Rosh Hashanah is often treated as a time to reflect on the previous year and focus on hopes for the coming year, according to Jordan Rosenblum, the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism and Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The new study, published in JAMA Health Forum last week by Zack Cooper of the Yale School of Public Health and National Bureau of Economic Research, and Stuart Craig of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business, analyzed state-level premium increases in the large-group, small-group and health exchange markets.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering team has developed a hybrid fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite “blanket” designed to reduce lightning strike damage and improve protective coverage on aircraft and other high-flying vehicles. The research was published in the June 2026 issue of Composites, Part B: Engineering.
NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe speaks with professor Jeremy Stoddard of the University of Wisconsin about how to teach the September 11th attacks to middle and high school students.
Questions: One of our readers awoke recently to some beautiful clouds in the summer sky and two excellent questions popped into her mind. First, what holds the clouds up in the air. And then what makes some clouds appear to be fluffy on top but flat on the bottom?
“There are so many things that happened after 9/11 that are still sort of affecting us today, but young people wouldn’t know what those are,” Stoddard said.
No high school students today were alive on 9/11. Increasingly, many teachers weren’t either. That’s changing how the attacks are taught, Stoddard said, with states taking different approaches to the required curriculum on the topic.
The lake is Peter Lake, a long-serving subject of one of ecology’s most patient experiments, and the person tipping pigment over the gunwale was Danny Szydlowski, a PhD candidate and CASC graduate fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Center for Limnology, working with a colleague, Dat Ha. Their account of the season, published on the Midwest Climate Adaptation Science Center blog on 22 January 2025, reads less like a triumph than a puzzle: the dye went in, the fertiliser followed, and the water still bloomed.
“PBMCs can be isolated clinically really easily, and they’re already used in the clinical workflow,” says Melissa Skala of the Morgridge Institute for Research and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, senior author of the study. “So, the question is, what can we get from them that we aren’t already getting?”
The Director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison), Jorge Osorio, added that it is important to think about the concept of “One Health (onehealth)”, which involves human health, environmental health, plant health, and animal health.
“At UW-Madison we work on the implementation of one health centers in different parts of the world“…where various disciplines are involved to address global health issues. We need to move forward with topics for the university, but also for industry, improve local capacities, and prepare for future pandemics,” he said.
Many Wisconsin orchards are preparing to open their fields to apple pickers across the state. But after a year of late frosts, drought and hail damage in some areas, many apple orchards are not expecting a large yield this fall.
Mark Christopher is an owner of Maple Leaf Orchard in Spring Valley. He said warmer temperatures in March and April caused the trees in his western Wisconsin orchard to start blooming earlier. When temperatures dropped again, it damaged the crop.
Dresser: “Inflation, the rate of inflation ,is higher than the rate of wage growth. This is what happened in 2022. Wages, workers’ wages, went up in nominal terms, but the cost of living just wiped that right out. That looks like what we’re heading into for 2026. So while we got a high in 2025 and that’s great news, 2026 looks much less likely that that will be a strong gain and possible that it will be a loss because of the high inflation.”
esearchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that Michigan’s EV policies place significant emphasis on expanding charging infrastructure and increasing EV adoption, but pay less attention to whether low-income residents can afford to participate in this transition.
“Access to an electric vehicle is not just the ability to buy a vehicle. It is access to the entire system that makes using that technology possible,” said Chelsea Schelly, a co-author of the study and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Jon Levine, dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine, told WPR that the college is currently maxed out on how many new students it can accept each year due to space constraints, but he is hopeful that the program will be able to increase enrollment in the near future.
“It’s the same physical phenomenon as fiber optics,” says Pupa Gilbert at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was not involved in the work. She does, however, study biomineralization (By-oh-min-er-al-ih-ZAY-shun). It’s how living things build structures out of minerals.
TOWN OF CHRISTIANA — Residents of this small farming community in eastern Dane County spent years fighting what was then Wisconsin’s largest solar farm.
They lost that fight, and now, the same developer is looking to add onto that project.
Chicago-based Invenergy, the nation’s largest private energy developer, filed initial paperwork with the Wisconsin Public Service Commission in June for a second solar farm that will sit on roughly 770 acres, about half the size of the first facility, in Christiana, a town of 1,235 about 20 miles east of Madison.
Question: Do all hurricanes have an eye?
Answer: Seen from space, a hurricane appears as a vast spiral of clouds stretching across hundreds of miles. Near the center of strong hurricanes is the eye, a roughly circular region of comparatively calm weather, light winds, and low pressure.
