Astrophysicists have long predicted that the Milky Way is a source of ghostly particles called neutrinos, but haven’t been able to detect them. Until now.
In a new study led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a massive detector at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory finally caught a glimpse of high-energy neutrinos being emitted from within the Milky Way.
“The position of the House speaker is essential because he will determine the agenda of Parliament, and so therefore the degree of political transformation,” said Tyrell Haberkorn, a Thai studies scholar at the University of Wisconsin.
Till Wagner, an assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Navid Constantinou, a physical oceanography research fellow at the Australian National University and Ian Eisenman, a professor of climate science and physical oceanography at the University of California at San Diego, used weather and ocean current data obtained from MarineTraffic to estimate the drift velocity using a method described in a 2022 study.
David Drake, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and Extension wildlife specialist, teaches a class on wildlife damage management. He said that the beaver population is not at risk of being endangered or threatened. Rather, he said, beavers, which are a rodent species like mice or rats, breed regularly.
“The beaver population is healthy in the state of Wisconsin, as it is throughout the United States. And I think the management is justified and I think it’s responsible and I think it’s ethical and professional,” Drake said.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and a Green Bay company are working together to upscale a new recycling technique that could help keep flexible plastics out of landfills.
Timothy Smeeding, a labor economist and social welfare policy analyst at the University of Wisconsin-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs, said the bill could bring up concerns if young people actually had to serve alcohol at the bar. However, he said that if they’re already serving food at a restaurant, allowing them to carry alcohol shouldn’t make a big difference.
New data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s IceCube neutrino detector has led to the first ever image of our Milky Way galaxy using the subatomic “ghost particles.” An international team of researchers also found the Milky way is a neutrino desert compared to others.
Nicholas Hillman is the director of the Student Success Through Applied Research lab at UW-Madison. He said there were thousands of borrowers behind on payments when they were suspended in March 2020.
“So during this pause, we’ve had kind of an artificial view of the significance of student loan repayment,” Hillman said. “And now we’re going to turn the system back on here in a few months, and we’re going to have the same exact problems all over again.”
The median home price in Wisconsin has more than doubled over the last decade, as supply has failed to keep up with demand after homebuilding slowed during the Great Recession. That’s according to new data from the Wisconsin Realtors Association, or WRA, and a new report from the University of Wisconsin-Extension.
Steven Deller, professor of agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison, authored the report. He said many were hoping to see downward pressure on prices in response to the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, but that hasn’t happened yet. Deller said high mortgage rates have had a modest effect on demand for homes, but a greater influence on those who currently own a home to postpone older couples from downsizing or young families upsizing, keeping some homes off the market.
“The normal churn in the housing market, the new supply of housing or the increase of existing homes going on the market is actually dropping a little bit more than the decline in demand,” he said.
“When we think of both climate and air quality, we often think of it as something that happens to other people,” said Tracey Holloway, a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. “As climate changes, it’s changing everything for everyone.”
Anuj Desai, a University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor who specializes in issues including free speech and statutory interpretation, agreed that those laws probably don’t apply to organizers or people responsible for children participating in the Naked Bike Ride.
“If the whole point (of the Naked Bike Ride) is that bodies are not sexual items, it’s not likely to satisfy a legal standard that requires it to be appealing to the prurient interest of children,” Desai said.
“It is remarkable how hard-nosed tactics have become in Wisconsin politics,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Burden said, under state law, “It seems to me that the commission took no action on Wolfe as administrator.”
“The median loan payment in Wisconsin is $152 a month. So, it kind of gives a little bit of a sense of how big this is,” Nick Hillman, Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis at UW-Madison said. “So, what a quarter, one in four people you see walking down the street are now gonna have to pay probably about 150 a month that they haven’t been paying for the past few years.”
Column by Russ Castronovo, director of the Center for the Humanities and the Tom Paine professor of English at UW-Madison.
“As research extensively documents, racial disparities in wealth accumulation are systemic, of which historic public policies and private practices sustain,” said Melody Harvey, UW-Madison assistant professor of consumer science in the School of Human Ecology.
