Several companies say they’re close to achieving nuclear fusion that could be used as clean energy. Cary Forest, a physics professor at UW-Madison, explains why fusion is so difficult to achieve and whether commercial fusion is realistic.
How does late adolescence impact you in your 80s? A decades-long study aims to answer that question after following thousands of students who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. We hear from Michal Engleman, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and current director of the study, on takeaways from one of the longest longitudinal studies in the country.
The map is meant for horticulture, not agriculture, said Chris Kucharik, a plant and agrosystem sciences professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, because farmers in the Midwest have largely been planting the same crops for decades.
Since the last map was released in 2012, all of Wisconsin’s hardiness zones have shifted about half a zone warmer, said Laura Jull, associate professor in the plant and agrosystem sciences department at UW-Madison.
Kakol and Vang are part of the Tiny Earth program at NWTC, which is based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and does research to find solutions in the antibiotic crisis and improve soil health. NWTC is one of over 30 colleges and universities worldwide involved in Tiny Earth.
When the University of Wisconsin-Madison posted five part-time cheese tasting positions for its Center for Dairy Research, more than two hundred people applied for the jobs. Brandon Prochaska, the center’s sensory coordinator, tells us what it takes to taste cheese for scientific research.
Written by Jason Fletcher, a professor of public affairs at UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs with appointments in Applied Economics and Population Health Sciences.
Mike Wagner, Helen Firstbrook Franklin Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, received a letter from Jordan, the House Judiciary chair, in August requesting documents—followed by a subpoena in September demanding them. The August letter, which Wagner provided to Inside Higher Ed, noted that Course Correct, a project the University of Wisconsin at Madison is involved in, was funded by the National Science Foundation. The letter said the grant program was very similar “to efforts by other federal agencies to use grants to outsource censorship to third parties.”
Happy Scratch, a nutritional supplement for cats and dogs with seasonal or food allergies, began in the laboratory of the late UW-Madison animal science professor Mark Cook, who discovered the allergy-fighting technology with molecular toxicologist Jordan Sand about 10 years ago. The two patented their discovery in conjunction with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
In Dane County, fathers were more likely to pay child support, and those payments increased, after the county stopped new birth cost recovery cases in 2020, according to a study this year by UW-Madison researchers. The study, by the university’s Institute for Research on Poverty, compared unmarried Medicaid deliveries in the county in 2020-2021 with those outside of the county in 2016-2021 and in the county before 2020.
University of Wisconsin-Madison $1.524 billion
Animal rights group PETA obtained photos and videos of what it alleges were invasive experiments and animal cruelty inflicted on primates housed at the research facility
But a recent study she wrote with Melody Harvey, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found no impact on eventual retirement savings. Perhaps, she said, for teenagers heading to college or just entering the work force, the idea of retiring is too distant.
COVID-19 caused an alarming surge in premature births, says Jenna Nobles, a UW sociology professor. “The effect of maternal COVID infection from the onset of the pandemic into 2023 is large, increasing the risk of preterm births over that time by 1.2 percentage points,” Nobles said. “To move the needle on preterm birth that much is akin to a disastrous environmental exposure, like weeks of breathing intense wildfire smoke.”
Other potential non-drug treatments that may help ease PPD, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, include: counseling or therapy, including art therapysocial support from groups like La Leche League, or community groups based at religious centers, libraries, and/or public health centers.
Professor Sumudu Atapattu is the director of the Global Legal Studies Center at UW-Madison Law School. She’ll be attending the conference and spoke to WORT News Producer Faye Parks earlier this afternoon. Professor Atapattu says that human rights and climate change are inextricably tied – and the nations of the world need to prepare.
Given the ‘success’ of this project, the Biden administration expanded the government-higher education alliance in June 2021 through the National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. Since then, a plethora of new partnerships between the government and higher education have emerged to shape our perceptions and opinions. For example, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $5 million taxpayer dollars to the University of Wisconsin to develop a system that can detect and “strategically correct” what the government perceives as misinformation. This is in addition to $7.5 million awarded to ten other universities to work on similar censorship-type programs, and $40 million awarded to 15 higher education institutions under the “Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant.”
