So far this decade, the state has experienced about a quarter of the population growth it saw between 2010 and 2020. But the COVID-19 pandemic led to a spike in deaths that altered the state’s trajectory, said David Egan-Robertson, demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Applied Population Laboratory.
“It actually may be a case that population will grow a little bit faster because there will be fewer deaths going forward in the state,” Egan-Robertson said.
University of Wisconsin-Madison was awarded a fellowship to research and write a book on European socialist politics in the context of economic decolonization.
The project title is Failed Globalists: European Socialists, the Global South, and the Struggle for Economic Decolonization, 1945–2008. Giuliana Chamedes, associate professor of history at UW-Madison, was awarded $30,000 in funding for the fellowship.
“The rise of party activists is the theme of the last 20 years,” says Byron Shafer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin who wrote the definitive history of the 1968 reforms in Quiet Revolution: The Struggle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics. “And a lot of it does come from what happened back then.”
Loss of vision over time is a particular interest for study author Freya Mowat, a veterinary ophthalmologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. Mowat studies how dogs’ vision declines over time and what factors contribute to it. She said that research may have applications for humans, as well.
“If we are finding risk factors for unhealthy dog aging, we may also find risk factors for unhealthy human aging — because we live with our dogs,” Mowat said.
About 1 million people typically step up to work the polls in a presidential election, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The tributary streams used by Hovsgol grayling for spawning are also drying up. “They no longer have water in them during the spring spawning season,” says Olaf Jensen, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Nearly 80% of the 96 streams that once flowed into Lake Hovsgol are dry during the key months when the fish migrate.
A comprehensive analysis by FiveThirtyEight recommended going for two, especially late in the game, but a separate analysis by a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor, Laura Albert, concluded it’s best to kick the extra point. Even on similar questions, slightly different assumptions or data can lead to different answers.
No longer tied to milking cows herself twice a day, Hinchley says both she and her dairy cows are happier with the robotic milkers operating 24 hours a day.
“It’s not necessarily something that you would have to do in order to stay in the dairy business,” said Chuck Nicholson, a UW-Madison professor of animal and dairy sciences. He noted only about 8% of Wisconsin’s dairy farmers have implemented the new technology, typically family farms that want to save on labor costs. “The labor shortage is definitely a key motivating factor.”
“This judge seems to be a very activist judge,” said John Gross, a clinical law professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “He seems to want to insert himself into the resolution of cases in ways that are often not appropriate, or at the very least, not authorized by any statute.”
Gross also raised concerns the restitution order, which directed money to the county that supported the victim after the assault, could set a dangerous precedent in which judges or district attorneys could use restitution to fill government coffers.
In less than six years, the number of dugout canoes known to exist in Wisconsin rose from 11 to nearly 100. Locating and studying these vessels, ranging from about 150 to 4,000 years old, is the mission of the Wisconsin Dugout Canoe Survey Project. Interview with Sissel Schroeder, a professor of anthropology with a specialization in archaeology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose lab hosts the Wisconsin Dugout Canoe Survey Project which she heads up with state maritime archaeologist Tamara Thomsen.
The current increase in COVID-19 cases is a continuation of an increase in the illness that began in August and started to take off after children returned to school in September, said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. The surge also follows along with other respiratory viruses, although its pattern is not identical, he added.
“For someone who has symptoms for a respiratory virus infection, they may not have COVID-19 — it could very well be influenza or could be RSV,” Sethi said Thursday. Wherever they are given, “COVID tests are still useful, because it would be nice to know what virus you might have.”
Studies show that early intervention and integrated, team-based mental health services are an effective way to treat schizophrenia. However, many patients still can’t access the new approach to care. We talk to Ronald Diamond, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at UW-Madison and former medical director of the Mental Health Center of Dane County, about what’s standing in the way of patients getting the treatment they need.
The National Institutes for Health is awarding a $150 million grant to UW-Madison researchers to study how Alzheimer’s and other dementias are affecting the brain. We talk with the study leader about Alzheimer’s and the future of dementia research.
“That language is pretty categorical, so my sense is that no recall election could be held until new maps are adopted or the court takes some other authorizing action,” Robert Yablon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who specializes in election and constitutional law, said.
