“The science on how hurricanes will change in the future is fairly complex and not entirely settled, but a few things are generally accepted,” Daniel Wright, a civil and environmental engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Hydroclimate Extremes Research Group, previously told Newsweek.
In an August presentation, Somesh Jha, a computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the technology could be a threat to cybersecurity and could be misused to spread misinformation.
For example, there’s already a “fine-tuned” AI that can write spam emails, he said. AI can also be used to create fake images and videos that look real, known as “deepfakes.” Jha said deepfakes could be used, unethically, during elections to sway public opinion.
“This is coming,” he said. “I can tell you that there are people (who) are really scared.”
Over the next three years, Milwaukee Public Schools will have help securing candidates for some of its toughest-to-fill teaching jobs.
A new partnership between MPS and the University of Wisconsin-Madison provides on-the-job training through a 10-month teaching residency, paired with a special education teacher preparation master’s degree program.
Lola Loustaunau, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School for Workers, said that “it would really open the door for a lot of protections for workers” if OSHA consistently inspected small dairy farms that provide housing to immigrant workers.
“If they are politically interested in doing something,” she added, “it looks like they have all the basis to do it.”
Written by Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Big Country with an Empty Nest” (China Development Press, 2013).
Dr. Stacey Ishman, an otolaryngology instructor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, estimated that she has treated about eight patients with insects in their ears over her 23-year career — often people who did outdoor activities like camping.
“Most of the time the ear is completely fine,” said Ishman, who also wasn’t involved in the new report. “If there’s some injury to the ear canal, quite honestly it’s more often from people trying to get it out than it is from the bug itself.”
Susan Lederer, professor of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin’s medical school, said that as the number of medical schools increased in the 19th century and dissection became an essential part of training, schools needed to find more cadavers.
States passed laws making unclaimed bodies, mostly of very poor people, available to medical schools.
“It reflects longstanding assumptions about the differences between middle-class and either working-class or underclass people” that it was deemed acceptable to turn certain bodies over but not others, she said.
In 2022, Wisconsin saw a record-setting increase in domestic violence-related suicides and homicides, up 20 percent compared to the previous year. We talk to Mariel Barnes, an assistant professor in the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison, about why Wisconsin’s domestic violence problem is worsening, and what we can do to improve outcomes for victims.
But in light of Protasiewicz’s victory, Barry Burden, a professor of political science at UW-Madison, noted that “the two parties are looking at the Constitution and litigation differently than they used to.”
He added that voter ID would be a logical place for conservatives to start, if they were serious about pursuing a strategy of embracing constitutional amendments.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Political Science Professor Barry Burden told WPR that, unlike Wisconsin, most states have banned losing primary candidates from running in general elections.
“I do wonder if this is coming from Republicans, in part, because of a concern that there might be candidates who splinter off from the Republican Party if Trump is the nominee next year,” Burden said.
In 2018, the UW-Madison’s Division of Extension received a $2.5 million five-year grant from the CDC’s High Obesity program to address obesity in Menominee County. The funding led to the Kemāmaceqtaq: We’re All Moving initiative, which worked with county and tribal government and community groups.
Gauthier, who helped lead the initiative, said the last five years of work have focused on changing policies and making environmental improvements to support healthy choices. The initiative has helped local government buildings, schools and community groups adopt new nutrition policies, supported a local farmers market program and led a walking audit of the county to identify how to improve infrastructure for walking and biking.
Amber Canto is director of the Health and Wellbeing Institute with the UW-Madison’s Division of Extension and project director for the High Obesity Program grant funding. She said they’ve received another five-year award to continue their work in Menominee County and begin work in Ashland County, which now also has an obesity rate of more than 40 percent.
Canto said they’ve tracked increases in healthy food options and recreationally-accessible miles, but the bigger impacts are harder to quantify this early on.
“That data has shown, from a theory perspective, that if these opportunities are present that the behavior and therefore the health outcomes will shift over time,” she said at Monday’s hearing.
University of Wisconsin-Madison clinical law professor Mitch said the price listed is likely less than what the homeowner would get by listing their home for sale publicly.
The fake check at the top of the ad appears to be one of the many marketing methods people are using to buy and then resell homes for profit, Mitch said.
“The idea is that sending out lots of letters or texts could be worth it if they get enough responses from people looking to sell,” he said.