Several representatives from the University of Wisconsin-Madison are observing the negotiations in Dubai. Sumudu Atapattu, director of the Global Legal Studies Center at the University of Wisconsin Law School; Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at UW-Madison; and Nova Tebbe, a PhD student focusing on the health benefits of climate mitigation policy, will share what they learn with a virtual audience on Dec. 4.
Ignatowski, the Institute for Reforming Government director, noted that Wisconsin is ranked No. 32 in the United States for the number of mental health professionals.
That ranking is based on 2021 data from the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, a program of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Data from 2023 show that there are 420 people for every one mental health provider registered in Wisconsin. The national ratio is 340 people per one provider.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say new technologies for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere must be developed faster to meet goals to reduce global warming.
Enter the steadying voice of Charles Isbell Jr., a nationally recognized expert in computing and AI who started work this summer at the UW-Madison as its latest provost.
If the UW-Madison were a private company, the role of provost might best be described as “chief academic officer.” It is historically the No. 2 position on campus behind the chancellor. Isbell is settling into that role across UW-Madison’s many colleges and schools, but he also brings a wealth of experience in what is one of the defining technological moments in a generation.
In their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Torche and Jenna Nobles from the University of Wisconsin-Madison analyzed birth records from siblings born in California between 2014 and 2023. By comparing sibling births, the researchers found that from July to November 2020 mothers were nearly twice as likely to give birth three weeks before their due date.
To give Wisconsin veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder more options, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is working to make it easier for researchers to treat those with acute PTSD with the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms.
The bill would create a state trust fund called the “medicinal psilocybin treatment program” that would be administered by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The truth is that Ms. Tai is taking the pen away from Facebook, Google and Amazon, who helped shape the previous policy, according to a research paper published earlier this year by Wendy Li, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who used to answer the phone and interact with lobbyists at the U.S. trade representative’s office.
“We’re trying to understand how this rich data that we collected when they were younger and in middle age is influencing their memory and cognitive function now,” said Michal Engelman, a UW-Madison sociology professor who directs the study.
“There’s biological and physiological processes, but there’s also the social and economic environment,” Engelman said. “All of these things work together to shape people’s well-being through their life course.”
UW-Madison researchers are also studying psilocybin to treat people with opioid and methamphetamine use disorders, using drugs made by Usona, in a tranquil treatment room at UW’s School of Pharmacy.
Studies into the benefits of protein-restricted diets have shown that lower protein consumption is associated with a decreased risk of age-related diseases and mortality and improved metabolic health. Now, exploring alternatives to calorie-restricting diets, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that reducing the intake of a single amino acid in mice extended their lifespan, making them leaner, less frail, and less susceptible to cancer.
“We like to say a calorie is not just a calorie,” said Dudley Lamming, corresponding author of the study. “Different components of your diet have value and impact beyond their function as a calorie, and we’ve been digging in on one component that many people may be eating too much of.”
A recent analysis from a UW-Madison professor finds that bottled water consumption is most prevalent among low-income women, signaling a distrust in household tap water. We speak with Manny Teodoro, an associate Professor in the LaFollette School of Public Affairs/Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison.
When the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Dairy Research publicized it was looking for a new crew of cheese tasters, the response was exuberant, as you might expect in a state known as the country’s cheese capital.
250 people applied for five part-time jobs available. The Center rigorously trains them to analyze cheese made and provided by graduate student researchers, pizza makers and the state’s esteemed cheese industry.
The state Geological and Natural History Survey researches and provides environmental data that helps inform institutional decisions that can affect our environment. We’ll talk with Sue Swanson, Wisconsin’s new state geologist who is also director of the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey through University of Wisconsin-Madison, about who they work with and how their data is used.
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, hens will produce eggs.
