Some cheese varieties naturally have a moldy appearance, explained Mark Johnson, assistant director at the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The blue veins in a wedge of gorgonzola or the white rind on a wheel of brie are examples of mold.
Scientific research has consistently shown that video games do not make people more violent. Playing games can, however, improve perceptual and cognitive functions, says Dr C Shawn Green, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Office of Naval Research funded Green to research how certain games (mainly shooters) improve warrior performance. “These games have lots of speed in them,” he says. “There’s lots of what we call ‘transient events’ – things pop up on the screen and disappear.” He says this can improve basic visual perception as well as heighten levels of cognition (such as working memory).
The race could be shaken up dramatically if the Wisconsin Supreme Court agrees to hear a redistricting lawsuit challenging congressional boundary lines, said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor. The court has not said whether it will hear the challenge.
“Everyone appreciates and remembers experiences more than ’stuff,’” said J. Michael Collins, professor of public affairs and human ecology at the University of Wisconsin. “There are lots of fun and memorable experiences that are not expensive, from moonlight walks to scavenger hunts to simple at-home dinners. Being creative can be better than bling.”
The sounds of summer could be a lot louder this year depending on where you live in Wisconsin.
That’s because for the first time since Thomas Jefferson was president, two rare broods of cicadas will emerge at the same time. PJ Liesch, an extension entomologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said this event only occurs once every 221 years. “It’s something that is really unique and special for us,” Liesch said.
Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and the ethnic Chinese demographic in Singapore—all populations that observe the 12-zodiac lunar calendar—also posted small increases, University of Wisconsin-Madison demographer Fuxian Yi previously told Newsweek, citing China’s annual census data.
We speak with Robert Golden, the outgoing dean of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
Whether you love beets or hate them, you probably haven’t given them as much thought as Irwin Goldman.
A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Goldman is also former chair of the department of horticulture. The Goldman Lab there is even named after him. He and colleague Nick Breitbach spent decades trying to breed a better beet. Now the Badger Flame Beet is getting attention nationwide from growers and chefs as it becomes increasingly available.
“This tool is likely to be very useful for young people and their families as they’re trying to present themselves in the most appealing way to college admissions,” said Mitchell Nathan, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at UW-Madison and author of “Foundations of Embodied Learning.”
Earlier this month, UW-Madison’s Student Success Through Applied Research (SSTAR) Lab released a new report revealing how, in higher education, students and schools with the least financial need often receive the most government funding. We talk to Nick Hillman, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and director of SSTAR, about the causes of funding disparities and how “equity-based” funding models could address them.
State Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, and state Rep. Deb Andraca, D-Whitefish Bay, were approached by a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison professors and asked to strengthen campus firearm laws.
Jack O’Meara represents the Public Representation Organization of the Faculty Senate, or PROFS, a nonprofit advocacy organization of UW-Madison faculty. He said there was increased concern after the Feb. 13, 2023, mass shooting at Michigan State University. In that incident, three students were killed and five others were injured when a gunman entered a building on the East Lansing campus.
Groundhogs, also known as woodchucks, are one of the few true hibernators that reside in Wisconsin. Their heart beats five times per minute while they sleep through the winter months, and their body temperature drops to 37 degrees Fahrenheit. We learn more about the fabled animal, plus cover wildlife news from around the state. Interview with David Drake, extension wildlife specialist and professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, and Jamie Nack, extension senior wildlife outreach specialist, both from UW-Madison.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel talked to Marquette University research fellow John Johnson and University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden about what common redistricting concepts mean and how they apply to the case.
“Wards are usually viewed as the building blocks of districts, so that gets done first,” Burden said. Because there are only 72 counties, “some of them are going to have to be sliced in order to make districts. Especially the more populous ones, like Dane, Milwaukee and Brown are going to have multiple districts in them.”
It’s normal for insect population totals to swing up and down drastically, but drops become dangerous when they have been chronically eroded, as with monarchs, said Karen Oberhauser, professor emerita of entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has studied monarchs for decades.
“I do not think this is about fairness – premiums are set based on accident rates and risks associated with different demographic groups and would be higher if the groups are involved in higher rates of accidents or other damages,” said Nancy Wong, Kohl’s Chair in Retail Innovation, Professor of Consumer Science, Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs, School of Human Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Explore how Wisconsin’s Ho-Chunk people fought back against devastating attacks on their land and culture. Interview with Stephen Kantrowitz, professor of history at UW-Madison.
From the care of Wisconsin researchers to the International Space Station, a group of tomato plants rode on a rocket last week with the goal of brightening astronauts’ days — and their diets. But first the tomatoes are trying to find their own joy.
Growing without gravity is stressful to tomatoes, said Simon Gilroy, a University of Wisconsin-Madison botanist who runs a lab that studies plant development.
Laura Albert, an industrial and systems engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said although the initial response time of four minutes was quick, she questioned why it was labeled a low priority call. “Maybe some information wasn’t really conveyed clearly along the way,” Albert said.
Albert also said it’s common for people not to be found when they call 911, mainly because they leave before an ambulance gets to them. Baker also said false alarms are common, especially at bus stops. He said callers sometimes call for an ambulance at a bus stop and get on a bus if it arrives before the ambulance does.
