“There’s really nothing like the efforts of the fake electors in 2020,” said UW-Madison Political Science Professor Barry Burden. “That was an orchestrated effort across multiple swing states, including Wisconsin, to present false electors on behalf of the party that had lost in every one of those states.”
“If oil prices are going to stay at the levels that they are, then we can continue to see at least not an upward movement in gasoline prices, and that’s gonna allow us to have inflation continue to fall,” said Menzie Chinn, a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
What’s currently being called atypical canine respiratory disease started showing up around the state in late October, according to Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at UW-Madison, with clinics seeing between six and a dozen cases each. It began showing up in Colorado, Massachusetts and other parts of the country earlier in the year.
Adam Stevenson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and an expert in criminal law and sentencing, said while this type of sentence is extremely rare, many states are banning the practice, including Texas, Arkansas, Minnesota and Iowa.
This bill “generally follows with both the Supreme Court’s commentary that kids are different — they change, they mature, both emotionally, but also, scientifically,” Stevenson said. “It also follows the greater trends across the country.”
Underage sales of nicotine products have more than doubled in Wisconsin since 2019, the year when the federal age for purchasing tobacco products was raised to 21. Wisconsin has kept the minimum age at 18 in spite of research showing that raising the smoking age reduces nicotine addiction. Dr. Michael Fiore, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, explains.
How farmers handle their cows can have a big impact on their health and safety. We talk to Jennifer Van Os, an animal welfare extension specialist at UW-Madison who developed a new tool to help farmer’s practice better methods.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who studies technology in education said artificial intelligence holds promise in schools. David Williamson Shaffer is the Sears Bascom Professor of Learning Analytics at UW-Madison. He got into this work after being a teacher in the 80s and 90s.
“Graphing calculators and computers were just starting to come to the place where they were impacting the classroom, were a kind of change agent,” Shaffer said. “They were a way in which the old system was disrupted just enough that we had a chance to rethink a little bit about what we were doing.”
Fitzgerald’s remarks misconstrue that process, according to former University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor David Canon, whose research focused in part on election administration.
“He has it exactly backwards,” Canon said. “They don’t vote individually to certify the results in all 50 states.”
Author Beth Nguyen is a Madisonian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in creative writing. “Owner of a Lonely Heart” isn’t her first published book, but it’s different because of the way it’s written as a memoir in essays.
That story tells of a woman who, as a child, escaped Vietnam with her father. He didn’t tell the young girl’s mother where they were going, leaving her behind. The mother eventually escaped to the Boston area, and 20 years later, mother and daughter reconnected.
Ben Fisher, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor who reviewed 32 evaluations of school-based police programs, said he found that police in schools weren’t shown to diminish school violence, crime or the presence of weapons or drugs.
“The challenge that insurance companies face is that since they do not have the same information as drivers, they must set higher insurance premiums that consider the average risk of drivers,” says Jordan Van Reign, assistant teaching professor and MSPO Associate Director, Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics (AAE), University of Wisconsin–Madison. “If insurance companies could have the same information about risk as drivers, they could set individual insurance premiums that better match the risk of each individual. This would improve overall market efficiency by reducing overall rates and better matching rates to the risk of individuals.”
Dr. Gerald Pankratz, an associate professor and geriatrician at UW Health, said the most common injuries from falls are innocuous and might include a few bruises or cuts.
“On the more serious side, we’re definitely concerned about fractures of the big bones, the hip, most predominantly — there’s a marked increased risk in mortality and institutionalization in the months after having a hip fracture,” he said.
Nations were divided over whether to create a timetable for eliminating fossil fuels at the latest United Nations’ conference on climate change. We learn what happened from Sumudu Atapattu, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor attending the conference.
Krishanu Saha leads the CRISPR Vision Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is member of National Institute of Health’s Somatic Cell Genome Editing Consortium. His lab is specifically studying how to cure Best disease as well as Leber congenital amaurosis, one of the most common causes of blindness in children.
“All of the testing that we’ve done thus far shows a lot of promise that it can actually correct the defects in these cells. And so the task for us over the next five years is to formulate a medicine that could be used here in trials enrolling patients,” Saha said in a recent interview with WPR’s “The Morning Show.”
The marten has been the focus of several reintroduction efforts over the last 75 years. Ten Pacific marten were introduced to the Apostle Islands from Montana and British Columbia in the 1950’s but didn’t survive; the last was detected in 1969, according to Jonathan Pauli, marten researcher and professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin.
Patrick Remington, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said the rate of underage tobacco sales is going in the wrong direction.
“It’s more than just a minimal change,” Remington said. “To me, that would be cause to certainly redouble the efforts to vendors and sellers to comply with federal law.”
Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said most Republicans in the state legislature and GOP leaders opposed any kind of independent redistricting commission or process “until Tuesday, September 12, when Speaker Vos led a press conference to announce support for a freshly crafted bill that would implement a system similar but not identical to the Iowa model.”
Burden said it was a surprising turn of events given Republicans’ history of standing by the existing system and resisting reforms.
“Farmers would welcome warm and dry (conditions) to get out and have things planted in a timely fashion, but they need moisture in the soil for germination and early growth,” said Chris Kucharik, a plant and agrosystem sciences professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
During the holiday season, we’re often encouraged to make amends and forgive people, but what does it take to really forgive someone? And what happens to your brain and body when you do… or don’t? In this episode, Dr. Sanjay Gupta talks with forgiveness science pioneer, Robert Enright. He’s been studying and writing about forgiveness for decades at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and he says forgiveness is a choice, and that your ability to do it can be strengthened like a muscle. Enright walks us through a range of scenarios, from forgiving small things like being late for a meeting to larg
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.
“There are many restrictions, where Wisconsin goes is back to where it was in June 2022, before the Dobbs decision,” said Amy Williamson, associate director of the Collaborative for Reproductive Equity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“All evidence indicates that the vaccine is very safe and effective,” said Jenna Nobles, a demographer and professor of sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison and study co-author. “In addition, it shows that avoiding the vaccine is what is potentially harmful for the pregnancy. This is an important piece of information for patients to have.”
People are generally staying in their homes longer, says Mark Eppli, director of the Graaskamp Center for Real Estate at the University of Wisconsin. In 1988, for example, “your average time in a house was 10 or 11 years.” Today, he says, it’s 20 years.
“That’s really long; inventory’s going to stay low,” Eppli says. “With high interest rates making housing all the less affordable…it’s going to keep people in their houses even more.”
“It’s a big deal to have that many logical qubits. A very remarkable result for any quantum computing platform,” says Mark Saffman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He says the new quantum computer greatly benefits from being made of atoms that are controlled by light because this kind of control is very efficient.
Barry Burden, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that “just about any process is going to result in more competitive maps,” but he suggested that Democrats still face challenges in their effort to gain more control of the state Legislature.
“Although it’s a 50-50 state and Democrats do win lots of statewide races, especially in the last few years, because of the way Democratic voters are concentrated in more urban communities around the state, it’s difficult, I think, even for a neutral process, to produce a map that’s going to result in a 50-50 Legislature,” he said.
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.
The eight-day December celebration is one that UW-Madison Classical Judaism Professor Jordan Rosenblum says always leaves a good taste in his mouth, blending history with modern culinary indulgence.
“There’s a nice connection. (The food) also happens to be delicious,” Rosenblum said.
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.
One of the people who have had the most influence on her, Hanford said, is University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor Mark Seidenberg, author of the book “Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It.”
Like Hanford, Seidenberg cautioned at a reading conference at Monona Terrace in Madison in February that a full range of needs must be addressed if more children are to become successful readers. He included good early childhood experiences as one of the things that matter.
Scientists have said the world needs to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Energy expert Greg Nemet, a public policy professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said any new natural gas plants would guarantee fossil fuel emissions beyond that date, or they would need to be shut down early.
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.
As students face college application deadlines, we explore a new approach to admissions being adopted by the Universities of Wisconsin. Next year, most campuses plan to start proactively informing Wisconsin high schoolers who are eligible to enroll based on their academic performance. Interview with Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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.
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.
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.
Foreign policy analysts previously told PolitiFact National fungibility is a legitimate concern in this case.
However, Andrew Kydd, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, added a caveat to fungibility.“This still frees up their budget constraint to spend other money on other things,” Kydd wrote in an email to us. “But by this logic anyone who buys something at Walmart is supporting the Chinese nuclear arsenal.”
“Republicans’ only real backstop to prevent undoing of their conservative legislative and judicial accomplishments over the past 15 years is their majorities in the state Legislature,” said Barry Burden, UW-Madison politics professor and director of the Elections Research Center. “Enshrining some conservative ideas in the state Constitution is a way to protect them even if Republicans lack full control over state government.”
Jennifer Gaddis, a school nutrition expert at UW-Madison who works with the Madison School District, said these participation rates raise some red flags.
As the second-largest school district in the state, in a city that prides itself on local food options, Gaddis said she thinks it’s a “failure” that administration and the community are not “demanding more.”
“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.”
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.”
One challenge to vertical farms moving into office and residential buildings comes from local zoning bylaws.