“It’s not any sweeter than a lot of other candy, and I’ve tasted every candy there is,” said Richard Hartel, who teaches candy science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Mayor Johnson is doing some really interesting things, trying to bring in business and economic activity into the city,” said Alvin Thomas, an assistant professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “That is going to be necessary to afford people the opportunities to take care of themselves.
“At the core are things like mental health, access to jobs – jobs that will allow an individual to respectively be able to care for their children and family and community.”
“If you had asked (about environmental changes) 20 years ago, it would (have been) really different,” said Dominique Brossard, chair of the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who reviewed a summary of the study’s findings.
“I think it’s promising that people are realizing there are environmental issues impacting their region as a whole,” she added.
“It is a little more complicated than people assume,” political scientist Barry Burden of the University of Wisconsin-Madison says of the possibility of a spoiler candidate altering a presidential race.
“So one option is to essentially just shut down the power line, because if there is no voltage and no current on the line, there is no chance of this release of energy happening and then there is no chance of an ignition,” explains Line Roald, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose work includes modeling the risk of wildfire ignition and power outages in the electric grid.
Interview with Lindsay Palmer, assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW-Madison
The tax credit provides the biggest benefit to families “who can afford to spend a lot on child care,” says Tim Smeeding, an economist and emeritus professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin. The proposal doesn’t help people for whom the cost of child care is out of reach, he added.
“This is a very pressing issue for many people in Wisconsin,” said Laura Dresser of the Center for Wisconsin Strategy, which has published “Can’t Survive on $7.25,” a report that explores the impact and issues of low wages for Wisconsinites.
“We know that there are fewer people working very close to the bottom of the wage floor – that $7.25 per hour minimum wage – today than there were even three years ago,” Dresser added, “but there are still some in the state who do and others who don’t make much more than that.”
Ever since the Neanderthal genome was first sequenced 13 years ago, there have been questions about the mixture of modern human and Neanderthal genes, said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who was not involved in the study.
“Graham first visited Israel in 1960. And it’s a really big deal,” said Daniel Hummel, a research fellow at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Not only did Graham preach in Israel, but he met with then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion: “He really makes a point to articulate a Christian Zionist view that the nation of Israel is a fulfillment of God’s plans for the Jewish people and that it has a great future ahead of it,” explained Hummel.
Eric Grodsky, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor whose research has included publications on chronic absenteeism before the pandemic, suggested in an interview that focusing on those underlying causes is the best way to help students academically, as well. That’s because whatever is causing them to miss school can harm their ability to learn even if they’re present, he said.
Kathy Cramer, a political science professor, quoted.
Gary Lupyan, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says that words can organize the way we think about the world and shape the way we perceive it. In a recent experiment, he and his colleagues measured how hard it was for English speakers to assign circles colored in diverse ways to a random category (such as “A” or “B”) if the colors were easy to name (for instance, “red” or “blue”) or hard to name (“slightly neutral lavender” or “light dusty rose”). All the colors, regardless of how nameable they were in English, were equally easy to discriminate visually from one another. Even so, Lupyan and his colleagues found strong differences in participants’ ability to learn which circles went into the different categories based on how easily nameable the colors were.
Written by Allison M. Prasch, associate professor of rhetoric, politics and culture, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Party leaders might be more extreme now as a result of the close party balance in the House,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The narrow margins for the majority party in recent years empower more strident and extreme factions within the party to demand fidelity to their preferences. It is possible that Pelosi’s more liberal position helped her maintain exceptional party discipline even while sometimes managing tenuous majorities.”
It could also be that, also over an immense period, glass will eventually crystallize and become a typical solid. In this light, glass is just liquid “that’s sliding on its way to being a crystal,” Mark Ediger, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, says.
But there’s another exciting possibility here: that instead of crystallization, over very long periods, glass can inch closer to the state of “perfect disorder,” as Ediger describes.
“Let’s suppose that you have boxes,” he says, “many different boxes of different sizes and shapes, and you’re trying to pack them all into the back of a U-Haul.” If you manage to squeeze all the boxes in the back of the U-Haul, with no possible room for any others, and there’s only one possible configuration of the boxes that will allow you to do this, that’s perfect disorder.
“Israel’s apartheid system and colonization and military occupation over Palestinians, with full support of the U.S. government, are the source of all of this violence,” said Lorraine Halinka Malcoe of Jewish Voice for Peace. She is also a public health professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
A recent study on stress in rhesus monkeys by Dr. Ned Kalin, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin—Madison discovered genetically inherited overactivity in three brain regions may cause someone to be more vulnerable to developing anxiety.
