Column by Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, assistant professor of Latin American and Caribbean History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His most recent book is Puerto Rico: A National History (Princeton University Press, 2024), also published in Spanish as Puerto Rico: Historia de una nación by Grupo Planeta USA.
These changes happen to about 1 in 5 of us as we age, according to Lisa Vinney, a speech-language pathologist and faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Age-related voice changes happen to everyone to some degree,” she said. “But those changes can occur more rapidly or be more pronounced thanks to genetic, lifestyle and health factors.”
In their paper, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Wehner and co-author James P. Kossin of the University of Wisconsin–Madison did not explicitly call for the adoption of a Category 6, primarily because the scale is quickly being supplanted by other measurement tools that more accurately gauge the hazard of a specific storm.
Across the country, state lawmakers are cutting funding to their most prominent public universities.
That dwindling support for higher education was the subject of a panel at UW-Madison earlier this evening – and the School of Education’s Dr. Taylor Odlewas one of the panelists.
While public perceptions of the value of going to college have diminished in recent years, experts argue the lifelong earning potential for someone with a bachelor’s degree is worth the investment.
That was the message Wednesday from a forum about the future of flagship universities held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While ideological battles over diversity programs, curriculum and funding continue, universities must forcefully advocate for their value to society, the panelists said.
Several experts said the USDA’s plans to require testing in cows are a good start. “We need to be able to do greater surveillance so that we know what’s going on,” said Thomas Friedrich, a virology professor at the University of Wisconsin’s veterinary school.
Finding viral fragments in milk from the commercial supply chain is not ideal, but the genetic material poses little risk to consumers who drink milk, said David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We need to be able to do greater surveillance so that we know what’s going on,” said Thomas Friedrich, a virology professor at the University of Wisconsin’s veterinary school.
David O’Connor, a virology expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, likened recent bird flu developments to a tornado watch versus a warning.
“Lots of farms aren’t raising their hands to be tested because they don’t want to be known as having an infected herd,” said Keith Poulsen, director of the veterinary diagnostic lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
But “the 2023 numbers seem to indicate that bump is over and we’re back to the trends we were in before,” said Nicholas Mark, a University of Wisconsin researcher who studies how social policy and other factors influence health and fertility.
Susan Carpenter, native plant garden curator and gardener at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum, told WPR’s “Central Time” that Wisconsin’s native bees have different ecological functions and needs than domesticated honey bees.
UW-Madison professor John Rudolph says instead of focusing on jobs and college prep, educators should teach what science is and establish trust in scientists. Rudolph joins us to discuss his book “Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should).”
Column by Menzie Chinn, professor of Public Affairs and Economics in the UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs and Department of Economics.
ssociate professor of Population Health Sciences and Obstetrics and Gynecology, UW-Madison.
Adrian Treves, an environmental science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the origins of today’s rampant predator killing can be found in America’s early European settlers, who brought with them the mentality that wolves were “superpredators,” posing a dangerous threat to humans. “We’ve been fed this story that the eradication of wolves was necessary for livestock production,” he said.
Ancient matzo wasn’t as crackerlike as it is today. It was likely similar to a pita, said Jordan Rosenblum, a religious studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There’s a 2,000-year history of putting stuff on matzo and eating it,” he said.
It’s “clearly hominin,” John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who also blogged about the discovery, told me in an email.
Women like Slemp challenge the image of the stay-at-home mom as an affluent woman with a high-earning partner, said Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The stay-at-home moms in this country are disproportionately mothers who’ve been pushed out of the workforce because they don’t make enough to make it work financially to pay for child care,” Calarco said.
John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, titled his blog post on the matter: “How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is hosting Earth Fest this week to promote sustainability and pay tribute to the mission of Earth Day’s founder.
“This is the butterfly effect of infectious disease ecology,” says senior study author Tony Goldberg, a wildlife epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Far-flung events like demand for tobacco can have crazy, unintended consequences for disease emergence that follow pathways that we rarely see and can’t predict.”
UW-Madison holds more than 50 events as part of Earth Fest.
Paul Robbins, dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison, said much of Gaylord Nelson’s legacy focused on alleviating poverty and addressing inequality in society — not just the environment.
“We lead with a community-first vision that justice comes first,” Robbins said. “If you get justice right, you’re on the road to healing the environment.”
Extreme heat kills more people in the United States each year than all forms of extreme weather combined, said Richard Keller, professor and chair of the medical history and bioethics department at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. In a changing climate not only are the days of extreme heat becoming “more frequent and more intense, they’re also longer lasting,” Keller said.
