There are a number of things that could be happening, said Dr. Bruce Klein, a professor of pediatrics, medicine and medical microbiology and immunology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. These pathogens can hitch a ride on shoes when people travel. New developments can stir soil — and the fungi they harbor — releasing spores into the air in places they weren’t thought to exist.
“Sea level rise impacts coastal ecosystems and infrastructure that underpin the blue economy including supply chains, real estate, infrastructure, agriculture, insurance markets, health costs and more,” Andrea Dutton, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the department of geoscience, told the hearing.
Katherine Cramer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist, said that lower- and middle-wage workers have “pretty basic” expectations for the future of their work. “One man in Kentucky said, ‘I’m not looking for a mansion on a hill.’” What he and others want, Cramer said, is jobs that don’t destroy their humanity, that are meaningful and that give them time with their families. Many don’t feel they have that now. .
Andrea Dutton, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said burning fossil fuels primarily drives climate change, which could cause widespread economic and environmental problems.
Union membership in the state hovered between 215,000 and 230,000 from 2015 through 2021. That makes it hard to tell if the membership gains in the new data reflect actual membership increases or a correction after an under-estimate last year, said Laura Dresser, associate director of the COWS economic think tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“You need to see multiple years of data to really know what’s going on or to be able to say, ‘Absolutely, unions are growing in this state,’” she said.
“If we’re thinking about how we want to manage or protect groundwater resources in the future, we really need to be thinking about what’s happening on the land surface. And if you look at Wisconsin, greater than 90% of the land is, really, rural land,” said Michael Cardiff, a professor in the department of geoscience at UW-Madison. “Rural water users are probably most connected to the largest area of land in Wisconsin, and could probably tell us about what sort of concerns they’re seeing.”
An exhibit in the main floor of UW-Madison’s Memorial Library seeks to showcase pivotal moments in the history of experimental and electronic music. Many of those pivotal moments are available to play (and available to check out) in Memorial’s basement, amidst the vast musical collection of the Mills Music Library.
Sports betting is now legal in 38 states. We talk about why the sports gambling industry is booming and how it’s affecting sports leagues themselves with Jason Kido Lopez, an assistant professor in media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Steve Vavrus is a senior scientist at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. On Jan. 17, he joined WPR’s “The Morning Show” to explain the causes of lakes freezing later.
UW-Madison linguistics expert Dan Pell said Madison’s street names, many of which honor white historical figures, do not always project the progressive values city government has sought to establish.
“If you turn the (street) names into faces, it would be really obvious that there is white privilege baked in,” Pell said. “I think it’s important that we rethink how we represent history and how we project who writes history.”
A $150 million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be used by UW-Madison to fund nationwide research that investigates the neurobiology of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.
Dr. Nate Chin is the medical director for that study which will involve all 37 of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers in the U.S.
Julie Stamm researches CTE at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and authored a book called, “The Brain on Youth Sports: The Science, the Myths, and the Future.” During a recent interview with WPR’s “Central Time,” Stamm said the new Boston University study adds to other research undermining a misconception that CTE is only a concern for professional athletes.
“We know that’s not the case,” said Stamm, a clinical assistant professor in the university’s Department of Kinesiology.
With the new year, millions of people resolve to diet, exercise more or make changes in other aspects of their lives, including personal finances. For most of us, personal finance-related resolutions are a combination of spending less, saving more and maybe paying off some debts. Some of the newfound attention to our financial outlook may even stem from an expensive holiday season that just wrapped up. But the new year offers new opportunities to get on track.
Written by J. Michael Collins, the Fetzer Family Chair in Consumer and Personal Finance at UW-Madison and a professor in the La Follette School of Public Affairs and the School of Human Ecology.
The rising trajectory of Snapshot Wisconsin could make it the largest such wildlife monitoring project in the world, said University of Wisconsin Professor of Forest and Wildlife Ecology Phil Townsend.
The short-term side effects associated with the mRNA vaccines may also be contributing to reluctance. For some people, these vaccines are a breeze, but for others, a day or two of fever, aches, and chills are guaranteed to follow a booster. “We know from other vaccines that any mark in the ‘this is inconvenient for me’ column will suppress uptake,” said Malia Jones, an assistant professor of spatial dimensions of community health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
New research finds that early exposure to lead pipes can reduce an American man’s lifespan by an average of almost three months. Those are the findings from a paper co-authored by a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The results are part of a broader body of research examining conditions in childhood that may affect the longevity of Americans.
Jason Fletcher, a professor with the university’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, said researchers compared U.S. Census records of men living in cities that had lead pipes to those living in cities that used non-lead materials in the early 20th century. Fletcher said they then linked the names and addresses of those individuals to their death records from 1975 to 2005. Fletcher said the paper did not examine women because of difficulties with linking data due to name changes when women married.
“It’s a really unusual dynamic where neither party has a competitive primary process this year,” said Eleanor Powell, associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I’m hard pressed to think of a cycle where there was this much lack of interest or competitiveness.”
