Last week, the White House announced a plan to fight antisemitism over the next year. We take a look at the spike in antisemitic violence in the past few years, and what the government has proposed to counter it. Interview with Chad Alan Goldberg, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
“The size of the Republican field and how closely the candidates will be aligned with Trump are important variables that will not be known for a while,” says University of Wisconsin political scientist Barry C. Burden.
But the general takeaway remains the same, said Michal Engelman, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Th timeline shows how life expectancy may be heavily influenced by systemic issues that are larger than just individual health choices.
Toxic blue-green algae is blooming on lakes months earlier than in previous years. UW-Madison scientists studying Lake Mendota think that’s a lingering result of infestations of tiny invasive species, zebra mussels and spiny water fleas. Interview with Trina McMahon, a professor of bacteriology, and civil and environmental engineering at UW-Madison.
In recent months, hospitals have stopped requiring people to wear masks in their facilities. We speak with a Dr. Kaitlin Sundling, an associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the UW–Madison, who is among many health care workers calling for universal masking in medical facilities because of the risks facing workers and patients.
UW-Madison School of Education professor Rich Halverson explains the ideas behind emphasizing phonics for literacy instruction in Wisconsin schools as reading test scores slide among younger students.
“Essentially, you’re putting on additional administrative burdens for people to receive these benefits,” said Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin.
To help people find culturally-inclusive foods and food services, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension Brown County launched a new map to help people find food and food services in northeast Wisconsin. It includes things such as food pantries, electronic benefit transfer locations, meal programs and community gardens.
“We collect food pantry statistics and in the last couple of months we have seen an increase in the number of households using food pantries,” said Clarice Martell, one of the extension staff members who worked on the map project. “We hope that this map can make it easier for food insecure households to locate food resources near to them.”
Quoted: “If you’re drinking one to two drinks (per day) because it’s good for you, it doesn’t necessarily increase the length of your life,” said Dr. Patrick Remington, an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison medical school. “There’s no evidence in this large, well-designed study of a life-extending benefit.”
Mark Seidenberg, a University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor, has done extensive research on how eyes and brains work to turn words on a page into understandable content. Nationwide, he is recognized as a leader in research involved in the science of reading.
But, in an interview, he said building children’s skills to figure out words is not the only thing needed. Environmental factors such as homelessness and exposure to lead also affect success in school.
“This has been an issue for over a decade,” said associate clinical professor for the University of Wisconsin-Madison law school John Gross. “To some degree, the legislature has been indifferent to this problem.”
Democrats will talk about the election success they’ve had over the last five years, including the presidential election, Gov. Tony Evers’ reelection and the election of Janet Protasiewicz to the state Supreme Court, said University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center director Barry Burden.
“If you’re drinking one to two drinks (per day) because it’s good for you, it doesn’t necessarily increase the length of your life,” said Dr. Patrick Remington, an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison medical school. “There’s no evidence in this large, well-designed study of a life-extending benefit.”
“We thought originally that the spring-like arch helped to lift the body into the next step,” study co-author and University of Wisconsin-Madison biomechanical engineer Lauren Welte said in a statement. “It turns out that instead, the spring-like arch recoils to help the ankle lift the body.”
New research by the University of Wisconsin’s Andrew Stevens at the Department of Agriculture and Applied Economics shows some forms of diversification were better than others in helping agribusinesses survive the market shocks caused by COVID 19.
Mikhail Troitskiy, professor of practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek via email that Reade’s appearance at the barely-watched press conference in Moscow “is likely a stunt pulled by entrepreneurial Russian PR managers.” It may also have been a matter of personal interest for Butina, he added.
Quoted: “A lot of things obviously have changed in 15 years, including a lot of cost increases particularly for things like labor and for utilities,” said Chuck Nicholson, an ag economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “So it has become harder and harder to use that old value to accurately represent what it takes to transform a pound of farm milk into a certain amount of cheese.”
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned lawmakers earlier this month that the federal government could default on its debt by June 1st. We examine the political options available for Republicans and Democrats, as well as the potential economic consequences of failing to increase the debt limit. Interview with Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW-Madison medical entomologist Susan Paskewitz explains how black-legged ticks, also known as deer ticks and transmit Lyme disease to humans, are increasingly found in more areas around the state.
About four years ago, Maichou Lor was living in New York completing a postdoctoral fellowship, when family members back home in Wisconsin kept telling her that her dad’s hearing was getting worse.
“He wasn’t responding to conversations even though he had a hearing aid,” said Lor, now an assistant professor of nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I brought him in to see his doctor through the ENT clinic here at UW-Health.”
Noted: Thanks to more than $3 million in grant funding, the University of Wisconsin-Madison now plans to establish 90 sites to monitor weather and soil conditions throughout the state by fall of 2026. The state currently has 14 weather stations.
Chris Kucharik, a UW-Madison agronomy professor, is overseeing the university’s effort to build the new network. He recently joined Wisconsin Public Radio’s “The Morning Show” to discuss how more weather and soil reports could be used and how researchers will decide where to build the new stations.