A brood of periodical cicadas that call part of Wisconsin home is emerging for the first time in 17 years this spring. We cover all things cicada with P.J. Liesch, one of our favorite entomologists.
Co-authored by ssociate professor of Management and Human Resources, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Leaders with the University of Wisconsin-Madison said food waste accounts for about 30% of the solid waste the university generates.
“The optimist in me knows there are a lot of moving parts,” University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of energy analysis and policy Tracey Holloway tells Consumer Reports. “It could end up being easier to be sustainable, easier to be resilient, than we thought, and maybe in some ways that will offset the costs that they project.”
Anuj Desai, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, suggested that Ms. Tabassum could have legal grounds to sue, particularly in light of California law that supports students’ First Amendment rights.“If the reason they’re removing her is because of her views, then that just feels much more like a free speech problem,” he said. “Ordinarily we would say, beef up the security.”
“The early and consistent wins we are witnessing demonstrate that we can disrupt Black maternal and child health disparities by creating solutions with, rather than for, our community,” said Robin Lankton, vice president of Population Health at UW Health, a member of the health council.
Partial cloverleaf interchanges, with on and off ramps next to each other, are the highway intersection most susceptible to drivers mistakenly entering on exit ramps, experts say. At such interchanges, “it’s hard to know which is the correct ramp,” said Andrea Bill, a traffic safety research project manager at UW-Madison’s Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory. “Here in Wisconsin, especially in our urban areas, we have a fair amount of them.”
Tahnee Aguirre, a financial security educator for UW-Madison Extension, which provided the rent education and financial literacy classes, said the women already had the tenacity and intelligence to be successful. Now they have a vision.
“Now that they see it and know what they need to do to make it happen, they have a better chance to achieve their goals,” Aguirre said. “Their opportunities are endless.”
“This is an innovative way to approach the issue, and the authors are up front about the limitations of their analysis, because it is so new,” says Tracey Halloway, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the report but read a draft. “The optimist in me knows there are a lot of moving parts, and it could end up being easier to be sustainable, easier to be resilient, than we thought, and maybe in some ways that will offset the costs that they project.”
PJ Liesch, an extension entomologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, compared it to the recent solar eclipse because “you only have so many opportunities in your life to witness something like it.”
“This year we are talking billions, if not, trillions of cicadas,” Liesch said.
“Available housing is incredibly low,” said Grace Kobe, who co-directs the University of Wisconsin Law School’s Eviction Defense Clinic, which is part of the partnership. “And so much of that housing that is being built is not affordable, and so when folks are facing eviction, or not facing eviction and just trying to find somewhere to go, their options are so incredibly limited here.”
Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center director, said the main source of distrust in elections are messages from political leaders to their followers indicating they should be distrustful.
“As the most important voice in one of the major parties, Trump has a unique ability to undermine public confidence through his rhetoric, even though it is often detached from facts about the situation,” Burden said.
Heather Kirkorian, professor of human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, researches the effects of media on children’s development. Kirkorian said media effects vary widely among individuals, noting it can pose both positive and negative outcomes. While clear evidence exists of manipulative practices to keep youth engaged longer, she said a direct link is lacking between the use of social media and an increase in suicidal ideation or mental health problems.
“It’s really important for us to understand that the effects of media are not the same for everybody, and some groups of children might be disproportionately affected by media,” Kirkorian said.
“It’s just this perfect storm of technical issues and procedural delays that have just rolled downhill right from the Department of Education to institutions to students and families,” says Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“There aren’t many places in the country where two very different broods overlap,” said Daniel Young, a professor of entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the school’s insect research collection.
Access to scholars. There are brilliant scholars whom nonacademics don’t get to engage with. So, to increase access to them, I hosted a weekly show on Instagram Live where I interviewed various academics, including Gloria Ladson-Billings, professor emerita at University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Chris Emdin, Maxine Greene Chair for Distinguished Contributions to Education at Teachers College. You may not want to do something like that every week, but you might post clips from an academic talk or a video of an interview regularly, or at least from time to time.
High interest rates and soaring home prices are holding back Wisconsin’s housing supply and discouraging potential buyers, a University of Wisconsin-Madison real estate expert told an audience of bankers and business people at the Economic Forecast Luncheon on Wednesday at the Sheraton Madison Hotel. The annual event is hosted by news outlet WisPolitics-WisBusiness and the Wisconsin Bankers Association.
“We just don’t have product for sale,” said Mark Eppli, director of the James A. Graaskamp Center for Real Estate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Business School, in a keynote address.