That’s why, across the country, some cities, including Boston and Cleveland are amending their zoning bylaws to support urban farming. Still, these changes depend on the type of agriculture and the resources available, said Alfonso Morales, a professor at the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture.
“They’re [cities] going to vary in the process by which people can start a farm, and the complexities, the number of permits, or licenses to pull,” Morales said.
Manuel Teodoro, a UW-Madison associate professor who published a book on the connection between drinking water failures and public distrust, says the system used by cities like Wausau is a broken one. In his peer-reviewed paper, Teodoro said the ability of low-income families to pay for basic water and sewer services is a subject of increasing concern. He also wrote about this issue in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel opinion piece.
“When people pay taxes through their water bills, the government response to nonpayment is denial of a life-sustaining service,” Teodoro said. “Nobody should have their water shut off because the city wants money for a jail or to pay a city employee’s pension.”
National media outlets, including the New York Times and AP, have reported on cases of the illness in numerous states, notably Colorado, Massachusetts, Oregon, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. However, veterinarian Dr. Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, said every state, including Wisconsin, has probably seen cases of the new dog respiratory illness.
“What we’re seeing is multiple different states seeing different types of respiratory disease, and there are some outbreaks that we’re not getting an answer to with our in-depth diagnostic tests,” Poulsen said.
That’s because salt, rainwater and snowmelt drain into the storm sewer system, which then discharges into Lakes Mendota and Monona, UW-Madison limnologist Hilary Dugan told the Cap Times last year.
“The city has been very forward-thinking in reducing (its) salt use,” Dugan said. “It’s frustrating when you cross over from city-maintained paths to campus-maintained paths because the sudden change in practice is just so noticeable.”
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.
UW-Madison sociology professor Samer Alatout, a native of Palestine, shares thoughts about nationalism, the historical relationship between Palestinians and Israelis, and building a democratic state.
Wisconsin produces almost two-thirds of the world’s cranberries. They have been harvested in Wisconsin for as long as people have lived here, said Allison Jonjak, cranberry outreach specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Extension, who grew up on a cranberry marsh herself.
“This really represents America, and it happens to be harvested right before Thanksgiving,” Jonjak said. “Cranberries are ready right now, they’re emblematic of North America, and they go really well with most meats.”
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.
Associated Bank confirmed Ernst was laid off due to restructuring but declined to comment further.
While his layoff may have felt egregious, employment law expert Alexia Kulwiec said that both in Wisconsin and across the country, with exception of Montana, employees are hired “at-will.”
“This means that an employer can terminate employment for a good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all, unless there are specific legal prohibitions or a contractual agreement,” said Kulwiec, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
That’s true for all businesses, big or small, said Cliff Robb, professor of consumer science at UW-Madison.
“I do think there will be crowds,” he said. “People will be shopping, but they will be much more bargain-oriented. Consumers may be more willing to wait out deals.”
University of Wisconsin-Madison Associate Professor of Law Robert Yablon is the co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative and filed a brief with other scholars challenging the current maps. He told WPR the contiguity argument presented by Democrats is “rooted in the original meaning and practice of the Constitution.”
“And so I suppose it’s not surprising that, over time, the political sides that have argued it one way or the other have changed depending on what they viewed as their interests at the moment,” Yablon said.
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.
Managing, monitoring and connecting community members to over 1,200 acres of woodlands, savannas, prairies and wetlands could seem unimaginable for some. For Karen Oberhauser, director of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum, upholding the area’s three pillars — conserving and restoring arboretum land, advancing research and fostering the land ethic — is an everyday reality.
Why nuclear fusion? It doesn’t produce harmful long-term radioactive waste as a byproduct like nuclear fission, explained Gerald Kulcinski, director emeritus of fusion technology at UW-Madison.
The situation raises a series of questions in addition to ethical concerns and legal concerns about misuse of public office, said John P. Gross, a clinical associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
“It’s particularly suspect when it sounds like this particular private citizen may have engaged in prior business transactions with the city attorney and has ongoing business transactions, essentially, with the city attorney, because they’re storing their cars for them and they’re not paying rent,” he said.
Wisconsin also had among the lowest vaccination rates for other required vaccines, which protect against such diseases as chickenpox, polio and whooping cough.
“It’s very concerning,” said Dr. James Conway, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and medical director of UW Health’s immunization program. “This is mostly a call to action that we need to do better.”
Ross Milton, an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noted that the state has something that the city or county of Milwaukee currently lacks: a budget surplus. Original funding plans called for local governments to contribute over $300 million to the project, leading to fears that the county and city governments would need to cut services to make the needed payments.
“I think the opportunity cost is different for local governments than it is for the state,” Milton said. “And that does mean that who’s paying for it does somewhat affect how we should think about it.”