“When many talk about ‘totaling a car,’ it is often taken to mean that the car is a total wreck and cannot be salvaged, certainly not driven. However, in the insurance world, ‘totaling’ is when the insurer declares the book/cash value (e.g., Blue Book Value) of the car just before the accident is less than the costs of covered repairs from the accident,” says Karen C.A. Holden, professor emeritus, Department of Consumer Science and Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin – Madison Institute on Aging.
Despite documented systemic barriers, a new UW-Madison study shows mothers with low incomes find the credit system in the United States legitimate. We speak with Sarah Halpern-Meekin and J. Michael Collins, two of the researchers.
This week, Republican legislators unveiled a proposal to legalize medical marijuana in Wisconsin. We get reaction to the proposal from Lucas Richert, a pharmaceutical historian at UW-Madison.
A bill that would prohibit higher education institutions in Wisconsin from conducting “gain of function” research on “potentially pandemic pathogens” received a public hearing on Wednesday.
The bill — AB 413 — was introduced by Rep. Elijah Behnke (R-Oconto) and Sen. André Jacque (R-DePere), who cited several incidents at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and controversy over the origins of COVID-19.
Dr. Paula Cody, medical director of adolescent medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, warned about the dangers of diet pills and supplements more than six years ago after hearing enough patients ask about supplements to lose weight or gain muscle — and the issue has only grown.
“The incidence of eating disorders has increased pretty dramatically after the pandemic. We’ve seen the numbers skyrocket,” she said. “So I do think that the concern I had before, which was not a small matter then — I’m even more concerned now.”
UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences Dean Glenda Gillaspy reflects on her first three semesters on campus. She says the two most common issues that come to her desk from stakeholders are decreasing enrollment trends and the status of production agriculture education on campus.
Kathryn McGarr, an associate professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is also affiliated with the Department of History, pointed out the regional differences too, and then that there has been a shift since the Civil War for both of the parties. One example is the stance on equal rights.
“At the time of the Civil War, most members of what was then called the Democratic party supported slavery, and most members of what was then the newly formed Republican Party were anti-slavery,” she wrote in a December 28, 2023 email. “But what each party stood for has shifted dramatically over time, with the biggest realignments occurring in the middle of the Twentieth Century over civil rights. So someone like the segregationist senator Strom Thurmond was a Democrat until 1964 when he switched affiliation to the Republican Party.”
UW-Madison professor and editor Nate Jung describes how students can approach using generative AI to improve reading and writing skills while remaining mindful of its limitations as a teaching tool.
Stem cell biologists are gaining new insight into the human brain — thanks to technology developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dr. Randolph Ashton is the associate director of UW-Madison’s Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center and says they can use that research to screen for numerous conditions like spina bifida and autism; and, according to Dr. Ashton, RosetteArray technology could eventually help scientists develop more specific medical treatments – and perhaps even a cure. When it comes to medical ethics, he says his primary concern is the prohibitive cost of such treatment.
Wastewater testing works at all because “everybody poops,” said David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“These previously invisible vessels radically changed our knowledge about the scale, scope and location of fishing activity,” writes Jennifer Raynor, an author of the study and a natural resource economist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in the Conversation.
This is because the brain has to switch back and forth to give each one attention, says Megan Moreno, an adolescent medicine physician who studies media and digital health at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Over time, too much stimulation may be detrimental to your ability to concentrate on any one task. “We are in this world with lots of little micro interruptions,” Moreno says. “It is hard to piece together the stories, and it’s harder to retain them, because you have to do so much work to put them together.”
Dietram Scheufele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor whose work includes looking at AI and political communication, noted the new technology comes at the same time there’s been a rise in disinformation delivered by foreign adversaries to disrupt the U.S. electoral system.
Simon Goldberg, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studies the effects of meditation, including research among people who have psychological problems such as depression and anxiety. He noted that because of Dunn and Folk’s strict criteria, they omitted hundreds of studies on meditation’s benefits. “It’s, in the spirit of rigor, throwing lots of babies out with the bathwater,” he says. “It’s really very obvious that meditation training reduces symptoms of anxiety and depression.”