Efforts across the globe to kill gray wolves as a means of protecting domestic animals have had little to no known impact on preventing wolf-related deaths to livestock, according to a new study.
With Wisconsin in the midst of a yearslong debate over what protections, if any, should be applied to the estimated 1,200 gray wolves in the state, Adrian Treves, a professor of environmental studies at UW-Madison and co-author of the latest study, said his hope is the research helps guide public policy when the next debate over wolf populations arises.
With the current academic year now well underway, some Spanish-speaking and bilingual parents may worry about their children losing their “home” language as they interact with peers and participate in school lessons solely in English.
“I think that the real concern is that the clock is ticking,” said Derek Clinger, with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. “Really, any last minute change to mail voting procedures this close to the election could create a lot of chaos and confusion for election administrators and for voters.”
A Monday emergency opinion from the high court paused a lower court ruling that blocked parts of Trump’s March executive order directing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to create state lists of U.S. citizens eligible to vote. The order also directs the U.S. Postal Service to prevent mail-in ballots from going to anyone not on those lists.
According to our friends at the Marquette Law School, 19% of Americans say they can never trust the government while only 18% say they can trust the federal government to do what is right all or most of the time.
While the reasons for this crisis in confidence are many, as a leading public policy school, we recognize that many Americans — including many Wisconsinites — feel cynical about the government.
Question: Is it dangerous to fly through a thunderstorm?
Answer: Thunderstorms pose several hazards, whether you are on the ground or in the air, namely lightning, hail, turbulence, icing, downbursts and even tornadoes. Because of these potential hazards, planes don’t fly through thunderstorms. Instead, they fly around them.
From towering stalks of maize to floods of rice paddies and waves of golden-colored wheat, grass plants cover ecosystems around the world and provide more than 40 percent of the calories people consume.1 Researchers have long wondered how grasses became such successful plants and outcompeted other species to dominate the natural and agricultural landscape.
Thousands of people across Wisconsin are not keeping up with repayment of student loans. According to a Wisconsin Watch and AP report, more than 100,000 borrowers in the state carry loans that are in default, as defined by not making payments in more than 360 days. Collins said the student loan default rate is a bellwether for the overall economy right now given the cost of other obligations many people have.
Approximately 3 million people in the United States are living with a condition called heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, or HFpEF. The number of people with this form of heart failure, which is more common in women than men, is growing alongside a rise in risk factors like aging, hypertension, diabetes and obesity. Additionally, more than 80% of HFpEF patients also face pulmonary hypertension, or increased blood pressure in the vasculature of the lungs.
“It’s impossible to say there’s one cohesive feeling,” said Joel Coyne, a business and marketing teacher at Sun Prairie School District and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Teachers are going to have to reevaluate what are we teaching, how are we teaching and how we are assessing the learning.”
Hospital costs in Wisconsin are about 26% higher than in Illinois, according to a new study comparing the two states, but a hospital trade association questions the report’s methods and disputes its conclusions.
The reason for the difference isn’t certain, says the report’s co-author, University of Wisconsin economist Anthony Lo Sasso. But he says it could be because most metro areas in the state have one dominant hospital and healthcare system.
Violent outbursts are so common that they’ve been dramatized on the popular medical TV series The Pitt. “Emergency rooms right now are like a powder keg,” said Rachel Odes, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing.
The road to opening a copper-nickel mine in Minnesota is long and uncertain, but it’s a path Twin Metals is exploring every day.
Their exploratory drilling brings them further below the surface than 16 stacked Statues of Liberty, all to refine a plan to mine out the copper and nickel on the land here, if they ever get the proper approvals.
A pacemaker that never needs a battery replacement could soon become reality, thanks to a device that generates its own electricity from the very heartbeat it regulates. University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers built a nanogenerator small enough to slip inside an existing leadless pacemaker, potentially letting a single implant last a patient’s entire lifetime.
Led by postdoctoral scholar Pengfei Chen under professor Xudong Wang, the team designed the device to fit inside the Medtronic Micra, the most widely used leadless intracardiac pacemaker on the market today.
Watching a loved one with Alzheimer’s or dementia slowly lose their cognitive abilities can be heartbreaking. While the person you once knew seems to be slipping away, sometimes people with Alzheimer’s briefly seem like their old selves again. They may remember a long-forgotten name or suddenly regain the ability to have a fluid conversation. What do these moments of lucidity really mean for the progression of the disease? And what implications do they have for those living with the disease, and their caretakers?
