“It could be that this gives the court a completely neutral basis for deciding the maps are no good,” said Kenneth R. Mayer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor.
“The world has produced nearly three billion solar panels at this point, and every one of those has been an opportunity for people to try to improve the process,” said Gregory Nemet, a solar power expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And all of those incremental improvements add up to something very dramatic.”
Maui experienced a two-category increase in drought severity in just three weeks from May to June, with that rapid intensification fitting the definition of a flash drought, said Jason Otkin, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.Otkin co-authored an April study that shows that flash droughts are becoming more common as Earth warms by human-caused climate change. A 2016 flash drought was connected to unusual wildfires in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, he said.
Ryan Owens, a UW-Madison political science professor, said the liberal justices’ actions are harming the court’s reputation.
“Disregarding procedure, purging state employees without notice and making blatantly political decisions is an institution-destroying cocktail that, for the public, will taste like ipecac syrup — and have the same effect,” said Owens, who briefly ran for attorney general as a Republican.
“What the emergency rental assistance proves is that you can stabilize housing and get better outcomes across a range of life situations,” said UW-Madison urban planning professor Kurt Paulsen. “You’re better able to focus on a job or school and deal with whatever problems life throws at you.”
But the challenge to noncontiguous districts could provide judges a way to decide the case without ever addressing whether partisan gerrymandering is illegal. “It could be that this gives the court a completely neutral basis for deciding the maps are no good,” said Kenneth R. Mayer, a UW-Madison political science professor.
The Perseid meteors are visible around this time each year. Director of UW Space Place, James Lattis tells News 3 Now that a debris field left by comet Swift- Tuttle intersects with Earth’s orbit causing the astronomical phenomena.
Maui experienced a two-category increase in drought severity in just three weeks from May to June, with that rapid intensification fitting the definition of a flash drought, said Jason Otkin, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Paul credited Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, with originating the vampire allegory in a 2013 blog post. The economist Russ Roberts, in turn, credited Paul in his 2022 book, “Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us.”
HUANG: So here’s what’s happening. The salt draws water out of the cabbage leaves, breaking down cell walls, and that releases sugars that feed the kimchi-making microbes. I called up fermentation professor Victor Ujor at the University of Wisconsin. He loves fermentation, and he loves talking about microbes.
VICTOR UJOR: So I think they are such beautiful things.
Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argued that, even if Biden’s age has not affected his ability to do the job, “some members of the public may nonetheless believe he is not mentally sharp enough or that he lacks the necessary physical stamina.”
Includes Q&A with Jonathan Ferguson, financial capability specialist, University of Wisconsin-Madison-Financial Education Division of Extension.
The notion of planting miles of trees to hold back encroaching deserts is misguided and damaging; we should promote programs that secure livelihoods and respect dryland ecologies instead
Co-authored by nature-society geographers Matthew Turner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Diana Davis of the University of California-Davis) and Emily Yeh of the University of Colorado Boulder.
This achievement is a milestone, according to Gerald Kulcinski, director emeritus of fusion technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It doesn’t change any physics, but what it does is that we can now say with confidence that there’s a nuclear process going on and we can tell where it’s located,” he said. “It’s confirmation of something that we’ve known for a long time, but now we actually have visible evidence of it.”
Dietram Scheufele, who studies science communication and technology policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that while some of the doomsday predictions about AI are overblown, “we’re definitely entering a new world.”
The technology, he said, “gets real creepy real fast.”
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum’s Wisconsin Native Plant Garden — home to hundreds of species native to the region — the turf grass on the ground is brown but the native plants are green, said Susan Carpenter, the garden’s curator.
“It’s a stark reminder that they are more resilient in the face of drought than turf grass, which has very short little roots,” Carpenter said.
UW-Madison computer sciences professor Jerry Zhu explained how AI language models work, illustrating the increasing complexity that chatbots are able to operate with. ChatGPT and others base their technology on “conditional probabilities” of what letter, word or punctuation is most likely to come after another based on its database of how language has been used.
Ever wanted to learn the Irish language? A program at UW-Madison offers Irish classes to the campus community. And a similar program, along with a weekly conversation circle, is being offered to people outside of campus through the Isthmus Conversation Circle. WORT Reporter Heewone Lim is here today with Dr. Becky Shields, who is an instructor and an academic advisor in the Language Sciences program here at UW-Madison and leading efforts to bring Irish to Madison.
Dr. Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer and emergency medicine physician at UW Health, says a new COVID booster is good news. Dr. Pothof encourages people to get the new booster in September or October when they get their flu shot.
“Our immune systems get a little bit lazy and they don’t work as well against COVID. So having this booster is going to be helpful. It’s actually against the strain that’s pretty common out there right now,” Dr. Pothof.
“Sometimes we don’t know what to do with emotions,” so parents channel them into packing and shopping to feel productive, said Beth Miller, a coordinator for residence life at University of Wisconsin-Madison who has been involved in campus life for the past 17 years. “But sometimes parents are purchasing things based on emotion and not necessarily based on need.”