For more than 150 years, debtors prisons have been illegal in the United States. However, that restriction only applies to private debts; a recent study found that between 2005 and 2018, eight thousand Wisconsin residents were jailed for failing to pay court debts each year. We talk to John Gross, director of the Public Defender Project at UW Law School, about the causes and consequences of modern-day debt imprisonment.
Mikhail Troitskiy, professor of practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek that the strategies of countries like Sweden and other NATO allies are being accentuated because Ukraine aid from countries like the U.S. could end. Russia might view this as an opening for “spillover” into other foreign lands.
By the 1890-91 school year, more than 200 of Massachusetts’s 351 towns had an average daily attendance of 90%, and only 11 were below 80%. During the following decades, mandatory schooling spread nationwide. William Reese, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, found that just 6% of adolescents were in high school in 1890 but that by 1930 half of them were.
“Ranked choice voting doesn’t have an obvious partisan advantage in places where it’s been implemented. It hasn’t helped the Democrats or the Republicans in any consistent fashion,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But it’s become sort of a folk wisdom in Republican circles that ranked choice voting is a plan by Democrats to help them do better in elections and to hurt Republicans. I don’t know where that has come from exactly.”
Howard Schweber, a political science professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, said the lawsuit is essentially moot because he believes the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately have the final say.
“There’s no question that this issue is going to go to the United States Supreme Court, so all of this is kind of performative,” Schweber said.
In 5 billion years, our sun will balloon into a red giant star. Whether Earth survives is an “open question,” Melinda Soares-Furtado, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says. Sure, Earth could be swallowed by the sun and destroyed. But in some scenarios, Earth escapes and is pushed farther out into the solar system.
Michelle A Chui, PharmD, PhD, a professor in pharmacy administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy, told Health she doesn’t think medicines can spoil in your medicine cabinet from shower or bath moisture, or general humidity in the home.
We assess several bills working through the Wisconsin legislature that would seek to reform predatory — yet legal — payday loan operations, including one that could cap interest rates, and another that would expand the definition of a “payday loan.” Interview with Sarah Orr, clinical professor and director of the Consumer Law Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Megan Moreno is a University of Wisconsin adolescent medicine physician and co-medical director of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health. She often warns parents against romanticizing their own methods of socialization as adolescents over what their kids do to make and keep friends.
“I have a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old, and one thing I think a lot about is checking my own biases of how they’re supposed to be spending their time,” Moreno said.
Jonathan Martin, professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UW-Madison, points to a “robust” El Niño, which refers to a warming of the ocean’s surface, or above-average surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.
Courtney Bell, a UW-Madison professor and director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, said evaluating students on how well they meet specific standards has always been part of the grading process. Although grades might show up differently on report cards now, Bell said standards-based learning dates back to the 1980s.
Similarly, inherited microchimerism might help explain why some studies have found that people are better at accepting organs from their mother than from their father, says William Burlingham, a transplant specialist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
To Howard Schweber, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert in constitutional law, there are two separate issues at play: the legal and the political.
“There have been no reported appellate court cases in Wisconsin dealing with the issue of how housing is addressed in local comprehensive plans,” said Brian Ohm, a retired professor in the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture at UW-Madison, calling the lack of legal challenges “a surprise to a lot of people.”
In an opinion column in the Wisconsin State Journal, two University of Wisconsin-Madison professors wrote that the additional births caused harm to Wisconsin communities.
“Dobbs is just the latest abortion restriction to harm Wisconsinites, especially low-income Wisconsinites,” wrote Tiffany Green, associate professor of population health sciences and obstetrics, and gynecology, and Jenny Higgins, director of the Collaborative for Reproductive Equity. “In our role as scientists and public health professionals, we conclude that the evidence is clear: Restrictions and policies in our state that make abortion inaccessible and unaffordable harm the health and well-being of Wisconsin families
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many health experts were concerned about the new disease’s impact on older adults and people who are immunocompromised.
Jenna Nobles, sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was interested in another potentially vulnerable group – pregnant people.
“We know that emerging infectious diseases can be extremely consequential for pregnancies, both people who are carrying the pregnancies and the infants who are born from them,” Nobles said.