Nearly a decade ago, University of Wisconsin–Madison professors Barbara Bendlin and Federico Rey led research showing that people with Alzheimer’s disease have different communities of intestinal microbes than healthy individuals.
“Since then, we’ve been trying to figure out how this difference in the gut perhaps leads to changes in the brain,” says Bendlin, a professor of gerontology in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
Across Madison and beyond, children are spending a significant amount of time on screens and social media.
While there are some benefits of devices, such as certain educational platforms, local families are expressing growing concerns about the harm of too much screen time and social media.
Now is the perfect time for students to start adjusting their sleep schedules before heading back to the classroom.
Dr. Casey Freymiller with UW Health Kids recommends slowly moving up a child’s bedtime and wake-up time rather than making big changes all at once.
Western Wisconsin desperately needs rain, but if you’re looking at your lawn this weekend and wondering whether firing up the mower will help or hurt, experts say the answer may be as simple as taking a walk.
If your footprints remain visible in the grass for more than about 10 minutes, UW-Madison Division of Extension says your lawn is showing signs of drought stress.
And you probably shouldn’t mow it.
That’s one of several recommendations from Wisconsin lawn experts as drought conditions expand across the state and rainfall remains well below normal in Eau Claire.
Recent Wisconsin Farm Related Fatalities reports indicate that injuries and deaths remain a persistent issue.
“This is incredibly unfortunate, given the many other challenges farm families and farm workers are facing here in this day and age,” said one of the reports’ co-authors, John Shutske, University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor and Agricultural Safety & Health Specialist. “We saw a high of 41 deaths in 2017. And, then a low of 28 in 2020, but climbing back in these last three years, we looked at around 30-35 deaths.”
The Democratic primary in Wisconsin is over, but the flattening of Asian American identities in Wisconsin politics is not. And this will likely continue as Francesca Hong, the first Asian woman who ever ran for governor in Wisconsin, continues to serve people in the state.
We discuss the Universities of Wiscoinsin’s latest budget proposals. Then, we hear from researchers about a study into people with dementia experiencing moments of lucidity. And we talk to the 17-year-old Wisconsin resident representing Team USA in the Pan-American Championship for MMA fighting.
“The absence of endorsements from AOC and Sanders was a bit of a warning sign because they had in fact been involved in state-level races elsewhere. Their backing would have given Hong more legitimacy as a candidate and made her platform seem more grounded,” UW-Madison Political Science Professor Barry Burden said in an email.
While much attention has been given to a gubernatorial race that turned rapidly from sleepy to tumultuous in its final weeks, Democrats emerged from Tuesday’s nailbiter primary election with a continued focus on flipping enough legislative seats to wield political power they’ve lacked for more than 15 years in Wisconsin.
Tuesday’s Democratic gubernatorial primary win by David Crowley was a big surprise.
The Milwaukee County Executive narrowly defeated democratic socialist Francesca Hong. Crowley will face Republican Tom Tiffany Nov. 3.
Hong had a groundswell of grassroots support, while Crowley dropped out of the race in July. At that time, Crowley was behind in the polls.
He jumped back in a week later, after Sara Rodriguez dropped out due financial mismanagement by a campaign staffer.
UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden spoke with WUWM’s Ann-Elise Henzl about Crowley’s turnaround.
iffany faces his own headwinds. For one, the party that holds the White House historically struggles in midterm election cycles.
“Tiffany is going to be hampered by that, and Trump is even more unpopular now,” said UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden.
Hong caught flak from national media about years-old social media posts about defunding the police and canceling Thanksgiving. Some of the posts were dredged up by Republicans, UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said, as part of their strategy to define Hong as being too liberal. It might have backfired, Burden added, giving moderate voters a reason to look elsewhere and prevent Hong from being their nominee.
In the 19th century, Congress implemented this policy called allotment. The idea was that where tribes own things in common — meaning all members and the tribe itself owns the property — they decided to break up that communal title and parcel out individual parcels of land to different families, and then sell the surplus. The process of selling the surplus land within the reservation is what led to these checkerboarded reservations that we see today, where there are significant populations of non-Indians that own fee land within the exterior reservation boundaries.
Kathy Cramer, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Mr. Evers’s influence — even if it came near the end of a long campaign — could have turned voters away from Ms. Hong and toward Mr. Crowley.
“It could just be that there are lots of Democrats who just have an affinity for the guy,” she said of Mr. Evers, who has served two terms as governor. “That could have weighed heavily on their vote.”