It’s eerily quiet in the vacant Biotron Laboratory building on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. It’s been closed for two years, but various pieces of office equipment are still scattered throughout offices and what were once state-of-the-art, climate-controlled research labs sealed with thick metal doors. That silence is about to be shattered by the UW Police Department’s annual Active Killer Training.
“All humans share relatively recent common ancestry, but the story in the deeper past is more complicated than our species evolving in just a single location or in isolation,” says lead author Aaron Ragsdale, a population geneticist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, to Reuters’ Will Dunham.
Noted: Do pollinators actually benefit from an unmowed lawn?
Sometimes. It depends on the lawn, say experts from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Lawns with turfgrass don’t provide as many resources for pollinators compared with a yard containing an abundance of low growing flowering plants. Adding more flowering plants, shrubs and trees to your yard can increase benefits to pollinators.
Climate change is “hard science,” said Young Mie Kim, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who serves as vice chair of a committee focused on research methodology. “So, relatively speaking, it’s easier to develop some common concepts and tool kits,” Ms. Kim said. “It’s hard to do that in social science or humanities.”
Barry Burden, a professor of political science and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said while both have “general skepticism about whether public universities are serving the state well,” Walker framed his attacks on higher education around the need to improve economic efficiency at state institutions. Walker was also less focused on “meddling in the day-to-day affairs of the university in the way that DeSantis is,” in terms of imposing sweeping change on public colleges.
Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told USA TODAY the claim is “completely fabricated.”
The lifespan of a chicken varies. The average lifespan of a hen is between six and eight years, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During three to four of those years, the hens will produce eggs.
Mikhail Troitskiy, professor of practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agrees with Sokov, and told Newsweek in an email that it’s “strange” Russia did not previously remove such munitions considering the facility’s proximity to the borde
Recent research from UW-Madison surveyed dozens of fathers and more than 30 community partners to learn what fathers in Wisconsin need. Interview with Margaret Kerr, an assistant professor of human development and Family Studies at UW-Madison.
“The current environment of declining deposits and runs on banks raises questions about whether most deposit amounts are sustainable, especially uninsured deposits, reducing deposit-franchise value,” said Tom Linsmeier, an accounting professor at the University of Wisconsin and a former Financial Accounting Standards Board member.
As opposed to turf grass and its related weeds, “our native plants, which are adapted to drought, which are adapted to extreme weather events, they have the ability, with deep roots, to deal with deluges of water,” said Liz Anna Kozik, a University of Wisconsin–Madison Ph.D. student in environment and resources.
“It’s a spectacularly cool paper,” Anne Pringle, a mycologist who studies death caps at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and did not contribute to the findings, tells the New York Times’ Alla Katsnelson. “They do this amazing amount of work and end with this hypothesis that they’ve found an antidote.”
Though midges are “astonishingly abundant,” and form “humming clouds” that annoy many across the upper Midwest — and other parts of the northern hemisphere — they are harmless, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Research by Allison Daminger, an assistant professor of sociology at the UW-Madison, has found through extensive interviews with couples that men and women tend to share responsibility for research and decision-making, while women do more noticing (this will need doing soon) and monitoring (is anyone actually doing this?). And women tend to have more household responsibilities overall. As a result, women do more cognitive labor.
Quoted: “As long as (the ballot language) doesn’t say the opposite of what the amendment accomplishes, then it’s sufficient under this standard,” said Dustin Brown, an attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “This decision gives the Legislature very broad authority to present constitutional amendments to the people, and it very much limits the degree of oversight that courts can exercise over that process.”
Following the end of the pandemic-era Title 42 border policy, the number of migrants trying to enter the United States illegally have dropped by roughly half. We examine the new immigration policies and enforcement in Mexico and the United States and how that is affecting migration patterns. Interview with Erin Barbato, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
A report from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension found the average price of agricultural land sold in the state last year was $5,551 per acre. That’s 11 percent higher than in 2021 and nearly 24 percent higher than in 2020.
Heather Schlesser, the Extension agriculture educator who prepared the report, said the sustained increases trace back to the cash farmers received from federal COVID-19 assistance programs. She said at the same time, many farmers decided it was the right time to sell land.
“It’s all about give and take, supply and demand,” she said. “There’s not a lot of ag land out there. So if there’s more money out there and there’s less land, the farmers that are selling are going to want more for it. So I think that started driving it.”
Spongy moths are returning in full force this year. An entomologist tells us why. Plus, we learn how much No Mow May is actually helping our pollinators. Interview with Patrick (PJ) Liesch, manager of the UW-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab.
“The idea is that just like physical exercise builds muscle, we can build our mental muscles to become more aware and calm in the faces of challenges and stress,” explains Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry and founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It’s a spectacularly cool paper,” said Anne Pringle, a mycologist and geneticist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has studied death caps for 20 years. “They do this amazing amount of work and end with this hypothesis that they’ve found an antidote.”