When neuroscientists talk about gratitude, they often cluster it with other social and moral emotions like appreciation and compassion. That’s no coincidence. These emotions activate similar networks in our brains, said Cortland Dahl, a scientist at the Center for Healthy Minds, part of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
“Gratitude, I would say, is a very specific version of (appreciation), where we’re oriented to something we really appreciate that has benefited us personally — somebody else’s presence in our lives, how they’ve supported us, being the most common expression of that,” Dahl said.
When the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Dairy Research publicized it was looking for a new crew of cheese tasters, the response was exuberant, as you might expect in a state known as the country’s cheese capital.
The bill would create a pilot project in collaboration with researchers at UW-Madison to explore the medicinal benefits of psilocybin to treat PTSD among a select group of veterans. Program participants would need to be military veterans ages 21 and older, who are not members of law enforcement and who have been diagnosed with treatment-resistant PTSD.
Dane County is home to more than 170 dairy farms, according to state records. It’s unknown how many provide housing to workers, but a recent statewide study on immigrant dairy workers by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School for Workers found that close to three-quarters of surveyed workers lived in employer-provided housing, typically on the farm
Social scientists, including Thomas Heberlein of the University of Wisconsin (now professor emeritus of community and environmental sociology), have been examining and documenting a decline in hunting in the U.S. for decades.
The rate of decline in gun deer hunting was predicted 16 years ago by a team of University of Wisconsin and Department of Natural Resources researchers.
The researchers, Richelle Winkler and Jennifer Huck of UW’s Applied Population Lab in Madison and Keith Warnke of the DNR, released a draft of their study in 2007 titled “Deer Hunter Demography: Age, Period, and Cohort Analysis of Trends in Hunter Participation in Wisconsin.“
Post-doctoral fellowship is revolutionizing research at UW, according to experts.
Volker Radeloff, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the new study, pointed to both the Marshall fire and the recent Lahaina fire in Hawaii as two extreme examples of the risks wildfire can pose outside of forests. Both started with burning grasses and grew into devastating urban infernos.
Forest fires are well known for their ferocity. They accounted for just 33 percent of houses destroyed by wildfires in the early 2000s, however, the study authors found after analyzing the locations of homes within wildfire perimeters since the 1990s. In contrast, 64 percent of such houses were destroyed by grassland or shrubland fires. This is because even though forest fires are particularly destructive to buildings, much more of the area burned in the U.S. is made up of grasslands and shrublands, says the study’s first author Volker Radeloff, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “We had a hunch,” he says, “but the actual numbers surprised us.”
Every county in Wisconsin has at least one service member missing in action since Pearl Harbor. A team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is working to identify them and others at sites around the world.
Graduate and undergraduate students, professors and others at the university make up the team working on the Missing in Action Recovering and Identification Project, or UW MIA RIP. They all volunteer their time to travel to sites around the globe to find and repatriate the remains of soldiers lost in war.
Veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder could have access to medicinal psilocybin treatment under a bipartisan bill.
The proposal would create a pilot program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison run in collaboration with the university’s Transdisciplinary Center for Research in Psychoactive Substances and its School of Pharmacy. Veterans age 21 and older suffering from treatment-resistant PTSD would be eligible to participate as long as they are not currently serving as law enforcement officers.
UW-Madison would launch a study of the effects of psychoactive mushrooms on Wisconsin veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder under a bipartisan bill that circulated Thursday.
New findings led by a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher have revealed an important potential accelerator of aging: deprivation in early childhood.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison kicked efforts to persuade the Legislature to come up with nearly $200 million for a new engineering building into higher gear Monday.
Earlier this summer, the Healthy School Meals for All coalition and UW-Madison Professor Jennifer Gaddis released the first statewide survey of the Wisconsin school nutrition workforce.
That report found that of the approximately 5,089 K-12 school nutrition workers across the state, 94% were women, and 88% were white.