“This is a natural cycle for lakes to go up and down,” said Katie Hein, UW-Madison Trout Lake Station research scientist, “and they go up and down on a decadal time frame. So, we were in a drought in like 2012, so about 14 years ago now.”
Tessa Conroy, associate professor of agriculture and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an economic development specialist with UW Extension, told “Wisconsin Today” that rural communities “have been worried about this for a long time.”
Quantum innovation is nothing new to Mark Saffman — a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has conducted research on a key technology behind quantum computing for over two decades — but he believes the competition for capital and talent is hotter now than ever before.
Since 2018, Saffman has been on the leadership team of Infleqtion, a Colorado-based quantum company that went public in February and has offices in Madison, Chicago and across the globe. The company uses neutral atom technology, Saffman’s specialty, for quantum computing, networking, sensing and security.
Preliminary results from a regional study conducted in Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa by Harkirat Kaur, an assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Plant and Agroecosystem Sciences, compared BMR, conventional tall and short-stature corn hybrids.
Neanderthals lived across Europe and Asia between roughly 400,000 and 40,000 years ago. Before our stocky cousins went extinct, some of them interbred with modern humans, leaving traces of their genetic material in our gene pool. Today, most people of non-African ancestry have inherited between 1 and 4 percent of their genetic makeup from Neanderthals.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say AI has helped tackle a decades-old problem in wireless communications involving MIMO, a technology widely used in modern mobile networks. The work was led by Dimitris Papailiopoulos, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who is currently on leave at Microsoft Research. According to his account, GPT-5.6 and Claude Fable 5 were used to develop and verify possible solutions to the problem.
“What happens in the gubernatorial primary could have both short-term and long-term consequences for Democrats in Wisconsin and even nationally,” Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center, said.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center director Barry Burden said for Crowley’s argument to take shape, the Wisconsin polling would need to be farther off than polling showed ahead of the Michigan race.
“El-Sayed was leading Stevens by 10 to 15 points in public polling. He won by one point. Crowley’s memo shows he is losing in a standard poll question by an even larger margin, so the polls need to be farther off in Wisconsin for him to be victorious,” Burden said. “Maybe the wilder fluctuations in the Wisconsin primary make it more possible for this kind of error to happen, but it would be substantial at more than 20 points.”
UW-Madison researchers have created a technology for sensing vibrations at “much lower cost” than traditional systems, with possible applications in health monitoring, predicting natural disasters and structural testing.
WARF included the technology in its latest roundup of top licensing prospects among its portfolio of engineering and computer science university research.
UW-Madison political science professor emeritus Howard Schweber considers protest encampments in Madison and responses by authorities given the breadth of and limits to freedom of speech and assembly.
The protein boom may be pushing many people to consume far more than their bodies need, and new research suggests that excess could come at a hidden cost.
Protein has become one of the food industry’s favorite selling points. It is added to cereal, coffee, snack bars, desserts, and even water, often with the suggestion that more is automatically healthier.
A study conducted by Princeton University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison revealed vast amounts of undocumented uranium has been exported from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) over the past 20 years.
After hackers successfully targeted dozens of water systems in neighboring Minnesota, utilities throughout Wisconsin have been double-checking their security systems ahead of any potential future attack here. “The reason to target a water system is that it’s so fundamental to our day-to-day lives,” said Dorothea Salo, a cybersecurity expert and teaching faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s a critical system and unfortunately, it turns out that they’re often easy targets. Like many of us during the pandemic lockdown, we put a lot of things on the internet, and that includes the infrastructure for our water supply.”
State and federal authorities continue to investigate a recent coordinated cyberattack on Minnesota municipal water systems.
Hackers disrupted technology controls at water towers and treatment plants in more than 30 Minnesota communities last week. And the FBI says water and wastewater companies in at least six other states have reported incidents.
MPR News guest host Catharine Richert talks with her guests about what we can do to protect the water systems, power grids and other public services we rely on.
Inflation hit a three-year high in May, leaving a growing number of Americans struggling to afford necessities. The rate has since slowed a bit, but most prices aren’t likely to come down. Analysts say “affordability” could be one of the deciding issues in this fall’s midterm elections.
But while we all notice the spike at the gas pump and the cash register, many people may not realize they can use simple, free tools to quantify the change and figure out whether their pay is keeping up.
After months of President Donald Trump threatening a US takeover of Cuba and ramping up a decadeslong economic assault of the island, The New York Times revealed Wednesday that the Central Intelligence Agency created a related task force, “setting in motion plans for a more concerted campaign to pressure the Cuban government to make the economic, political, and leadership changes.”
