Wisconsin residents, researcher says

Posted on
Wisconsin Public Radio

Donna Friedsam is a researcher emerita who has been studying health care policy and reform for decades at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Friedsam told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that changes at the federal level could have significant ripple effects at home.

“Many people who are on Medicare, who are low-income, also duly rely on Medicaid to cover things that Medicare does not cover,” Friedsam said. “So, Medicaid is actually quite a wide-ranging program and reaches over a million Wisconsin residents who rely on it.”

Tariffs are ‘lose-lose’ for U.S. jobs and industry, economist says: ‘There are no winners here’

Posted on
CNBC

While tariffs’ protection may “relieve” struggling U.S. industries, it comes with a cost, Lydia Cox, an assistant economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and international trade expert, wrote in a 2022 paper.

Tariffs create higher input costs for other industries, making them “vulnerable” to foreign competition, Cox wrote.

COVID-19’s fifth anniversary: 5 areas where life changed in U.S.

Posted on
Deseret News

As the Journal Sentinel reported, quoting Sedona Chinn, an assistant professor and researcher in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at University of Wisconsin-Madison, folks who were frustrated started doing their own research, but it also “led to more misinformation and more anti-expert bias, making it all the much harder for solid science to break through.”

Fennimore farmers work to reduce dairy intolerance through products

Posted on
WMTV - Channel 15

Researchers explain that some people have a reduced ability to chop up and absorb lactose. UW Madison’s Center for Dairy Research is hoping to continue to learn more about the future of dairy digestion.

“There is weak evidence at the moment that this change in the moving from what is typically A1 to A2, that there’s a difference in potential difference in how the body digestive,” Dr. John Lucey, the center’s director said.

Wisconsin farmers protect potatoes with weather forecasting tool, help from UW researchers

Posted on
The Badger Herald

Farmers may prevent blight by spraying their fields with fungicides, but if overdone, this practice has its drawbacks, University of Wisconsin professor of plant pathology Andrew Bent said. To prevent blight and overspraying, professor and Department of Plant Pathology Chair Amanda Gevens uses a tool called Blitecast to communicate to farmers the appropriate time to spray fungicides.

Don’t overdo it, but light exercise can help with minor illness

Posted on
CNN

“If you have a mild to moderate illness, you can continue to exercise, but you should do less than you normally do,” said family physician Dr. Bruce Barrett, a professor and vice chair for research in the department of family medicine and community health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If you normally run 10 miles per week, maybe run 5 if you have a mild cold. Just tamp it down.”