The new findings come as no surprise to Tessa Conroy, an assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who studies economic development and has written about this gender gap.
“Wisconsin tends to rank relatively low on several measures of business ownership and entrepreneurship,” including overall business ownership and business ownership among people of color, Conroy said in an email.
The resulting rent increases are economics 101, said Kurt Paulsen, a professor of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When demand exceeds supply, prices go up.
“It’s a story of too many people chasing too few units,” he said. “And like any region, we face a real choice: Either we build lots of housing where people want to live, or we don’t build a lot of housing.”
The detailed nighttime cloud trends are significant and striking, said Aaron Alexander, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison studying water resource engineering in urban landscapes who was not involved in the research. Measurements of turbulence are difficult to collect at night, when the winds are calm and temperatures are cool, using physical monitoring devices, Alexander said.
“I think the evidence is fairly clear that psychotherapy is remarkably effective,” says Bruce Wampold, a prominent researcher in the field who is an emeritus professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The science on how hurricanes will change in the future is fairly complex and not entirely settled, but a few things are generally accepted: 1) there might not be more hurricanes overall, but those that do form will tend to be more intense both in terms of the strength of their winds and the amount of rainfall that they produce; 2) because of this intensification and also due to some potential changes in the directions that storms tend to move, it is probable that there will be more Category 4 and 5 storms hitting the U.S.,” Daniel B. Wright, a civil and environmental engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Hydroclimate Extremes Research Group, told Newsweek in November.
Research by Allison Daminger, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has found through extensive interviews with couples that men and women tend to share responsibility for research and decision-making, while women do more noticing (this will need doing soon) and monitoring (is anyone actually doing this?). And women tend to have more household responsibilities overall. As a result, women do more cognitive labor.
“This would make Madison the most monitored community in Wisconsin with regard to particulate matter,” said Tim Bertram, a professor of chemistry at UW-Madison and a member of the project’s leadership team.
Tyrell Haberkorn, a University of Wisconsin Thai studies scholar, said there is a chance street protests could be trigged again if Move Forward meets the same fate as its predecessor.
“During the pandemic almost everything Covid related, whether it was vaccines or testing or treatment was all covered by the government. Basically, it was all subsidized that starts to go away. Now, what’s covered depends on who your insurer is, or if you have insurance,” said Dr. Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer at UW Health.
UW Health psychologist Dr. Shilagh Mirgain said Mother’s Day can be an emotional trigger for many.
“Almost in anyone’s life, there are going to be years where Mother’s Day is really challenging,” Mirgain said.
Shilagh Mirgain, a health psychologist for UW Health, says reframing how you view the day may help you still enjoy it and work through those hard feelings.
“Reframing the focus of this holiday can be an effective way to celebrate all the positive attributes of motherhood you may not have experienced yourself as a child or missed out on as an adult,” she said.
We talk with Michael Childers, a professor in the UW-Madison School for Workers and Department of Labor Education, and an entertainment reporter about the latest in the second week of a massive Hollywood writers strike.
Bird expert and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Stanley Temple said most of the birds that will make Wisconsin home on Friday were in Missouri or Arkansas on Thursday afternoon.
“There are so many factors that go into predicting where they will land, like wind and route, but it’s very likely they will be in Wisconsin by Friday morning,” Temple said.
The potential Milwaukee and Milwaukee County sales taxes that could be implemented under the Assembly bill would not be without consequences, said Andrew Reschovsky, professor emeritus of public affairs and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“You don’t pay attention if you have plenty of money,” he said of the increased prices that come with a sales tax. “But if you’re having trouble getting through the month, those extra pennies can make a big difference.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health has money to give away. Now it needs applicants.
The school is inviting nonprofit health organizations to apply for grants “to provide better care and address root causes of maternal and infant health disparities.” Awards will be made for a maximum of $1.15 million for up to two years. Applicants must propose working with community partners.
“So many of the issues that are happening right now, this generation of teens really thinks about how it’s going to impact them,” said Dr. Megan Moreno, a pediatrician at UW Health, and the co-director of the American Academy of Pediatrics Center of Excellence for Social Media and Mental Health.
John Lucey, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research, wants to turn whey into the chemicals used to make plastics, adhesives and other consumer products that are currently being derived from petroleum. Just like our reliance on oil and gas, Lucey said the chemical building blocks made in oil refineries are holding us back from a greener future.
“We’ve got to replace those too unless we want to keep using fossil fuels,” he said. “These basic chemistry kinds of things, the stuff you would have learned in organic chemistry like butanol — we want to make those kinds of compounds because they can feed into the existing industry.”
Family child care providers make an average of $7.46 an hour, while center-based teachers make an average of $12.99. Both make less than the average Wisconsinite with a high school diploma, according to research by Alejandra Ros Pilarz, an assistant professor at the Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
She found poor wages and lack of career advancement opportunities are top reasons why 18% of family child care providers and 28% of ECE teachers plan to leave the field within a few years.
