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“Our brains are prediction generators, and when there are delays or the facial expressions are frozen or out of sync, as happens on Zoom and Skype, we perceive it as a prediction error that needs to be fixed,” said Paula Niedenthal, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who specializes in affective response. “Whether subconscious or conscious, we’re having to do more work because aspects of our predictions are not being confirmed and that can get exhausting.”

Charting the animal origins of human diseases like COVID-19 can be difficult and often leads to unexpected discoveries, explained Dr. Tony Goldberg, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. During a January 29, 2020 presentation at the Wednesday Nite @ the Lab lecture series on the UW-Madison campus, Goldberg recounted the growing body of research into pathogen transmission between animals and humans over the past three decades.

Christine Whelan, Ph.D., professor in the School of Human Ecology at University of Wisconsin – Madison, told TODAY she believes that the falling importance of religion in today’s society also plays a role, evidenced in part by more unmarried couples living together.

“The idea of first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby — it could be any order you choose at this point,” she said. “For the last couple decades, we’ve seen ’choose your own adventure’ when it comes to marriage patterns.”

Quoted: “This is kind of the smoking gun,” says geochemist Annie Bauer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not part of the new study. “This is the most important evidence we can get [of early plate motion].”

Quoted: “What groups will do is say to supporters, ’Our ability to win this election is threatened by some action or inaction that the government is taking.’ That’s a way to generate energy among core supporters, even if the law doesn’t successfully change,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Katherine J. Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, coined the term “rural consciousness” in her 2016 book “The Politics of Resentment,” which is built on conversations she had with rural Wisconsinites over years about how they saw their communities as both overlooked and dictated to by Madison and Milwaukee.

Quoted: Ankur Desai, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of atmospheric sciences, said while the emission declines may be dramatic, they won’t have an immediate impact on the climate or the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Barry Burden, a professor of political science and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek that while Trump flipped Michigan from blue to red during the 2016 election, the 2018 mid-term elections signaled a possible shift as Democrats swept the state’s Senate and gubernatorial races.

Just over half of workers in Arizona, which had a relatively high minimum benefit of $172 before the crisis, are estimated to make more on unemployment than if they were still working, according to Noah Williams, the director of Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said officials have limited time to make improvements for Wisconsin’s upcoming elections, including a special Congressional race next month and the statewide primary in August.

Quoted: While other YouTube child performers tend to adopt the site’s popular blogging style, speaking directly to viewers as they unbox toys or shop in a mall, “Like Nastya” videos usually involve short, episodic plots. The storylines are simple enough for a three-year-old to follow. Heavy doses of sound effects, jump cuts and slapstick humour are like sugar for young audiences, said Heather Kirkorian, a professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies cognitive development and media. “It’s like ‘The Three Stooges’,” she said. “That plays really well with preschoolers.”

Quoted: “I think one of the most important things for people to be cautious about is there’s now going to be a proliferation of scams,” said Michael Collins, director of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Every president wants to defend their legacy,” says Allison Prasch, assistant professor of rhetoric, politics and culture at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “But the way that Trump is portraying himself rhetorically demonstrates a self-obsession in ways that I think are unprecedented

Quoted: “Every day it’s shut down it becomes more costly to reopen and recover, there’s no doubt about that,” said Ian Coxhead, an applied economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Depending on how long before we can begin to reopen the economy, there will be more people and more businesses added to the rolls of those who are not going to come back to the labor force of the business world.”

Qutoed: Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is among the academics who have produced studies that found no partisan advantage to mail voting, said the Times analysis of the Wisconsin data did not align with any previous studies from states such as Colorado and Utah, which transitioned to fully vote-by-mail systems in recent years.

Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said officials have limited time to make improvements for Wisconsin’s upcoming elections, including a special Congressional race next month and the statewide primary in August.

Quoted: David O’Connor, who studies viral disease at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said: “If a substantial amount of transmission occurs before people feel sick, how do you stop that? By the time people feel sick and seek care, all the testing and isolation in the world would be too little, too late.”

Quoted: In recent years, scientists have identified about two dozen genetic changes that might have helped make our brains not only bigger but incomparably capable. “It’s not just one quantum leap,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison paleoanthropologist John Hawks. “A lot of adaptations are at play, from metabolic regulation to neuron formation to timing of development.”

Quoted: David O’Connor, who studies viral disease at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said, “If a substantial amount of transmission occurs before people feel sick, how do you stop that? By the time people feel sick and seek care, all the testing and isolation in the world would be too little, too late.”

But Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said these are not ordinary circumstances.