Black communities are likely to be what Harvey called “banking deserts,” meaning there are few, if any, mainstream financial institutions. They are also more likely to have concentrations of high-cost alternative financial services such as payday and auto title lenders, Harvey explained, asking “Where does one begin when even the most basic of financial services may not be readily available and accessible?”
“Only cosmic rays make neutrinos, so if you see neutrinos, you see cosmic ray sources,” Francis Halzen, a member of the IceCube team and physicist at the University of Wisconsin, tells Popular Science. “The goal of neutrino physics, the prime goal, is to solve the 100-year-old cosmic ray problem.”
Dr. Melanie Boly, a neurologist at the University of Wisconsin, came onstage to explain the other contender: the Integrated Information Theory. What makes consciousness special, Dr. Boly argued, is the way it manages to feel at once rich and unified over time.
These days there is no shortage of gadgetry for optimizing our lives — diet, sleep, exercise. “We like to attach stuff to ourselves to make it a little easier to get things right,” Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said during a workshop break. A.I. gadgetry might do the same for mathematics, he added: “It’s very clear that the question is, What can machines do for us, not what will machines do to us.”
Dr. Tracey Holloway, a professor at UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, says we likely haven’t seen the last of smoky skies from Canada this year.
“Since usually we have more smoke in July and August, where we’re just getting into that part of the year, it would not be surprising to have more smoky days ahead,” Dr. Holloway said.
On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court ended a Harvard and University of North Carolina policy of considering a student’s race when accepting applications. We talk with Anuj Desai, a UW-Madison Law professor, about what the ruling means for Wisconsin’s public and private universities.
Professor of Political Science Emeritus at UW-Madison Howard Schweber referred to Thursday’s decision as a ‘sweeping giant statement principle.’ But he says an exception is equally notable.
“The giant loophole comes quite close to the end of the opinion when Chief Justice Roberts says ‘of course, a college or university may still continue race as it applies to a particular student’s individual life story described in their application essay.’ So what really happened here is a shift from one way to think about it is a shift from race consciousness in admissions to race consciousness in application,” Dr. Schweber said.
In 2013, IceCube detected the first cosmic neutrinos. In the years since, they’ve been able to narrow neutrino sources down to individual galaxies. “We have been detecting extragalactic neutrinos for 10 years now,” says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the IceCube collaboration.
“We now hope to have established the multi-messenger techniques that will allow us to pinpoint the cosmic ray sources in the galaxy which, arguably, represents one of the oldest problems in astronomy,” Francis Halzen, IceCube principal investigator and physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, tells Inverse.
“It took us 10 years to find the galactic plane in neutrinos,” says IceCube head Francis Halzen at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s totally counterintuitive. It’s like if you went outside at night and saw a sky bright in active, distant galaxies but no Milky Way.”
IceCube had already definitively detected neutrinos streaming in from outside the Milky Way, but it couldn’t be said with certainty that any of them came from within the galaxy, says Francis Halzen, lead investigator of the project and a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. This was rather strange, considering the proximity of the Milky Way’s disk (in fact, our solar system is embedded in it) and the high likelihood that neutrinos form there.
Christine Whelan, clinical professor of Consumer Science at the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says an individual’s work ethic is at the core of what it means to be an American. You demonstrate to other people you are pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and are busy, indicating a sense of success. “Affluence and busyness seem to go together as status symbols,” Whelan said in a telephone interview. “It is easy to criticize it, but the culture demands it from us. We need to be careful about individual actions versus cultural norms.”
Kurt Paulsen, professor of urban planning at UW-Madison, wouldn’t say that Dane County has made true progress in the last decade in terms of how people of color experience mortgage and rent cost burdens compared to their white counterparts.
It’s more like “slightly less bad but measured from a very bad starting point,” he said.
“The Senate’s attempt to initiate a confirmation hearing for Wolfe does seem to rest on very shaky legal ground,” UW-Madison Law School associate professor Robert Yablon said.