“Some banks are good at originating, and they don’t have the capacity to hold these loans on their balance sheet,” said Anthony DeFusco, associate professor of finance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And so it frees up resources for them if they sell your loan.”
What happened? Lauren Asprooth is a research scientist with the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems at UW-Madison. As corn and soybeans shot up, she said, “every other row crop has gone down or stayed stagnant.”
“We have decoupled livestock production and crop production, so there’s not as much of a need for small grains in terms of forage,” Asprooth said. “We put a lot of funding into the markets for byproducts and R&D for corn, and therefore made other crops relatively less easy to grow.
Candy is a classic gift for your sweetheart on Valentines Day. Making your own can be challenging, but it helps to understand the science behind the process. Richard Harte, a food scientist from UW-Madison, gives us his tips on candy making, just in time for the holiday.
For as long as she can remember, Dr. Lori Kido Lopez has been passionate about media and Asian American social justice. And that’s in part because she sees herself as an activist — someone looking to challenge society’s prevailing injustices.
“We are only pointing out that as a wind-only-based measure of risk, climate change is making it progressively inadequate,” said co-author Jim Kossin of First Street Foundation and the University of Wisconsin.
Michael Wehner, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US, said that “192mph is probably faster than most Ferraris, it’s hard to even imagine”. He has proposed the new category 6 alongside another researcher, James Kossin of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Being caught in that sort of hurricane would be bad. Very bad.”
“Storms are getting stronger and stronger, so category 5 underestimates actual risk,” said James Kossin, an author on the paper and an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Dairy’s storyline for 2023 in Wisconsin and across the United States “was not the best storyline we could imagine,” said Chuck Nicholson, associate professor of economics, however he is seeing signs that point to milk price improvement in the coming year.
Nicholson, an associate professor of dairy economics at the UW-Madison spoke about dairy’s economics at the Renk Agribusiness Agricultural Outlook Forum in late January on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
University of Wisconsin Law School clinical instructor and immigration attorney Erin Barbato described what she witnessed at the U.S.-Mexico border on a recent fact-finding trip.
We learn about a UW connection to experimenting with growing tomatoes beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Next we talk about the art of doing nothing in particular. Then we hear what to know about the rise of the respiratory virus RSV. And we explore the problems American parents face compared with those in other countries. Interviews with Simon Gilroy and Dr. James Conway.
In the years following World War I, the Catholic Church was intent upon regaining lost ground and entered into a variety of political alliances to do so–some of them with unexpected outcomes. Interview with Giuliana Chamedes, an associate professor of history from UW-Madison.
Jason Lopez’s studies of sports betting throughout history show this: The act of traveling to gamble is about as old as gambling itself.
Lopez, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of media and cultural studies, wonders if the recent steps to expand sports betting in Wisconsin’s neighbors could pressure the Badger State to change its laws.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are one step closer to understanding how and when cleft lip and palates form during pregnancy.
The discovery, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could mitigate the risk of the birth defect that affects about 1 in every 1,700 babies born in the United States.
Low-wage workers have found it especially hard to afford higher housing costs, even before a spike in prices in 2022, explained Laura Dresser, associate director of the High Road Strategy Center (formerly COWS, a left-leaning think tank) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dresser’s research has found that increasing the minimum wage to $15 over the next five years would increase wages for one in seven workers in Wisconsin. That includes one of every four Black and Hispanic workers.
“It can tell us about the virus without us needing to stick anything up anyone’s noses or even know who was in a space,” said Dave O’Connor, a UW-Madison researcher involved in the surveillance. “Air sampling should be something that lots of schools bring on board to understand what the respiratory virus transmission risk is.”
Monitors have been at seven schools in the Oregon School District for two years, where air sampling last school year tracked flu and COVID-19 activity as reliably as student absences, rapid tests at school and regular tests from samples collected at home, UW-Madison researchers recently reported. That research was part of a UW study, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that has analyzed respiratory illness at Oregon schools since 2015.
Mikhail Troitskiy, professor of practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek via email on Friday that Russia’s relative silence is unsurprising considering the ongoing conflict and a lack of incentives to publicly disclose the whereabouts and/or deaths of top military commanders.
Joining us now is Julie Stam, assistant clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin. Madison and author of “The Brain on Youth Sports, the science them its and the future.” Julie, good morning. So Roger Goodell says the risk of concussion is the same as walking down the street as a medical professional. What’s your take on that?
“These groups are exploring,” says John Hawks, a University of Wisconsin–Madison anthropologist who was not involved in the study, to NBC News. “They’re going to new places. They live there for a while. They have lifestyles that are different. They’re comfortable moving into areas where there were Neanderthals.”
Laura Dresser, associate director of the left-leaning COWS economic think tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said state policies like Act 10 and Wisconsin’s “right to work” law have played a major role in the decline.
We called Dr. Megan Moreno to talk about this because she teaches medicine at the University of Wisconsin and she’s a co-medical director of a center at the American Academy of Pediatrics dedicated to social media and youth mental health. And she was at the White House yesterday to talk about kids’ online safety and health.