Far from being something to brush off lightly, concussions are classified as traumatic brain injuries, Julie Stamm, author of the book “The Brain on Youth Sports: The Science, the Myths, and the Future,” told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the podcast Chasing Life.
“I often use the term concussion because it’s just so commonly used in sport especially. But it is a traumatic brain injury, and it’s often classified as a mild traumatic brain injury — and even that feels like it minimizes the injury,” said Stamm, a clinical assistant professor in the department of kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, pointed to a 2020 incident in which human error led to incorrect initial results in Antrim County, Mich., and stoked conspiracies about election fraud.
Jeremy Morris is a professor in media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies how digital technologies are affecting the music industry. He said concert films are neither better nor worse than live performances, but rather different.
“I think there is that kind of gut reaction to sort of look down on these other ways of presenting concerts,” Morris said. “But it provides a different experience that some people can really enjoy and latch onto.”
Dr. Emma Mohr, pediatric infectious disease physician at UW Health, said she is encountering more families who are questioning recommended vaccinations for their kids than prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. She said hearing about the development of the COVID-19 vaccines — and often the misinformation spread about the shots — has put all vaccinations at the forefront of parents’ minds.
“They say ‘oh, people were questioning the COVID vaccine and researching it. Now our doctor is offering us a different vaccine, should we be questioning this one and researching this one?'” Mohr said.
PBS Wisconsin Education is proud to introduce a new addition to Meet The Lab, a collection of online learning resources developed in collaboration with research labs on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. This collection is designed to introduce middle school students to cutting-edge research and develop their identities in science. Like all PBS Wisconsin Education materials, Meet the Lab resources are available for free for all Wisconsin educators.
UW-Madison urban planning professor Kurt Paulsen explains how government policy and business practices that discriminated by race continue to affect homeownership rates of Black families in Wisconsin.
Families with a direct connection to the region may have a tougher time navigating the next few days than those without one. And age matters a lot, the experts said. Younger kids, particularly those in second grade or below, should be protected from watching upsetting videos as much as possible, says Heather Kirkorian, the director of the Cognitive Development and Media Lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. They’re too young to understand what’s happening. “They don’t have the cognitive and emotional skills to understand and process,” she told me.
Ron Kean, poultry specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, said prices are still elevated compared to before last year thanks to the broad impact of inflation.
“We’ve seen transportation costs increase and feed costs increase and labor costs and things like that,” Kean said. “I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to the prices we saw pre-COVID, but they’re certainly down from what they’ve been in the last year.”
Nationwide, big-name retailers and small community pharmacies are struggling to find pharmacists. The challenge to recruit more is magnified in rural areas.
UW-Madison is offering a new program to help build a pharmacy workforce in Wisconsin. It’s called the PharmD Early Assurance Program.
Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz has faced impeachment threats for declining to recuse herself from a lawsuit over redistricting in Wisconsin. Robert Yablon, a UW-Madison law professor, joins us to look at the legal precedents at issue and where the case could go from here.
From the NFL to youth soccer, sports teams have been forced to reckon with decades of research showing the risks of repeated blows to the head through contact sports. At the same time, participation in organized team sports has been found to be extremely beneficial for the developing brain. So how should parents square those facts and find a safe middle ground for their kids? In this episode, Sanjay speaks to Julie Stamm, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Kinesiology and author of the book “The Brain on Youth Sports.” She explains why even those who don’t play sports should be aware of the risks and shares tips on how we all can keep our heads protected.
The silage number is likely to increase somewhat this year due to the drought, but Joe Lauer, who studies corn and silage production at UW-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, says the average corn yield likely will vary greatly depending on region.
Shawn Conley, who studies soybeans at UW-Madison, said three weeks ago he thought this year’s harvest per acre would be lower than that of 2022, but he now believes it could come in at or even higher than that of a year ago, based on early reports.
Steven Deller studies public finance and economic development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although he doesn’t have direct knowledge of Fast Forward, he said there are “hundreds if not thousands” of federal and state-level grants that are not fully taken advantage of.
There are two main reasons, he said: a lack of awareness and cumbersome application materials. The need to ensure government money is being spent properly creates a lot of paperwork.