NPR spoke with Megan Moreno, an adolescent medicine physician and researcher at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, about the unique impact that content creators can have on young people, and how it can lead to events like Cenat’s meetup. Here’s what she told us: On the unique nature of internet celebrity with fans:For some followers, the connection to that content creator can feel so strong and so personal that they’ll start to develop what is sometimes called a parasocial relationship.
So calibrate your comedy accordingly. You’ll know if your approach is on the right track because laughs never lie. “Interactions with your child that are filled with mirth should be unscripted and spontaneous,” says Dipesh Navsaria, associate professor of pediatrics and human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “They should involve a back-and-forth where parent and child are ‘riffing off’ each other.”
Retired U.S. Army Reserve Colonel and Ambrose-Hesseltine Associate Professor of U.S. Military History Dr. John Hall discusses the monumental decision.
“The court has been a contentious place, by some measures, for a decade,” said Michael Wagner, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But I do think it’s in the court’s interest to demonstrate how the decisions they make are rooted in the law and not rooted in politics. “It’s a difficult thing to do,” he added.
Even though the NIH has had to navigate political rapids for decades, including enduring controversy over stem cell research and surveys on the sexual behavior of teens, this is a particularly fraught moment. “It is caught up in a larger debate about who gets to decide what is truthful information these days,” said Alta Charo, a professor emerita of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has advised the NIH in the past.
“The jury is trying to try to figure out what the defendant was thinking in the moment, and that can be really hard to know,” said Cecelia Klingele, a University of Wisconsin law professor and expert on self-defense laws.
“Buprenorphine is a first-line treatment for opioid use disorder, and offering it to anyone seen in the emergency department after an opioid overdose should be standard of care,” said Dr. Elizabeth Salisbury-Afshar, a UW Health addiction medicine physician and University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of family medicine and community health, who called the study results “promising.”
“Mosquitoes emerge from standing water – like what’s in our gutters and puddles or in more forested areas – but we haven’t had a lot of that,” said Lyric Bartholomay, a public health entomologist and professor of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “So without much rain, there just haven’t been good habitats for mosquitoes to grow.”
“The reason that setting new temperature records is a big deal is that we are now being challenged to find ways to survive through temperatures hotter than any of us have ever experienced before,” University of Wisconsin–Madison climate scientist Andrea Dutton tells Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press. “Soaring temperatures place ever-increasing strains not just on power grids and infrastructure, but on human bodies that are not equipped to survive some of the extreme heat we are already experiencing.”
Other journalism models—including nonprofits such as MinnPost, collaborative efforts such Broke in Philly and citizen journalism—have had some success in fulfilling what Lewis Friedland of the University of Wisconsin–Madison called “critical community information needs” in a chapter of the 2016 book The Communication Crisis in America, and How to Fix It. Friedland classified those needs as falling in eight areas: emergencies and risks, health and welfare, education, transportation, economic opportunities, the environment, civic information and political information.
Don Olszewski, director of the Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship at UW-Madison, said many important features of the workplace are difficult to replicate on Zoom. But Olszewski said some of the advantages of in-person work can be achieved with a hybrid schedule, especially if commuting is an issue.
“It’s hard to really engage new employees in the company and feel virtually,” Olszewski said. “The mentoring that goes along with that, a lot of that tends to be informal, running into people at the water cooler.”
David Drake, a wildlife specialist and forest and wildlife ecology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison compared juvenile birds to 16-year-old drivers.
“They know how to drive but, they don’t know where they’re going or how everything works,” Drake said. “We refer to that as an accidental. I’m assuming that’s likely what happened.”
“It’s really hard to bring people on different ends of the political spectrum together on this issue,” said Nan Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dairy farmer Sarah Lloyd says consolidation in the industry has allowed processors, distributors, and retailers to keep consumer prices high even as farmers are paid less. “There’s been reduced competition in the marketplace,” said Lloyd, who’s worked as a food systems scientist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems.
“Farmers don’t have the power to push back…and consumers are also getting a raw deal,” she said.
Ingredients: Mostly, conventional deodorants will have lab-derived antimicrobial ingredients like alcohols and triclosan. If you want mostly natural ingredients, look for deodorants with essential oils for fragrance and natural moisture absorbers like baking soda, arrowroot, charcoal and cornstarch. Some deodorants also have ingredients like baking soda, vinegar, citric acid and lemon juice that kill off some of the odor-causing bacteria and keep their numbers down, according to Dr. Apple Bodemer, a board-certified dermatologist and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
APSA president Lisa Martin, a University of Wisconsin professor, acknowledged that “many people will be very unhappy with this decision. They won’t come to the annual meeting or even renew their membership.”
This round of charges against Trump are unprecedented, according to Mike Wagner, a political science expert who teaches at UW-Madison. “We are in uncharted territory,” he said. “This is beyond even what Hollywood tends to imagine in thrillers about presidential elections. This is something that we have not faced as a nation.”
A series of Meta-supported are finding Facebook’s algorithms alone weren’t responsible for harmful polarization in the 2020 presidential election cycle. But an independent audit found Meta maintained strong control over what data to provide researchers for study. We talk with Mike Wagner, a professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW-Madison, about research into the power of social media algorithms and what makes an independent study.