It also found that four out of five school food workers who were not managers worked part-time, and that a quarter of schools across the state offered poverty-level starting wages for school nutrition workers.
There are about 1,500 Wisconsin service members who are missing in action after WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Cold War. We talk with a member of a team of scientists, historians and doctors who are trying to locate and recover their remains.
There is an exception, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison horticulture department. If your trees have serious foliar fungal diseases, you should be raking your leaves. “While most leaf spots on leaves are cosmetic and harmless to the overall health of the tree, fallen diseased leaves do serve as a source for spores that can infect next year’s emerging leaves,” according to a post from the school. “Significantly diseased leaves should be raked and removed from the area and disposed of properly, such as by burying, burning where allowed, or hot composting.”
The newest trial is titled Leuprolide plus Cholinesterase Inhibition to reduce Neurological Decline in Alzheimer’s, or LUCINDA for short. After seeing positive results with an earlier study, researchers are working to build a larger body of evidence to show if the treatment is working.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health are conducting a trial to determine whether the drug leuprolide, which is approved for prostate cancer in men, can be used to treat symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in women.
Ph.D. student from UW-Madison said she lost important research, and she could use your help in finding it. Chelsea Volpano said she lost her research boat in the waters of Lake Michigan Monday, Oct. 30.
In the high desert of Wyoming, two UW-Madison scientists, Ethan Parrish and Dave Lovelace, Ph.D, discuss their collaboration to decolonize their scientific disciplines in order to promote a more inclusive future for the next generation.
When you type in a password, you often see a series of asterisks on your screen. However, that series of symbols means so much more to your software and for your digital security.
Atmospheric scientist Leigh Orf of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has taken advantage of advances in supercomputing to build ten-meter-resolution models that can directly simulate tornadoes. At this scale, turbulence comes alive, Orf says. His models reveal how small areas of rotation could combine to kick off a tornado. “It fully resolves non-tornadic vortices that merge together in ways that are very compelling and I’ve never seen before,” he says.
Take the case of Rufus Sweeney, a 4th-year medical student at UW-Madison and Oklahoma Choctaw. When he discovered his pre-diabetes condition, he turned to glucose monitoring apps in the market that recommended lifestyle changes, from diet adjustments to sleep tweaks. His breakthrough came when he prioritized physical activity over all other app notifications.
Sea ice is one way that scientists can learn about the effects of climate change. The Weather Guys are back to share about this year’s sea ice season. They’ll also fill us in on waterspouts and 75 years of the UW-Madison Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.
Most models working at coarser resolutions can’t actually see simulated tornadoes, inferring them instead based on areas of air with a lot of spins. Atmospheric scientist Leigh Orf of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has taken advantage of advances in supercomputing to build 10-meter-resolution models that can directly simulate tornadoes. At this scale, turbulence comes alive, Orf says. His models reveal how small areas of rotation could combine to kick off a tornado. “It fully resolves non-tornadic vortices that merge together in ways that are very compelling, and I’ve never seen before,” he says.
Last week, as scientists gathered inside a cozy research station in north central Wisconsin, not far from Minocqua, Michael Menon was one of the researchers in the room.
He’s the UW-Madison PhD student chosen to conduct the wolf study that’s being funded and co-led by the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission.
Steven Deller, the report’s author and an agricultural and applied economics professor at UW-Madison, said he attributes the state’s inability to return to the low poverty rates it saw in the late ’90s and early 2000s to a shift away from more highly-paid manufacturing jobs toward a more service-based economy, the state’s decline in unionization and a slow recovery from the Great Recession.
“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.
Project hopes to better local economies, environment using national grant funding.
Expired and unused medications can fall into the wrong hands. Consider that less than 30% of opioid prescriptions are actually taken as prescribed for medical purposes. According to a recent study from Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, roughly 70% of people in Wisconsin hold onto their opioid prescriptions well past their need for medication, and it reaches nearly 90% in older Wisconsinites. One study found that leftover prescriptions accounted for nearly 40% of recreational use in high school seniors.