“If the agency is perceived as being ‘sloppy’ handing the grants out, there is a huge political price to pay,” Deller wrote via email.
Quoted: “Unfortunately, we haven’t made nearly as much progress as we would like,” said Dr. Camille Ladanyi, a gynecologic surgeon at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “We are unable to really, truly individualize care as much as we would like to as providers.”
Quoted: Mark Sidel, professor of law and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the recent arrests of climate leaders are part of a broader trend.
“These recent detentions and arrests are a continuation of a larger and deeply unfortunate pattern of suppression of patriotic Vietnamese civil society leaders,” Sidel wrote in an email. “Vietnam is jailing some of its best and brightest thinkers.”
On Oct. 4, it generated heated public testimonies at the state Capitol. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers is expected to veto the Republican bill if it passes committee and reaches the floor, but the bill’s introduction, perhaps ironically, does harm in and of itself, said Stephanie Budge, an associate professor in counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Research shows there’s a psychological impact of these anti-LGBTQ+ bills. Even before we consider if it passes, there’s so much harm, because it’s dehumanizing,” Budge said.
Quoted: “As seems to be the case with so many aspects of Wisconsin politics, we are in uncharted territory,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the university’s Elections Research Center.
Still, many scientists thought the “endangered” listing was warranted because drought along migration routes or cold winters could tip the population into an extinction spiral. “Monarch populations [are] at a level that most scientists suggest is not sustainable,” says Karen Oberhauser, a conservation biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was on the assessment team.
“You had all these birds that were just raring to go, but they’ve been held up with this weird September and October with temperatures way above normal,” said Stan Temple, a retired University of Wisconsin-Madison wildlife ecology professor and avian expert. “You had this huge pack of birds takeoff.”
A new study led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined the contents, organization and behavior of midbodies to gain a better understanding of what they do in the body.
“People thought the midbody was a place where things died or were recycled after cell division,” said Ahna Skop, corresponding author of the study. “But one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. A midbody is a little packet of information cells use to communicate.”
Once considered by many “the height of medical progress,” according to Jenell Johnson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of “American Lobotomy,” the lobotomy “ought to remind us to be humble about the limits of our knowledge in the present.”
The procedure, Johnson stressed, was “a kind of brain damage” that involved separating the connection between the parts of the brain that control executive function and emotion.
Kasey Keeler is an author and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. She is an enrolled citizen of the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians and descendant of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
Barry C. Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the latest fights over the state’s Supreme Court made clear that the line that once separated the justices from partisan politics had “completely disintegrated.”
“The kind of bare-knuckles politics that has defined the state for the last 15 years has now bled its way into every aspect of state political life, including the judicial branch,” he said.
John Gross, an associate clinical professor for the UW-Madison law school, said Pleasnick’s swift release from jail is not out of the ordinary.
“While people may be unnerved by the fact he was in the Capitol building with a firearm, it is still classified as a misdemeanor,” Gross said. “It’s not a felony offense.”
UW-Madison is home to the first collegiate glass program in the U.S. It turned 60 in 2022, and the glass program is kicking off a year-long celebration called Glass Madison, starting this month. October features six gallery shows on campus, all open to the public.
Sandra Stuttgen, a former veterinarian and current agriculture educator for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, said the new requirements are a part of the federal agency’s efforts to address how animal use of common drugs is contributing to the global problem of antibiotic resistance.
“As humans, if we have a condition where we need antibiotics, we want them to work,” she said. “They’re trying to protect the antibiotics that are of human significance, so it’s the drugs that humans and animals share.”
John Gross, an associate clinical professor for the UW-Madison law school, said Pleasnick’s swift release from jail is not out of the ordinary.
“When you have hot conditions, there’s increased demand on the heart to pump more blood to the largest organ in our body, which is our skin,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied the environmental health effects of climate change.
Rating books according to one person, or a group’s subjective moral guidelines, is not how professional librarians assess whether books are suitable for libraries, said Megan Schliesman of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education.
Amanda Gevens, potato and vegetable pathologist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, said potatoes are already generating heat heading into harvest through a process called respiration. If weather conditions raise the temperature of the tubers even further, that can make it difficult for farmers to properly cool them down for storage.
“There may not be adequate cooling air available to get control of this heat load,” Gevens said in an email. “Refrigeration is a great option to cool potatoes at harvest, although the system must have the capacity to handle the high heat load and fresh air also must be provided to purge carbon dioxide.”
