As solar power makes up a bigger piece of our electricity puzzle, there’s a worry about a trade-off, especially in rural areas: If we build more solar farms, are we losing land for crops?
But University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists are asking the question: Why can’t we have both?
Wisconsin is no stranger to Social Security. The modern Social Security system has Wisconsin roots: faculty at UW-Madison led the creation of the program nearly a century ago.
With the Fourth of July holiday coming up this week, distinguished psychologist at UW Health Dr. Shilagh Mirgain chats about ways people can come together to celebrate patriotism.
“We had great abundant soils where we could grow barley and wheat, hops, and we had plenty of water that was readily available,” said Robin Shepard, a Madison-area beer writer and assistant dean of UW-Madison’s Department of Extension. “Those were the things that really came together to make it the perfect storm for brewing.”
“Per the executive order, no one would be losing their citizenship,” Erin Barbato, the director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School, explained.
Still, Barbato said the order had the potential to cause “chaos.”
Six weeks out from the Democratic primary, which will decide which of six remaining candidates will be on the ballot in November, voters are largely tuned out, said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Torey Dolan, assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, joined WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” to talk about the history of the case and what the ruling could mean for tribal land buybacks around the state.
Last year, a solar project in Dane County opened with the idea of combining green energy and farming. Known as “agrivoltaics,” the co-location of solar energy and agriculture, the Kegonsa Research Campus is one of the largest in the country. We hear University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Ankur Desai, who is a leader in the project.
Steve Ackerman and Jonathan Martin, professors in the UW-Madison Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, say with only a few exceptions, it seems as if this year’s run-up to summer, which arrived at 3:24 a.m. Sunday, June 21, was relatively mild. By that, they mean very few really oppressively hot and humid days.
PJ Liesch, director of insect diagnostic lab at the University of Wisconsin, said spiders often get a bad rap, but they really aren’t going to bite humans. Humans aren’t food to them, so they’d really only ever do it in self defense.
Fast forward to today, and the end is nowhere in sight.
About four in 10 interns still don’t make money, according to some labor estimates.“It still feels kind of ludicrous in 2026 that we’re still having this conversation,” said Matthew Hora, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies the transition from higher education to the labor market.
Research varies about the scale of Wisconsin’s housing shortage, but according to the think tank Forward Analytics, the state needs somewhere between 84,000 and 140,000 new units of housing by 2030 to keep up with population demand.
“Which is a short time period,” said Kurt Paulsen, who teaches and researches affordable housing finance and policy at UW-Madison.
Prediction market bettors don’t have prophetic powers: they are a “quantification of conventional wisdom,” said Ross Dahlke, a data science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
The most common way to enrich uranium is by spinning uranium gas in a centrifuge, where lighter U-235 separates from the heavier U-238. This is done in stages, using multiple centrifuges that enrich the uranium bit by bit.
The early stages are especially labor-intensive because there is so much more U-238 to strip away, said nuclear security specialist Sébastien Philippe at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Over time, the enrichment process gets easier.
The United States is one of only a handful of countries that allows companies to hold patents on plant varieties. As a result, a small number of corporations can – and do – suppress competition in the seed industry, stifle innovation and turn taxpayer subsidies intended for farmers into corporate profits.
Julie Dawson is a Professor and Extension Specialist in the Department of Plant and Agroecosystem Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She told “Wisconsin Today” parts of Bayer’s rebate program would discourage smaller seed sellers — who buy seeds from seed giants like Bayer and re-sell those directly to farmers — from testing products from multiple companies and specializing what seeds they sell to their region or customer base.
Dr. James H. Stein, a cardiologist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said a patient who listened to a podcast episode about cardiology now might arrive at his clinic and announce, “I have advanced heart disease and I need a coronary CT angiogram and I need you to measure my homocysteine level.”
UW Health dermatologist Dr. Lisa Arkin sat down with our Leigh Mills to talk about the risks of spending too much time in the sun or the tanning bed.
UW-Madison is responsible for another massive medical advancement — but this one was pharmaceutical, not biological.
Warfarin, one of the most widely used blood thinners on the market, began as a treatment for cows. A Deer Park farmer walked into the laboratory of Karl Paul Link, a biochemist working in the university’s College of Agriculture, because his cows had developed a bleeding disorder.
There have been Super Bowls and Rose Bowls on the field and World Series on the diamond. World championships have been won on the basketball court and national titles on the ice. Athletes like Henry Aaron, Bart Starr and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar weren’t born here, but they helped deliver trophies to our state.
“The state of Wisconsin was a part of their journeys to the hall of fame,” said Ashley Brown, the Allan H. Selig Chair in the History of Sport and Society at UW-Madison.
Some of Wisconsin’s justices disagreed with the ruling, but said they were bound by the U.S. Supreme Court’s precedent to strike down the grants. UW-Madison political theory Professor Howard Schweber says it’s important the public understands that nuance.