There will be other races and measures on the primary ballot. Some municipalities will see elections for county boards or local school funding measures, said Barry Burden, director of the UW-Madison Elections Research Center.
“So even if the presidential race doesn’t look competitive, hopefully there’ll be other things that’ll draw voters out,” Burden said.
Knowing what TV shows a dog likes could help assess their vision, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s (UW-Madison) School of Veterinary Medicine.
In the study, researchers sought to determine what factors influenced a dog’s interest in engaging with videos, said Freya Mowat, veterinary ophthalmologist and professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine’s department of surgical sciences. Those factors included age and vision.
“It is crucial that governments make tackling these issues a priority,” said Jennifer Mnookin, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a co-chair on the committee that wrote the report, in a statement. Otherwise, she said Washington would “effectively cede” policy on a key public issue to private companies.
The amount of freshwater from the edge calving is modest (42 gigatons per year) compared with total flow (about 221 gigatons per year), said Feng He, a polar scientist at researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who was not involved in the study.
The idea is the jet stream — the upper air circulation that drives weather — is wavier in amplified global warming, said University of Wisconsin-Madison climate scientist Steve Vavrus. And those wave changes in the upper air knock the polar vortex out of its place and toward the United States, Cohen said.
“The Chinese zodiac had little effect on births in China until at least 2010,” University of Wisconsin-Madison demographer Fuxian Yi told Newsweek, citing China’s annual census data.
Bruce Wampold, emeritus professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has spent years studying the essential ingredients of therapy. Wampold points to a robust set of research indicating that more than the particulars of any method of treatment, it’s the relationship between therapist and patient that predicts outcomes.
Just 5 or 6 feet below ground, it’s about 50 degrees year-round, and that heat production becomes more consistent the deeper you go, said Gregory Nemet, professor of energy and climate policy at UW-Madison. It makes sense for large developments like the Belle Farm Neighborhood to use energy sources like geothermal, as the infrastructure needed is minimal, Nemet said: essentially digging a hole in the ground and installing coils and connecting that to an HVAC system for heating and cooling.
“(Nicotine) literally alters the makeup of the brain as it’s developing,” explained Chris Hollenback, the communications director for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention. “You have these receptors saying ‘more, more, more.’ When you’re under the age of 17, it’s easier to get addicted and harder to quit.”
“Some of these programs are focused on racially minoritized students,” said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The hallmark is the Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant and it gives students $2,500 per year. What is not mentioned, I think, in a lot of dialogue, is that they not only have to qualify as a racially minoritized student, but they also have to qualify on the basis of financial need.”
Written by Dr. Jonathan Patz, the Vilas Distinguished Professor & John P. Holton Chair of Health and the Environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute & Department of Population Health Sciences.
A union drive can be “a kind of arduous process,” but it’s only “the end of the beginning,” said Michael Childers, a business and labor education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It’s common for workers to wait a year or more between election and contract, and many unions allege that the employer behaves illegally during the bargaining process.
The idea is the jet stream — the upper air circulation that drives weather — is wavier in amplified global warming, said University of Wisconsin-Madison climate scientist Steve Vavrus. And those wave changes in the upper air knock the polar vortex out of its place and toward the United States, Cohen said.
In a global context, University of Wisconsin-Madison demographer Fuxian Yi wrote on social media Wednesday that even if China stabilizes its birth rate at 1.0, its population will drop to under 400 million in 2100 compared to 366 million for the U.S., as predicted by the U.S. Census Bureau
“Chinese authorities and some international economists believed that China’s economic downturn in the past few years was caused by the “zero Covid” policy,” Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an expert on Chinese demographics, told DealBook. “But China’s economic recovery was much weaker than expected last year, as the core drivers of the downturn were aging and a declining work force.”
Steve Vavrus, director of the Wisconsin State Climatology Office, said Wisconsin tied 1987 to become the fourth-warmest year on record since 1895. The statewide average temperature for the year was 46.3 degrees Fahrenheit, which was roughly 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the long-term average. Only 2012, 1998 and 1931 were hotter.
Data from UW Health urgent care centers indicates a 4.5 percent increase from 2022 in visits for acute respiratory infections during a 9-week period spanning June and July last year.
Claire Allen runs the office at UW-Madison every Tuesday from 10 to 4. She’s been staffing it for nine months as a housing counseling specialist.
“For a lot students, their first time renting is in college,” Allen said. “Lease questions, roommate conflicts, security deposit questions, options to end a lease if it’s not working out,” Allen said. “Questions about landlords not addressing repairs, that’s a big one.”
Although the pandemic exacerbated many of Wisconsin’s workforce issues, labor force participation has been steadily decreasing across the state since its peak in the 1990’s. Today, at the Regional economic Conditions Conference hosted by the Federal reserve Bank of Minneapolis, UW Madison economist Matthew Kures said the age of workers has been a large factor in the decline.
“We simply have fewer workers of working age and prime working age than we had a decade ago or two decades ago,” said Kures.
UW-Madison political science professor and Elections Research Center director Barry Burden details the plan and timeline set by the Wisconsin Supreme Court for creating new legislative district maps.
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.