“When the commission met earlier this week, only three of members voted to re-appoint Wolfe,” Yablon said. “Notably, after this vote, the commission didn’t take the position that it had successfully reappointed her. It’s odd for the Senate to claim there’s been an appointment that the commission itself didn’t purport to make.”
On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court ended a Harvard and University of North Carolina policy of considering a student’s race when accepting applications. We talk with a UW-Madison Law professor about what the ruling means for Wisconsin’s public and private universities.
It’s a seemingly simple decision, but UW-Madison political science professor Howard Schweber says the repercussions are a lot more complicated.
In Wisconsin, the decision will likely have the largest effect on the University of Wisconsin System’s most selective campus, UW-Madison. While the school has long struggled to attract students of color, it recently ushered in its most diverse freshman class in the institution’s history. About one-third of last fall’s freshmen, or 2,695 total, identified as students of color.
American officials are saying a Russian general knew ahead of time about a mercenary group’s attempted rebellion. We talk with Mikhail Troitskiy, a UW-Madison professor of Practice in Russian Studies, about the fallout of the Wagner mercenary group’s attempted mutiny and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power.
“If the (North Carolina legislators’) position in this case had prevailed, it would have meant that the Legislature in Wisconsin could have done congressional redistricting any way it wanted, without the Wisconsin Supreme Court being able to engage in any review of that based on the state constitution,” said Rob Yablon, a professor and co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “Now the door remains open, as it has been, to the state court making sure that whatever the state Legislature does is state constitutionally compliant.”
A new solar farm is being developed on land owned by the University of Wisconsin southwest of Madison with the aim of finding a better balance between green energy and agriculture.
“We had to make some decisions about who we were going to prioritize during this difficult time,” said oncologist Dr. Kari Wisinski with the University of Wisconsin Health, who told CBS News she had never seen a shortage this serious.
Dr. Erin Lashnits, a clinical assistant professor with the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine, said if the air quality is bothering you, chances are your pet is feeling the same way.
“Our pets can’t tell us when they have things like a headache or sore throat or that kind of thing,” Dr. Erin Lashnits, Clinical Assistant Professor with the UW School of Veterinary Medicine, said.
Melinda Soares-Furtado, a NASA Hubble fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies planetary engulfment, called the study an “exciting” example of the “unexpected properties” revealed in star-planet interactions. She suggested that future research about the system involve experts on blue stragglers, a class of luminous stars that are thought to be formed by stellar mergers.
UW Health Allergist Eric Schauberger mentions every person is unique and their body can react differently.
UW-Madison Environmental Studies Professor Dr. Tracey Holloway said wildfires in Canada typically happen later in the summer, so she believes the recent fires and subsequent smoke is caused by climate change.
Mikhail Troitskiy, professor of practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek that Prigozhin “clearly made himself look weak” and that his group’s task was too difficult to accomplish short of mass and open defection of members of the Russian armed forces or security services.
However, in the context of climate change, the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere is less relevant than the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, Grant Petty, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of two textbooks on atmospheric physics, told USA TODAY in an email.
Brazil, again, offers a strong example: Some companies that slaughter cows for beef say they’re monitoring their supply chains to ensure that they aren’t driving deforestation; they’ve agreed to only source cattle from suppliers without recent forest loss. Yet those same cattle may have traveled through several other farms where deforestation happened before reaching the slaughterhouses’ direct suppliers, according to Amintas Brandão Jr., a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin Madison. So in reality, those companies are implicated in environmental harm and misleading consumers.
“There’s a real irony there … that Republicans finally got what they wanted, in a way, after more than 50 years since Roe v. Wade, but it is costing them electorally,” UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said. “The Dobbs (v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization) decision helped keep Democrats competitive in an election cycle where they should have suffered pretty significant losses.”
The EPA’s proposed limit amounts to one drop of water in twenty Olympic-size swimming pools, said Christy Remucal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin.