Wisconsin residents battling itchy eyes, runny noses and relentless sneezing this summer might figure this year’s allergy season is worse than years past. They would be right.
Question: What causes a thunderstorm?
Answer: Thunderstorm development requires three basic ingredients: moisture, unstable air and upward motion.
Moisture comes from regions like oceans, lakes and vegetation that provide the water vapor necessary for cloud formation and precipitation.
“For many years, we’ve had this testing program that basically looks at mice first as a first step to see what happens in an actual live organism, then rabbits, then dogs, then going on to humans,” said Nicole Nelson, UW-Madison associate professor of medical history and bioethics.
During a panel discussion at the U.S. News Healthcare of Tomorrow conference today in Washington, D.C., Antman; Dr. Sanjay Desai, vice dean for education at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Maryland; Dr. Robert N. Golden, professor and dean emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Dr. Alison J. Whelan, chief academic officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges, discussed ways to reduce the financial burden for aspiring doctors.
While rising prices can put a strain on both farmers and consumers, interest in organic products continues to remain high. In 2025, U.S. organic food sales grew three times as fast as the overall food market. This interest extends to organic beef, eggs and dairy, a trend that bolsters demand for organic feed grain.
Wisconsin’s protracted political redistricting fight took two turns in May: a federal court affirmed Wisconsin’s congressional district map and the U.S. Supreme Court further curtailed safeguards that have governed redistricting nationally.
A three-judge panel dismissed a lawsuit in the federal court case that challenged the congressional maps for Wisconsin. The case argued that the state’s congressional maps are “anti-competitive” and favor a Republican majority. The court ultimately ruled for the district maps to retain the district lines that resulted in a congressional delegation of six Republicans and two Democrats.
As three alleged planners of Wisconsin’s fake elector scheme pleaded not guilty Tuesday to 11 forgery-related criminal charges in Dane County court, the criminal charges against them are moving forward in a national legal and political landscape that looks dramatically different from the one in which they were filed.
We found no authoritative estimate that the number of Ku Klux Klan members in Wisconsin in the 1920s was 40,000.
That’s the current population of Wausau in central Wisconsin.
“No one knows for sure how many Americans joined during the 1920s but the best estimates are around 2 million members, some 15,000 of whom were in Wisconsin,” according to the Wisconsin Historical Society.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used optogenetics, a technique that controls genetically modified brain cells with pulses of light, to recreate the brain rhythm of deep sleep in mice that were fully awake and moving.
Here’s what guests on the June 12, 2026 episode said about a PFAS settlement, housing help for renters, the State Health Assessment and UW tuition hikes.
Participating in physical activity, particularly while surrounded by “elements of nature,” can improve classroom focus and concentration for young students, said Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, a UW professor of pediatrics and human development and family studies. Yet environmental and economic disparities can prove significant barriers to many, he said.
Teams of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison spent months submitting proposals to the Department of Energy’s vast new Genesis Mission — an initiative centered around artificial intelligence (AI) but naming research goals in fields as varied as nuclear fusion and molecular biology. Many of UW-Madison’s proposals center around one burgeoning cross-college priority: quantum.
In Philadelphia, New York and Boston, American colonists were preparing to pledge their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to declare their independence from an oppressive monarch.
But in the faraway frontier territory that would later become Wisconsin, Native and European peoples were on a wholly different journey in 1776.
UW-Madison Wisconsin Center for Education Research scientist Bradley Carl explains the basis for school districts holding referendums and the choices faced by voters being asked to raise local taxes.
Q: I eat frozen yogurt regularly, assuming it’s better for me than ice cream. Is it?
Since frozen yogurt took off in the 1970s, it has been pitched as a healthier alternative to ice cream. In TCBY advertisements from the 1990s, their low-calorie, nonfat version was said to have “all of the pleasure, none of the guilt.” Today, some Greek yogurt shops tout gut-friendly probiotic benefits.
A new federal rule aimed at increasing access to nutritious foods for SNAP recipients is raising questions for some small grocery stores in rural communities.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced in May that retailers participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will be required to carry a wider variety of staple foods beginning in November.
Last month, when the Trump administration reached an agreement with Bayer to curb what officials lambasted as anticompetitive practices, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins hailed it as a win for farmers. But she cautioned the concentrated nature of the seed industry required continued antitrust vigilance.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison offers a handy tool that uses data from a NOAA satellite and other resources to track the Saharan air layer as it ebbs and flows across the globe.
By inducing specific patterns of activity in small portions of the brain in awake mice, researchers have triggered a recalibration of neural connections that normally only occurs during sleep. This new approach offset the effects of sleep deprivation on memory tasks and revealed features of sleep that are key to its restorative effect.
A researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has published a paper that demonstrates hybrid combinations of lignocellulosic feedstock pretreatment methods can achieve high glucose yields with reduced energy consumption.
In his article in The Atlantic, grimly titled, “America is sliding toward illiteracy,” Idrees Kahloon uses data largely from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, to reflect on the recent degradation of American education. Kahloon uses this data to test theories as to why K-12 test scores have plummeted since 2007 after a brief but substantive window of improvement.
PBS Wisconsin’s University Place will record “An Overview of the Geology of Wisconsin,” a presentation by Sue Swanson, Ph.D., Director of the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey (WGNHS) and State Geologist.
Question: What is the prediction for the 2026 hurricane season?
Answer: Tropical cyclones are large, whirling storms that obtain their energy from warm ocean waters.
Roughly 20 million Americans live in manufactured houses, which are made in factories.
Though they’re often called mobile homes or trailers, that’s really a misnomer because their owners can’t easily relocate them. Typically, the people who own them rent the land underneath the houses from the owners of parks for manufactured home. Sometimes an owner will rent their home to someone else while paying to rent the land as well.
The Joint Committee on Finance approved the $10 million sale of the state’s former Human Services building to Landmark Development Tuesday, bringing Madison one step closer to getting Amtrak service.
A key part of the company’s plan is to bridge gaps between Madison and other Midwestern cities.
“Madison is ideally situated amongst the sort of arc of bigger cities within the Midwest. We really can play a key position economically, culturally, politically, by the location we have,” Jason Ilstrup, the president of Downtown Madison Inc., said.
Roughly 20 million Americans live in manufactured houses, which are homes made in factories.
Although they’re often called mobile homes or trailers, that’s really a misnomer because their owners can’t easily relocate them. Typically, the people who own them rent the land underneath the houses from the owners of manufactured home parks. Sometimes, an owner will rent their home to someone else while paying to rent the land as well.
Almost 20 years ago, a green, shiny beetle arrived in southern Wisconsin and started eating ash trees to death.
Originally from Asia and known as the emerald ash borer, the bug is smaller than a dime and quickly spread like wildfire, largely fueled by firewood and tree nursery transports.
Summer is here and with children already or about to be on summer break, many parents are looking for productive ways for their children to spend their break.
UW Health Dr. Shilagh Mirgain shares some budget friendly summer activities for children.
While students may be done with homework for the summer, that doesn’t mean they have to stop reading.
Dr. Mirgain suggests visiting a library for books and fun.
Dr. Gregory DeMuri, pediatric infectious disease doctor at UW Health Kids and professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said Lyme disease can cause the rash, and then it can cause arthritis, heart problems and sometimes central nervous system issues.
Question: How important was the weather forecast on D-Day?
Answer: D-Day was the name given to the June 6, 1944, invasion of the beaches at Normandy in northern France by troops of the Allied Forces during World War II. The goal was to cross the narrow, often stormy, English Channel into Nazi-occupied France.
Here’s what guests on the May 29, 2026 episode said about broad voter support for a failed state surplus deal, prospects for job seekers, and a lawsuit over ICE holds by sheriffs.
Dairy producers across Wisconsin now have a new tool to help manage one of summer’s biggest challenges: heat stress. It costs the U.S. dairy industry significantly each year through reduced milk production, lower fertility, and added health expenses. At the same time, the cost of running the fans and ventilation systems that prevent those losses keeps rising, making smart decisions on the farm matter more than ever.
Instead, the former judges, representatives of Law Forward, the Wisconsin Association for Justice and directors of the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggest the Wisconsin Supreme Court should establish an advisory committee to study what process would work best in Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin Alumni Association hosted a webinar on May 19, “From War to AI: Forces Shaping Today’s Economy,” examining how conflict, global trade disruptions and artificial intelligence are influencing the United States and global economy.
The two are also concerned that the district could ignore some of the equity and teacher well-being issues raised in a report led by a group of students from UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, which found that teachers felt burnt out by monitoring phone use and want more district support, and that low-income Black and Latino students in the Madison School District face disproportionate levels of device-related discipline.
Requests to remove or restrict access to books in schools have hit record highs both across the country and in Wisconsin.
In May, Wisconsin upheld the Menomonee Falls School District’s finding that the 2024 removal of a children’s book that depicted multiple family structures, including ones with LGBTQ+ couples, did not count as discrimination.
The median home cost in Wisconsin’s two biggest metro areas is at least five times the median household income in those communities, among the highest in the Midwest.
Resistant and emerging pests are on the rise, leaving farmers scrambling for information on control options.
Corn earworm flexed its might last year in Wisconsin fields.
Maks Makarenkov couldn’t help but smile on car rides through the capital city. He saw homes with blue and yellow flags pinned in their windows or dangling from flagpoles.
“Seeing the Ukrainian flags here, it touches my heart,” Makarenkov said. “In this war, we feel the American support.”