Jonathan Martin, UW-Madison professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and one-half of the Wisconsin State Journal’s Weather Guys column, wasn’t able to provide much hope for merchants dependent on more consistent, more typical winter weather.
John Hawks, a University of Wisconsin-Madison paleoanthropologist who studies ancient human relatives but was not involved in this research, said the study helps solidify the theory that patches of different human cultures were developing as Neanderthals neared their end.
But Nathaniel Chin, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, said he was not surprised by the news, given other treatments coming to market.
Such rigor is admirable, but it also means one can miss things, says Simon Goldberg, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He 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.”
We examine a new study about the effectiveness of having police officers in schools. Then, two members of UW-Superior’s newest research center explain their efforts to advance community-based projects. Then, a Madison-based attorney offers advice for end-of-life planning. Includes interview with Ben Fisher, associate professor of civil society & community studies at UW-Madison.
We talk about where the most government funding for higher education goes — and why the recipients may not be the most needy. Then we look at what’s happening with a compromise bill that former President Trump could be holding up to energize his 2024 campaign. And we reflect on the demise of a major taste-making music enterprise.
Who decides which words make it into dictionaries and how to define them in non-biased ways? Professor Emeritus Marshall Cook looks behind the scenes at lexicographers such as Kory Stamper (author of Word by Word), and Derrick Allen (graduate of the UW Odyssey Project www.odyssey.wisc.edu) adds readings of “I Love Webster’s” by Tosumba Welch and Malcolm X’s “A Homemade Education” on the life-changing power of dictionaries.
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Anthropology Museum Director and Campus NAGPRA Coordinator Liz Leith: “The university is already in compliance with the recently announced NAGPRA revisions. UW–Madison does not have human remains or cultural items on exhibit, and access to and research on human remains and cultural items is already restricted, pending approval through consultation. My colleagues and I in the Department of Anthropology have been consulting with the Wisconsin Intertribal Repatriation Committee since the mid-2000s. UW-Madison deeply values and prioritizes consultation as a standard practice in relation to human remains and cultural items present on campus. Through these consultations, we have successfully repatriated most of the remains and cultural items that had once been on campus, and we will continue our work to maintain a strong shared future with Wisconsin tribes.”
In 2022, there were at least 13 lawsuits filed related to election administration, according to a tally from the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.
Questions of election administration landing in court isn’t a new phenomenon, said Derek Clinger, a senior staff attorney with the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative. But there’s been an uptick in such cases since the 2000 presidential election, when a razor-thin margin in Florida “brought attention to the actual defects in how we run our elections.” The U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore halted a Florida recount because of time constraints, effectively awarding the presidency to George W. Bush.
First we cover news from communities along the Mississippi River. Then, the top weather events from last year, plus the difference between “partly cloudy” and “partly sunny.” Includes interview with Steve Ackerman.
A polling expert explains why elected officials across the political spectrum are seeing low approval ratings. Then, we learn about mental health resources for college students. Plus, a look at why global conflict is on the rise. Includes interview with Andrew Kidd.
The team of faculty and students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Madison Technical College each day capture data from a series of weather towers spread across Antarctica, watching for shifts in weather and how it’s impacting the frozen land.
Volker Radeloff quoted. (Paywall.)
Audiologist Melanie Buhr-Lawler, a clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said she saw the threats to hearing health growing up on a farm in rural Wisconsin and later researching hearing loss in rural residents.
“People who live in rural areas have a hearing health double-whammy,” said Buhr-Lawler, who was not involved with the study. “So they’re more exposed to high noise levels through their work, be it mining or farming or other rural occupations, but also through leisure activities.”
Fiore, a professor of medicine, founder and director of the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said there are about 650,000 smokers in Wisconsin. If those smokers don’t quit tobacco products, Fiore said about half will die prematurely of a disease caused by smoking.
“There’s nothing a person can do that will improve their current and future health as much as quitting smoking,” he said.
One of the experts Shaer interviewed was UW-Madison psychologist and specialist on anger Martin Ryan, who attempted to explain what’s going on. Ryan explained that emotions have to go somewhere, and far too often drivers find their outlet in a car.
“If I was to set out to create a situation that would make the most people act badly and angrily, I couldn’t come up with anything better than driving,’ Ryan told the Times. “Every element that provokes an anger response is there. There’s your mood when you entered the car in a rush. There’s provocation — something that happens to you, like being cut off. And relatedly, there’s how you interpret the provocation based on your mood.”
It’s a common result of aging, said Dr. Stephen Nakada, a University of Wisconsin urologist.
Special education teachers and administrators share how the shortage is affecting them, and John Yang speaks with Kimber Wilkerson, professor of special education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to learn more.
The system is populated with educators who were taught entirely different methods, and “the resistance is real,” said Mark Seidenberg, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin.
Dr. Apple Bodemer is a board-certified dermatologist and associate professor of dermatology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
It’s estimated that a quarter of school districts in the state will put a referendum on the ballot in 2024, according to Julie Underwood, a dean emerita with the University of Wisconsin-Madison who focuses on education policy.
