Michaela Hoffelmeyer, an assistant professor of public engagement in agriculture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recalled interviewing early-career queer farmers who worried that valuable internships and apprenticeships would place them in hostile work environments or unsafe communities.
Queer farmers may also be forgoing good farmland because they want to avoid harassment, Hoffelmeyer said.
Dr. Katie O’Brien, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been leveraging social media to bridge the gap between doctor and patient, fostering a more familiar and approachable relationship.
As one of only two specialty-trained pediatric adolescent gynecologists in Wisconsin, Dr. O’Brien dedicates her career to diagnosing and treating common female pelvic conditions. She practices at the Teenage and Young Adult Clinic in Middleton and the UW Health Obstetrics and Gynecology Clinic in Madison.
In an increasingly tough housing market, a University of Wisconsin program seeks to give renters a leg up in their search for safe, affordable housing by educating them about the process and improving their standing with landlords.
Rent Smart, a free, six-module course developed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, covers the essentials of renting — everything from what’s affordable, what to look for during an apartment inspection and what to ask a landlord while applying.
In pregnant women, the effects are particularly impactful, as such DNA changes not only play out in the mother, but in the developing fetus and also the germ cells within the fetus, the precursors to sperm and eggs.
“This means that malnutrition has the potential to influence three generations—the mother, her child, and her grandchild,” says Hasan Khatib, a professor of genetics and epigenetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Such effects have been seen in the descendants of both the Great Chinese Famine and the Dutch Hunger Winter during World War II, where the children of babies starved in the womb carry genetic alterations that have placed them at higher risk of diabetes, as well as addiction and even schizophrenia in adulthood.
The connection between mental health and extreme heat is relatively new, but it’s a big one, said Jonathan Patz, a professor at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Population Health Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
We don’t always see this level of direct confrontation when a group member is accused of being dangerous, according to Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin.
“Most will tend to continue the friendship,” Calarco said. “This is because when someone close to us – or even similar to us – engages in violent or toxic behavior, we’re less likely to blame them for their actions than we would be if we saw the same behavior from someone to whom we’re not close.”
In the 1980s, everything changed. President Ronald Reagan slashed funding for renewables and research and development into solar power. “It was really ideological,” said Greg Nemet, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “They cut the solar budget by 85 percent within a couple of years.”
Mark Copelovitch, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote on Bluesky: “Signs you might be a far right authoritarian party (#3191): Casual normalization by a sitting Senator of a ‘third term'”
University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Eva Golos created a graph of the USGS data illustrating the moment the tremors reached the Midwest.
Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) announced plans in late June to cancel “University of the Air” along with three other legacy shows in part because of federal and state funding challenges.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Public Affairs Manual Teodoro has issued report cards for nearly every water utility around the state as part of his Wisconsin Waterworks Excellence Project.
“The idea here with the report card is to signal to the public where utilities are doing well, and where they are doing poorly in a way that is easily accessible,” said Teodoro.
Like the Skobot, most new A.I. technologies developed by Native scientists are designed for a specific language community. Jacqueline Brixey, a computer scientist formerly at the University of Southern California and now joining the University of Wisconsin, created a chatbot called “Masheli” that can communicate in Choctaw. Drawing from a collection of animal stories, the chatbot can listen and respond to users in both English and the target language, helping conversational skills.
David Kreling, an emeritus professor at the UW-Madison School of Pharmacy, said he’s never seen this level of tariffs in his 40-year career.
“We in the U.S. are very dependent on international producers,” Kreling said.
A software program UW-Madison faculty and students use on a daily basis has added artificial intelligence tools to assist with grading and summarizing discussion posts.
But the university says some of the tools could run afoul of guidance it provides instructors against using AI to automate student feedback.
Greg Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, served as a lead author on a United Nations panel report on climate change. He called the move a political change that’s meant to prop up fossil fuels.
“The change seems to be to get rid of that ruling that greenhouse gases are a danger to humans, and there’s certainly no scientific basis for that,” Nemet said. “Over time, there’s just been more and more evidence about how damaging it will be to have a hotter climate.”
Wisconsin is coming out of a drought, which can mean more mosquitos, said PJ Liesch, an extension entomologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We finally hit the point where no parts of Wisconsin are experiencing drought anymore. That’s a good thing for plants and crops, but … that can mean more mosquitoes out and about.” Liesch said. “So recent reports that I’ve had at the UW Insect Diagnostic Lab do suggest that there’s quite a bit of mosquito activity out there in Wisconsin, although it can vary from location to location.”
The program began in 2019 as part of a certificate partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education and Centro Hispano, funded through a five-year grant by the Wisconsin Partnership Program.
Advancements in x-ray lasers have potential for research in many fields. We talk to a UW-Madison physics professor about his work. Then, the Weather Guys are back to explain what we’ve been experiencing climatewise.
ales of previously owned homes in Wisconsin rose 8.1 percent in June compared to the same month last year.
That’s according to the Wisconsin Realtors Association’s latest housing report. Kurt Paulsen, professor of urban planning in the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called the sales jump a “mixed signal.”