Quoted: “There can be some ability to trace that, because each company would be producing, potentially, different types of PFAS that could be linked back to them,” said Steph Tai, a law professor and associate dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an expert on environmental law.
Trump is at his strongest point now, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and Elections Research Center director Barry Burden.
Conda’s perspective is not simply Republican talking points, because a majority of the public does have a negative perception of Biden’s performance and is dissatisfied with the direction of the country, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and Elections Research Center director Barry Burden.
By demonstrating her “unwavering support” for Biden, Harris is amassing “a national network of allies” within the Democratic Party who might back a second presidential campaign of hers in the future, according to University of Wisconsin, Madison political science professor and Elections Research Center Director Barry Burden.
Krishanu Saha, a bioengineer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose lab is working on gene therapies for treating blindness, says the precision allowed by CRISPR-Cas9’s programmability is its singular selling point.
“Traditional gene therapy, which we call gene augmentation, is essentially flooding the cell with extra copies of a normal gene; in some cases, this doesn’t work,” Saha tells Inverse. “We found in a few cases, it’s really important to destroy the mutant copy of the [gene] or fix the underlying mutation and that’s where you have to have the precision of CRISPR to go in and specifically do that.”
“Now’s the perfect time to set a New Year’s resolution to rethink your interest in quitting tobacco use,” Dr. Michael Fiore, a UW-Madison tobacco expert, said in a statement. “You can reach out to the Quit Line and go at your own pace. You get to decide how you change your tobacco use and when.”
As destructive as they are, plant diseases can be intriguing. Brian Hudelson, known as ‘Dr. Death’ to Garden Talk fans, has published a fanciful book of limericks based on common and uncommon plant diseases. Hudelson is director of the Plant Disease Diagnostics Clinic in the Department of Plant Pathology at UW-Madison
“Forgiveness is a moral virtue basically; it is a merciful response toward those who have not been good to us — without excusing the people, without forgetting, lest it happen again, without necessarily reconciling,” said Robert Enright, a pioneer in the field of forgiveness science and professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“In all cases of amblyopia, there’s a stronger eye and a weaker eye. And it’s winner-take-all in the cortex. And the cortex learns to ignore the signals from the weak eye,” says Elizabeth Quinlan, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“There are companies out there lending to Wisconsin consumers at really just exorbitant interest rates. I mean, I’ve seen 400 percent, 300 percent APRs,” said Sarah Orr, director of the University of WIsconsin-Madison Law School’s Consumer Law Clinic.
“And although the repayment terms are more like an installment loan, they’re really just terrible financial traps for people,” Orr continued. “A person who gets one of these products really spells ruin. I don’t know any other way to express it.”
A new study by a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that a lack of nurturing as a child is associated with accelerated aging later in life. The research looks at changes to a person’s genome that have been linked to their environment or behaviors — what’s called epigenetics. These markers can indicate a person’s biological age, or how much their body has aged physically.
Lauren Schmitz, professor at UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, said the field of research around these epigenetic changes is still new because data is limited. Studies require both survey data on people’s health experiences and a blood sample.
“It’s important who wins the White House for a whole host of reasons,” said Michael Wagner, the director of graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, who has published research on how abortion became a partisan issue in the news. “But for those who have become pregnant and don’t want to be, the election does not come in time to provide them a remedy.”
In order to get the U.S. Supreme Court to look at the case, the Legislature and its allies will need to make the argument that there was a violation of federal law. That’s because, explained Rob Yablon, University of Wisconsin Law School professor and co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative, the core legal claim in the case — contiguity — is a matter of state law.
The case brought to the court argued the maps violate Wisconsin’s Constitution because some legislative districts include pieces of land that are not connected. “The Wisconsin Supreme Court has the last word on state law questions,” Yablon said.
Had the Wisconsin Supreme Court found only a couple of districts with noncontiguous territory in violation of the Constitution, it could have called for a tailored approach to fix just those boundaries, UW-Madison Law School associate professor Robert Yablon said.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School professor Robert Yablon gives insight into why the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out the state’s election district maps and where things could go from here.
Wearing a smile on your face can be interpreted differently depending on where you live. We talk with UW-Madison professor of psychology Paula Niedenthal who’s explored smile culture around the world for decades.