Quoted: Whether public employees’ speech is constitutionally protected depends on the context they are acting in, said Robert Dreschel, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus of journalism and mass communication.
“It doesn’t take long before things get complicated and difficult to sort out,” Dreschel said. “It’s certainly quite a clash of interests.”
We talk with the UW-Madison assistant professor Rebecca Myerson behind the study about the effects of price caps on insulin costs.
Feng He, a senior scientist with the Center for Climatic Research within the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Wisconsin would see some pretty abrupt changes under a collapsed current, likely mirroring the major warming episode between 48,000 and 68,000 years ago.
Paul Hutson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies psilocybin and leads the school’s center for psychedelics research, said he anticipates within the next five years there will be enough evidence for the FDA to approve MDMA and psilocybin to treat PTSD and depression.
UW-Madison Professor Keith Findley, who co-chaired the Body-Worn Camera Feasibility Review Committee, said despite the pilot program’s differences, it largely reflects the committee’s recommendations.
“It’s taken so long to get to this point we can’t keep dragging our feet on this,” Findley told the Civilian Police Oversight Board on Monday. “I think Madison has fallen behind on the times.”
“It’s a mystery, and that’s one of the reasons we’re interested in it,” Bret Payseur, a genetics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells Inverse.
To make matters worse, if that seems possible, all these numbers rely on official Chinese statistics, and the government has likely been overstating them. According to an extensive examination of different sets of books by University of Wisconsin Prof. Yi Fuxian, it’s possible to find the “fudging” effects by comparing local and provincial data to that published at the national level.
Michael Wagner, a social scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was asked to observe the work and wrote a commentary accompanying the Science papers , says Meta’s business interests may have influenced the project at some points. For instance, he says Meta researchers believed that the experimental studies changing users’ feeds were unlikely to show any big effects—and they pushed to get these papers done first. “You could read it as ‘the big splash is going to be that there aren’t huge effects that are so deleterious to democracy that we need to have a bunch of new regulations on our platform.’”
“It’s a little too buttoned up to say this shows Facebook is not a huge problem or social media platforms aren’t a problem,” said Michael W. Wagner, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, who served as an independent observer of the collaboration, spending hundreds of hours sitting in on meetings and interviewing scientists. “This is good scientific evidence there is not just one problem that is easy to solve.”
Still, collaborations with platforms may not be the model for research going forward and perhaps it shouldn’t be, according to Michael W. Wagner, professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, who served as the collaboration’s independent rapporteur.
The work was not a model for future research since it required direct participation from Meta, which held all the data and provided researchers only with certain kinds, said Michael Wagner, a professor of mass communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was an independent auditor on the project. The researchers said they had final say over the papers’ conclusions.
“Meta set the agenda in ways that affected the overall independence of the researchers,” wrote Michael Wagner, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
And despite valid concerns from many of the researchers involved, in the end Meta did grant them most of the independence they were seeking. That’s according to an accompanying report from Michael W. Wagner, a professor of mass communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who served as an independent observer of the studies. Wagner found flaws in the process — more on those in a minute — but for the most part he found that Meta lived up to its promises.
We talk to an expert on early childhood media consumption about the potential harms of unregulated kids’ content on YouTube, and what parents need to be aware of. We also talk to a PBS Wisconsin education engagement specialist about what outreach is being done to help kids and parents make healthy media choices.
The Federal Trade Commission is finalizing its antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. Peter Carstensen, University of Wisconsin Law School Professor Emeritus and an antitrust expert, explains.
And yet 35% of the audience were men. What gives? “The current level of uncertainty and turbulence and anxiety accounts for part of that crossover among genders,” said Nancy Wong, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “People associate ‘Barbie’ with a more comfortable, simple and stable time in their lives.”
Somesh Jha, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Google researcher who specializes in A.I. security, called the new paper “a game changer” that could force the entire industry into rethinking how it built guardrails for A.I. systems.
This notion of a “DIY society” can extend to the numerous ways parents—especially mothers—are asked to “hold it all together,” the University of Wisconsin at Madison sociologist Jessica Calarco told me. For example, the rise of double-earner households was not met with policies like affordable child care or mandatory paid leave. Instead, families have been forced to navigate confusing and competitive marketplaces to acquire basic services such as day care and summer camp, and they are largely on their own to deal with any breakdowns.
“The reason that setting new temperature records is a big deal is that we are now being challenged to find ways to survive through temperatures hotter than any of us have ever experienced before,” University of Wisconsin-Madison climate scientist Andrea Dutton said in an email. “Soaring temperatures place ever increasing strains not just on power grids and infrastructure, but on human bodies that are not equipped to survive some of the extreme we are already experiencing.”
The Barbie movie has seen great success at the box office. We talk with Christine Whelan, a UW-Madison consumer science professor, about the doll’s cultural legacy and latest form.
Interview with Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UW Madison, about why it’s so hot, and what this means for our climate.
Yellow perch, rainbow trout and tilapia are just a few of the fish farmed for food in Wisconsin. We break down the aquaculture industry and take a tour of a fish farm. Interview with Sharon Moen, an outreach specialist for the Sea Grant Institute at the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute.