The goal of AIS Snapshot Day is to help the public learn to identify, report and control harmful species in state waters, said Emily Heald, rivers educator with the University of Wisconsin Madison Division of Extension.
The events are free and hosted by local experts on or near lakes, ponds, rivers and wetlands.
“We inherit the memory of trauma on a molecular basis,” said Hasan Khatib, a professor of genetics and epigenetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student studying taxonomy and systematics, Marsh categorizes insects. Examining the insects with a microscope, she divides them into species, which is the smallest grouping of an insect. Those species could be classified simply by the number of hairs that are on their wings or the shape of their abdomens.
“I love to organize,” she said.
The study was a nationwide Phase 3 trial led by UW-Madison surgery professor Dixon Kaufman. The goal was to test a new stem cell infusion treatment for safety and efficacy.
“There are many benefits to them (immunosuppressive drugs),” said Kaufman, the medical director of the UW Health Transplant Center. “But of course, there are side effects and downsides.”
Michael Notaro, director of UW–Madison’s Center for Climatic Research launched STEM camps in Beloit, Wisconsin Dells and at Madison’s Henry Vilas Zoo with a simple mission: make science accessible to all children with neurodivergences – but the camps are at risk.
“The main goals of the camps is to support the kind of interest and pursuit of science, degrees and careers, to foster and support neurodiversity and to celebrate it,” Notaro said.
Political experts say this will reshape Wisconsin’s political landscape significantly. Howard Schweber, a professor with UW-Madison’s Department of Political Science, believes this decision could encourage several Republicans who previously stayed out of the race to now consider running.
“This opens the field on both sides,” Schweber said. “I think there were several potential Republican candidates who are likely not throwing their hat in the ring because they assumed Evers would be very hard to beat.”
The camp is organized in collaboration with Dr. Michael Notaro, director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. With prior funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Notaro and his team have led similar camps in Beloit, Madison, and Wisconsin Dells.
However, future programming is uncertain. Federal support for the camps ended earlier this year when NSF grants were discontinued. While funding remains in place for this summer’s sessions, organizers are seeking alternative sources to continue beyond 2025.
If you are not feeling well and need an urgent care appointment, UW Health has an app letting you know the wait times at each clinic.
FoodWIse, a statewide program providing nutrition education to low-income families and community organizations, announced on Friday that its federal funding is being eliminated.
Dr. Michael Notaro, director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, launched the program several years ago.
“I think that’s inspired by my son Hayden,” Notaro said. “He’s autistic and a wonderful boy. My wife is also autistic. And based on my desire to support and foster neurodiversity, we created three STEM camps.”
Written by James Dahlberg, a professor emeritus in the department of biomolecular chemistry at UW-Madison.
The American Meteorological Society maintains a glossary of meteorological terms and defines a heat dome as “an exceptionally warm air mass at middle latitudes during the warm season that that is associated with a synoptic-scale area of high pressure aloft. This area of high pressure aloft can have a doming effect on the warm air mass below by suppressing rising motion and the development of clouds and precipitation.”
“I am concerned that this legislation, and the broad adoption of stablecoins that it will facilitate, may trigger a crisis at the very heart of the banking system,” writes Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Copelovitch is also the author of “The International Monetary Fund in the Global Economy: Banks, Bonds, and Bailouts” and co-author of “Banks on the Bank: Global Capital, Securities Markets, and the Political Roots of Financial Crises.”
“We have these negative associations with waste, particularly smellier waste, that is associated with poverty and disease – other things we don’t like to see or think about,” said Sarah A Moore, a professor in the department of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
You don’t want to forbid these foods entirely, says psychologist Katherine Schaumberg at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That strategy could backfire. “In our culture, food is connection. Having these foods in social settings can facilitate emotional health,” she says. “That can outweigh the physical cost of them.”
Written by ssistant professor of natural resource economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Written by Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science and public affair, and director of the Center for European Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Emily Callaci’s history of the international feminist movement examines the influence of their intellectual and political victories. The University of Wisconsin–Madison historian describes in “Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor,” that modes of protest were part of an emerging, dynamic wave of left-feminist activism.
Callaci’s book marks a significant contribution to the new Wages for Housework literature and serves as a reminder of the campaign’s true aims. Weaving together capsule biographies of five of its founders, it offers a history that reflects Wages for Housework’s global scope and radical ambitions.
All four of the anonymous researchers asked to assess its merit were sceptical. But Berger and his colleagues were undeterred. Earlier this year, they published an updated version of their study, offering a deeper dive into the evidence they had gathered from the Rising Star cave system in South Africa. The approach paid off: two of the original reviewers agreed to reassess the science – and one was won over.
“You rarely see that in peer review,” says John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a member of Berger’s team.
Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a leading influenza scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is among those who are skeptical, pointing to H5N1 infections in Cambodia, which has reported 27 cases since 2023, 12 of which have been fatal. The version of the virus circulating in that country is different from the one that has been infecting cows and poultry in the United States.
Written by Jordan Ellenberg, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
When Madison native Shawn Wiederhoeft received a kidney transplant in 2020, he did not expect to be at the forefront of a major medical breakthrough. But thanks to a clinical trial at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, he is now five years post-transplant and living without the need for anti-rejection medications.
Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says this analysis shows why so many researchers “feel completely burnt out by the time they get to tenure”. A focus on metrics, such as number of publications or citation count, doesn’t emphasize quality, innovation or longer projects, she adds. “There’s a great deal of pressure on junior academics to do as much research as possible, to prove you deserve to keep that job.”
One month ago, the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile released their survey telescope’s first images of vibrant new galaxies, asteroids and other astronomical phenomena. UW-Madison associate professor Keith Bechtol, lead scientist of the observatory’s systems engineering team, said the images, first released on June 22, create the most extensive map of the universe to date, kickstarting new scientific discoveries in the field of cosmic observation.
How well you can rise from sitting to standing may predict how long you live. Returning to talk about the sitting-rising test are physical therapists Lori Thein Brody and Jill Thein-Nissenbaum.
Greg Nemet, a professor in the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, knows this isn’t the first time people have declared the “dawn of the solar age.” People in the 1950s, the 1970s and the early 2000s all declared an imminent solar age, only to see fossil fuels continue to dominate.
Pete Long, an adjunct professor teaching strategic communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agreed that every aspect of the design, both the graphics and the product, is intentional.
For Kleenex facial tissues, he said limited editions and seasonal graphics are created to help consumers navigate the shelf and ultimately convince them to purchase.
Smokers can earn $380 if they are willing to kick cigarettes for four weeks and participate in a University of Wisconsin-Madison study.
The UW Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention is assessing whether nicotine pouches, like Zyn, can replace smoking.
“I thought it was very well done,” Freya Mowat, a veterinary ophthalmologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who did not participate in the study, tells Popular Science’s Lauren Leffer, emphasizing that the team’s statistical approach made the survey-based study more credible.
ASK THE WEATHER GUYS
Steve Ackerman and Jonathan Martin, professors in the UW-Madison department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, are guests on WHA radio (970 AM) at noon the last Monday of each month.
And when it comes to warning people about flash floods in particular, experts still stress the need to get warnings to people via every means possible.
That’s why a “Swiss cheese” approach to warning people can be most effective in overcoming that last mile, Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist and manager of the Wisconsin Environmental Mesonet at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains. (And it’s similar to an ideology used to prevent the spread of disease.)
“You know you got slices of Swiss cheese and they’ve got holes in them. Nothing is ever perfect. But if you layer enough pieces of cheese, it reduces the risk because something might go through one hole, but then it gets blocked,” Vagasky says. “We always want people to have multiple ways of receiving warnings.”
Ainehi Edoro, associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder of the literary blog Brittle Paper, says the novel marked a turning point. “For a long time, queer characters in African literature were either invisible or treated as symbols of crisis, like their presence was a sign that something had gone wrong,” she says. “So when Dibia wrote a novel that centred a gay Nigerian man as a full human being, that mattered. He pushed back against an entire archive of erasure.”
“There are a small number of studies suggesting uptake of PFAS through skin is possible and the concentrations of PFHxA reported in the study are quite high,” said Christina Remucal, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In Wisconsin, the beetle was first discovered in 2014 in counties west of Milwaukee. In 2019, UW-Madison entomologist P.J. Liesch, on a walk with his family, found an infested shrub. This spring, Liesch fielded dozens of questions from gardeners asking about it, as did Lisa Johnson, a Dane County Extension horticulture educator.
William Banholzer, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has been traveling to town meetings arguing research doesn’t support banning the boats. Banholzer, who owns a wakesurfing boat but says that doesn’t affect his conclusions, said studies show about 70% of a wave’s energy is dissipated at around 200 feet.
“If you’re taking my rights away, you better have a preponderance of evidence on your side, and they don’t,” Banholzer said.
“The point isn’t that Trump is a ‘Latin American’ dictator — or an Eastern European one like Orban — the point is that they are all, along with the people who work under them, part of contemporary right-wing networks,” explains Patrick Iber, associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s a dynamic system for mutual support. And it is one in which authoritarian ideas get reinforced, enemies get defined, and the leaders get to imagine themselves as engaged in a project of national redemption.”
Written by Ph.D. candidate in botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I thought it was very well done,” Freya Mowat, a veterinary ophthalmologist at the University of Wisconsin who researches canine visual psychology but was not part of the new study team, tells Popular Science.
The new results are also closely aligned with a 2024 survey study conducted by Mowat and a separate group of dog researchers at the University of Wisconsin.
“Regulators introduced expanded audit reporting to increase the usefulness of the audit report to investors by requiring the auditor to discuss the most challenging issues. However, Prior research generally finds that key audit matters do not influence investor perceptions of audited companies,” says Dan Lynch, a professor of accounting at the Wisconsin School of Business.
Rebekah Willett, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies children and media, said she often hears from parents whose children run into upsetting content that’s recommended by YouTube’s algorithm. (One child, she said, looked up baby animal videos, which led to videos of animals giving birth, which led to videos of humans giving birth.)
UW-Madison entomologist PJ Liesch returns to talk about the bugs we love and hate. Then we talk to another researcher on campus, Sathya Chandra Sagar, about his work on a global study of bird calls.