Nick Buttrick, a psychologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, wanted to know whether firearms provided similar comfort to gun owners, serving as a sort of psychological security blanket.
But plenty of America’s infrastructure was laid down even earlier, meaning it was designed to specifications that are probably even more obsolete, said Daniel B. Wright, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As part of a $9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Wisconsin’s state climatology office will get $1.25 million over four years to reinvent itself. The goal is to raise the profile of the office and make it the go-to spot when people want weather and climate information, said Steve Vavrus, who became the state climatologist this year and heads up the office. Vavrus, also a senior scientist at UW’s Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research, had worked with the office frequently in past years.
Matthew Hora, founding director of the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that he “wholeheartedly” endorses a ban on unpaid internships and associated training programs, but he isn’t optimistic that they are going away anytime soon. Some disciplines, like social work, make them mandatory for graduation; employers in some fields, such as the arts, have limited resources; and others, he said, pointing to government, seem to “ignore the unethical nature of free labor.
To put this practice into context, I spoke to two experts: Langston Wilkins, expert in hip-hop and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Dan Charnas, historian of hip-hop and associate arts professor at New York University. Both confirmed that the use of repetition to add musicality to spoken vocal samples is a common practice in hip-hop, but neither was familiar with Deutsch’s framing of the phenomenon as an auditory illusion.
Column by Jenny Higgins, PhD, MPH, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and director of the Collaborative for Reproductive Equity (CORE), and Amy Williamson, MPP, the associate director of CORE.
Wisconsin hasn’t seen a clear trend of more drought conditions, according to Steve Vavrus, director of the Wisconsin State Climatology Office and a climate scientist with UW-Madison.
“In fact, if you look at the past 20 years or so since 2000, we had more drought episodes in the first half of that period than the last half,” Vavrus said.
Lyric Bartholomay, a professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies integrated pest management and public health entomology who was not part of the study, said “increasingly tailored genetic approaches” will be necessary in the future to protect crops and people from pests, especially as insecticide resistance increases.
Don’t believe everything you read on Facebook. Everybody knows that, but somehow misinformation still spreads like wildfire on social media, especially when it comes to climate change and clean energy like wind and solar. A sea of misinformation is getting in the way of badly-needed clean energy projects.Where are the false claims coming from, and why do people believe them? In this episode, what you can do to battle back – and recognize when disinformation is working on you. Host: Amy BarrilleauxGuest: Dr. Sedona Chinn, assistant professor of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Humankind has long sought crowd-sourced answers to problems. From the 300-year history of the advice column to the plethora of advisers at our employ — spiritual, political, financial, emotional, professional, legal — people are inclined to make better choices when those actions have been guided by another. “We all have biases,” says Lyn Van Swol, a professor of communication science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “and if you can meld your perspective with another good source of information, you’re starting to cancel out some of your biases.”
Because no one was providing that, she created the Loka Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds in 2019. While not specifically focused on climate emotions, the initiative trains evangelical leaders on climate science and also has organized a global event of Indigenous elders and environmental experts.
On this week’s political podcast, Milfred and Hands talk all things housing with UW-Madison professor of urban planning Kurt Paulsen.
Cytopoint claims more than nine out of 10 dogs experience itching relief after their third injection. According to the University of Wisconsin, dog owners will have a good idea of its efficacy after their pup’s first injection.
“There are researchers out there who, rightfully so, want really strong data. We all should be striving for very strong evidence, but it’s very hard to come by in environmental exposure cases like this,” said neuroscientist Julie Stamm, a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the consensus statement. She agreed that cohort studies will yield the best evidence regarding CTE, “but that’s going to take decades,” she said.
A mesonet is a network of weather and environmental monitoring stations that observe mesoscale meteorological events — that is, local events that affect certain areas more than others. That can include extreme weather like heavy rain, hail, flooding and wind gusts. The key is they happen over a few miles to a few dozen miles, said Chris Kucharik, director of the mesonet project and professor and department chair of agronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