Quoted: Existing research on best practices in online learning will only get educators so far. “When you are being asked to implement online learning in the way our research suggests you should, but you are being asked to do that in a 12-day period, that’s nearly impossible,” said Annalee Good, co-director of the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: “Poverty represents a level of deprivation that many middle- or upper-income Americans can’t even wrap their head around,” said Sarah Halpern-Meekin, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin who has conducted extensive interviews with poor parents. “The first thing that come to mind is a mother I met who was trying to manage her son’s asthma while living in an apartment that had rodents, insects and mold no matter how much she cleaned. Rising poverty rates means more families living like that.”

Quoted: Most pheromones are single chemicals, says Charles Snowdon, an emeritus psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved with the work. “But what this paper is saying is that it’s a mixture of chemicals that seem to be more important,” he says.

Quoted: Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, said that likely gave some Democrats more of an incentive to vote even if the race was all but decided, according to previous Wisconsin Public Radio reporting.

Quoted: “We can practice relaxing as we are walking, cleaning our house, doing the laundry,” says neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We can also practice a little self-compassion at these times, recognizing that no one is perfect and not being too hard on ourselves for failing to accomplish something in the time we had originally planned, for example.”

Quoted: It’s more likely that Democratic turnout benefited from the party’s presidential primary being on the ballot. And at a time when Americans are spending more time consuming news at home, the controversy over whether to hold the election may have actually wound up encouraging voters, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Barry Burden of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Amber Wichowsky of Marquette, co-authored “Economic discontent as a mobilizer: unemployment and voter turnout.” Burden described by email the complexity of political mobilization during an economic crisis:“Historically, unemployed individuals have voted at much lower rates than working people,” Burden said, but when unemployment “becomes widespread enough to be perceived as a communal concern rather than an individual predicament” it raises turnout.

Quoted: Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, said that likely gave some Democrats more of an incentive to vote even if the race was all but decided.

Quoted: Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, said that likely gave some Democrats more of an incentive to vote even if the race was all but decided.

Quoted: Action games are associated with improvements on a pretty broad range of perceptual and cognitive skills,” says C. Shawn Green, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in cognitive neuroscience.

Quoted: And for this generation of teens, there is little precedent for this kind of threat. Most were born after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and haven’t experienced the type of disruption that would make them fearful of going about their regular lives, said Bradford Brown, a professor of human development at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who specializes in adolescents.

Quoted: In the 2016 presidential election, voters there cast some 145,000 absentee votes by mail; in Tuesday’s election, there were over a million. The state’s election officials regularly process high volumes of absentee ballots, but the last-minute cascade left them swamped, said Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Quoted: Sigan Hartley is a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of human development and family studies and the 100 Women Chair for the School of Human Ecology. She’s also a Waisman Center investigator, whose research focuses on positive well-being in individuals with developmental disabilities and their family members.

Quoted: Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called tampering a minor concern for clerks who already had processes for securing absentee ballots before election day.

Quote: As governments around the world try to predict the toll and duration of the coronavirus, they’re turning increasingly to a handful of forecasting models for answers. But many of the leading models differ drastically in their approach and methods. What do we need to know about these forecasts? And what are their limitations?Guest: Jordan Ellenberg, mathematics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madiso

Quoted: Dr. Norman Fost, a professor emeritus of pediatrics and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, leads the Ventilator Allocation Advisory Workgroup. He said there was general agreement on having uniform guidelines within the state.

Quoted: “The virus, people say sometimes, is a piece of bad news wrapped in protein. It is a vector for getting genetic information into a cell and that genetic information just contains a blueprint to make more viruses. They were able to tell that although this virus was new, it was closely related to the original SARS virus,” explained Professor Thomas Friedrich from University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Except for the part where he had actually endorsed said judge in January. “And there were no polls,” added Barry Burden, the director of the University of Wisconsin Elections Research Center.

If you’ve found yourself unsure whether a soundbite or headline you saw or shared was true, know that you’re not alone, says Dietram Scheufele, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies science and political communication.

“As the weeks wore on, the legislature dug into that position, allowing no accommodations, no flexibility for voters, and the governor slowly moved to the opposite side,” University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden told Vox.

Quoted: “There will be lingering concerns no matter how the election is run,” says Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s just not possible to run an ideal election in a public health pandemic. Who’s complaining about it will vary depending on what is done.”

Quoted: Tim Osswald, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on the technology, told The Hill that 3D printing speeds up manufacturing much more than traditional production methods.

On Tuesday, April 7, Wisconsin is scheduled to vote. With the coronavirus still raging, state lawmakers of both parties have for weeks been urging voters to cast ballots early or absentee to help contain the pandemic.

-Michael Wagner, Katerine Cramer, Dhavan Shah, Lewis Friedland

“Build in cues to remind yourself to be intentional about practicing mindfulness,” said Richard Davidson, director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Examples include glancing at a photo of loved ones on your desk or sticking an inspiring phrase (“I’ve got this!”) on your computer monitor.