One of the event’s sponsors was UW-Madison’s Kemp Natural Resources Station. Kelly Tyrell, a spokesperson for UW-Madison said in a statement that the speaker at the GLTPA conference is chosen by a committee and that the university hosts speakers on a viewpoint neutral basis.
A UW-Madison professor explains new research and immigration patterns in the Darién Gap. Then, a hematologist discusses a rare blood disease known as amyloidosis. Then, WPR’s Lori Skelton previews the spring concert season.
Many physicists took to X, formerly Twitter, to pay tribute to Higgs and share their favourite memories of him. “RIP to Peter Higgs. The search for the Higgs boson was my primary focus for the first part of my career. He was a very humble man that contributed something immensely deep to our understanding of the universe,” posted Kyle Cranmer, physicist at the University of Wisconsin Madison and previously a senior member of the Higgs search team at the CMS.
It was not surprising that the birds could learn to follow a circle on a screen because of their higher capacity for intelligence, said Kurt Sladky, a clinical professor of zoological medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine. Sladky was not involved in the new study.
There are many types of cicadas in North America. Some emerge every year, often in July and August. These cicadas have life cycles of about 2-3 years, PJ Liesch, extension entomologist and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Insect Diagnostics Lab, told the Journal Sentinel.
“First, consider whether an online savings account is the only banking product you need right now,” says Jonathon Ferguson, a financial capability specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Financial Education Division of Extension. “Online savings accounts can be great due to their relatively high-interest rates and tech tools. However, these accounts do not solve all needs.”
America dropped 20 spots in the latest World Happiness Report. We talk with Christine Whelan, a UW-Madison consumer science professor, about the trends contributing to lower happiness and what can be done about it.
Collectively, about five million Americans are diagnosed with either MS or Sjogren’s disease. Interview with Dr. Sara McCoy, a clinical rheumatologist at UW Health and director of the Sjogren’s Syndrome Clinic.
We live in a time when fake news permeates social media feeds and partisan coverage blasts through some cable news channels. Teaching media literacy can help people wade through the disinformation and become critical news consumers. As Christina Lieffring tells us, a video game created by UW-Madison’s Field Day Labs aims to teach students to become more media literate and what it takes to be a journalist.
Joshua Calhoun, professor in the Department of English at UW-Madison, discusses how Shakespeare’s sonnets have been organized, printed and grouped over the centuries. Calhoun explores love and heartbreak in the poems.
“What I found fascinating was that it was clearly a very explicit choice to not be at University of Wisconsin Madison,” says Allison Prasch who teaches about rhetoric, politics and culture at UW, which sports a student body population of more than 50,600. She adds that the speech, while ostensibly geared toward students, had an underlying message for folks not typically thought of when people think of UW, which is considered by many to be among the state’s most elite universities.
Avian flu remains prevalent in Wisconsin’s wild bird populations and the risk to farms this year is about the same as recent years, said Ron Kean, a poultry specialist with the University of Wisconsin-Extension. Kean said lasers are a great option to reduce spread of the disease.
“Keeping the wild birds away from our domestic birds seems to be a big part of biosecurity,” he said.
America dropped 20 spots in the latest World Happiness Report. We talk with Christine Whelan, a UW-Madison consumer science professor, about the trends contributing to lower happiness and what can be done about it.
Nielsen data shows that the top streaming service on home televisions is not Netflix or Hulu but YouTube. UW–Madison media studies professors Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson weigh in on how the video social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok are becoming the top competition for the television and movie industries.
Mikhail Troitskiy, professor of practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, disagreed with Greene’s characterization. “There is simply no reason for the Ukrainian government to persecute Christians because it has much more important concerns during the war with Russia,” he told Newsweek. “The constitution of Ukraine does not mention Christianity or any other religion as official, and Ukraine is a secular state—but there is no reason for its government to crack down on the Christian faith.
There’s good evidence that the moon retreated more slowly in the past as well. Margriet Lantink, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has analyzed sedimentary rocks in Australia that record climatic changes caused by fluctuations in the Earth-moon distance. “I read the fingerprints of those astronomical variations,” Dr. Lantink said.
If you want to peacefully coexist with technology, you need to get a handle on those impulses. Start by noticing when you have an urge to lift your phone or open social media on your browser window, said Richard J. Davidson, the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“At this point, Republicans are generally more enthusiastic about Trump than Democrats are about Biden, but Trump nonetheless failed to win over about one in five GOP primary voters,” UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said. “Some of those individuals are probably independents or Democrats who were enticed by Haley’s campaign, but he still has work to do bringing on board Republicans with higher levels of education and income, such as those in Dane and the WOW counties.”
