UW In The News

How your pets alter your immune system

UW Health expert shares friendly family summer activities

While many kids will reach for screens, Dr. Shilagh Mirgain, a distinguished psychologist with UW Health, said this doesn’t have to be the default.

She suggests going to the library with your kids and having them check out books.

She also recommended parents take their kids to a local or state park, even going as far as planning a picnic. “Think about bringing your food outside to eat. Kids outside thrive,” she said.

UW engineer: Feeding robots could be breakthrough

Written by James Pikul, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at UW-Madison.

Robots run out of energy long before they run out of work to do − feeding them could change that

Written by James Pikul, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Abortion bans harm care for pregnancy problems, UW-Madison study says

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Collaborative for Reproductive Equity released a study this spring showing that during the 13-month period in which abortion was largely unavailable in Wisconsin, OB-GYNs struggled to provide care for pregnant patients and treat pregnancy complications because of unclear legal guidelines.

Alf Clausen, Emmy-winning ‘Simpsons’ composer, dies at 84

Clausen was born March 28, 1941, in Minneapolis, but grew up in Jamestown, N.D. He earned degrees from North Dakota State University, the University of Wisconsin and Boston’s Berklee College of Music. He later studied film scoring with Earle Hagen and was a two-year member of Lehman Engel’s BMI Musical Theater Workshop.

A fungal disease ravaged North American bats. Now, researchers found a second species that suggests it could happen again

“Cave ecosystems are so fragile that if you start pulling on this thread, what else are you going to unravel that may create bigger problems in the cave system?” said University of Wisconsin–Madison wildlife specialist David Drake to the Badger Herald’s Kiran Mistry in December.

Here are the best states for remote work, if you can still find it

The gradual retreat from telework “presents a valuable opportunity for companies that continue to offer remote work to differentiate themselves from the competition,” said Anyi Ma, an assistant professor of management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “These companies now have the chance to attract and hire the most talented employees who prefer remote work.”

New PBS documentary on public libraries, ‘Free for All,’ has a Wisconsin accent

While the documentary takes a nationwide view, there’s a lot of Wisconsin in it. Among the interview subjects is Ethelene Whitmire, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who talks about Regina Anderson Andrews, the first African American to lead a branch of the New York Public Library and a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

UW professors discuss attacks on higher education, ‘fragility’ of U.S. democracy

With the 100th day of President Donald Trump’s second term in office approaching, University of Wisconsin-Madison professors and staff met Thursday to take stock of the growing threats to higher education and U.S. democracy and to discuss collective action to push back.

Wisconsin physicians are learning about firearms to prepare them for talking to patients about gun safety

Two years ago, Dr. James A. Bigham, a clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, began teaching medical students on the issue, not just providing statistics around firearms injury but also arranging for instruction from firearms trainers on how guns function and why someone may want to own one.

UW-Madison researchers identify oldest dinosaur in northern hemisphere

Back in summer 2013, paleontologist Dave Lovelace took some University of Wisconsin-Madison students on a dig in Wyoming. There, they found an ankle bone in an area where fossils typically aren’t found.

12 UW-Madison inventions that changed the world

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, known for helping UW-Madison commercialize discoveries such as vitamin D enrichment, a blood thinning drug and stem cells, may seem like a solid presence on campus whose existence was never in doubt.

But WARF, the nation’s first university technology transfer office, had to fight for survival from its founding in 1925 until at least 1980, when the federal Bayh-Dole Act said universities could retain patent rights on federally funded research.

UW-Madison expands engineering project to put businesses right on campus

UW-Madison’s record-breaking research spending fuels rise in national ranking

The university announced the ranking change Monday alongside an announcement that it had spent a record-breaking $1.7 billion on research for fiscal year 2023, a 13.7% increase over the prior year. UW-Madison’s growth outpaced the national increase of 11.2% spent on university research and development, bringing the national amount spent to $108.8 billion.

Teenager infected with H5N1 bird flu in critical condition

Nuzzo also pointed to a recent study published in Nature, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, an H5N1 expert at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, that showed the virus that infected the first reported dairy worker in Texas had acquired mutations that made it more severe in animals as well as allowing it to move more efficiently between them — via airborne respiration.

Researcher tests virus-based cancer treatment on her own breast cancer

“From my perspective, self experimentation is not fundamentally unethical,” said Alta Charo, a professor emerita of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “It may be unwise. It may indeed be tainted by an unrealistic set of expectations. … But I don’t see it as fundamentally unethical.”

Remedies for schools struggling to find special education teachers

This is when schools are more likely to see departures from special education teachers, said Kimber Wilkinson, a special education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. New teachers often tell her about their concerns with morale and heavy workloads once they land a role at a school.

Why did Republicans lose Senate races in so many states Trump won?

“The Senate candidates are often well known to voters” because they run intense campaigns with a flood of advertisements, said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And because turnout was similar for the presidential and the Senate races in most states, he argued, it is likely that some people are still splitting their ticket between the two parties.“So voters in some places are making real distinctions to say this is not somebody who is aligned with Trump or represents him in the same way, or this is someone who has the state’s interest in mind in a way that other candidates don’t,” he said. “And that really is a different story from one state to the next.”

Why America Still Doesn’t Have a Female President

But some people are biased against female presidential candidates. In 2017, a study found that about 13 percent of Americans were “angry or upset” about the idea of a woman serving as president. In an experiment that same year using hypothetical political candidates, Yoshikuni Ono and Barry Burden, political scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that voters punish female candidates running for president by 2.4 percentage points. This means that a hypothetical female candidate would get, say, 47 percent of the vote, rather than 49.4 percent if she were a man.

US Drought Map Shows Which States Are Worst Affected

“This fall [in precipitation] has been a prime example of flash drought across parts of the U.S.,” Jason Otkin, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote in a NASA Earth Observatory post. “These events can take people by surprise because you can quickly go from being drought-free to having severe drought conditions.”

Why the winner of the 2024 presidential race might not be projected on election night

“It can take a few days and sometimes more,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

When will we know the presidential election results? A state-by-state guide

Barry Burden, Director of the University of Wisconsin’s Elections Research Center, said, “typically 2 to 2 ½ hours after polls close, we start to get a pretty good picture of the state,” but he noted Milwaukee takes longer.”It’s the biggest city, and it has the most ballots, and it also counts absentee ballots at a central location,” Burden said. “That’ll be after midnight, 1 (a.m.) or 2 a.m.”

My mother nursed a life-affirming 25-year grudge. Hard as I try, I don’t have the attention span

Yet the fact that it exists in the animal kingdom surely suggests that there’s some evolutionary benefit to it, which is the case Robert Enright, a psychologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, makes: particularly among athletes, short-term grudges have an observable motivational effect.

Chinese companies use Biden’s climate law to expand their solar dominance

“There is this kind of global innovation system that I think has been one of the primary reasons why we’ve had this miracle of the cost of solar falling so much,” said Gregory Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who wrote a book on the solar supply chain. “To put up walls and to put up barriers, I think we’re going to squander some of that.”

Early voting turnout high as almost 44% of 2020 electorate cast ballots

“Election Day is just the end of voting now,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “We have many election days and it’s just the final day on which ballots can be cast.”

Dan Tokaji on 2024 Election Legal Fights

Dan Tokaji, dean and professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, talked about the voting lawsuits that have been filed across the country ahead of Election Day and the legal battle that’s expected to follow.

At 50, Hello Kitty is as ‘kawaii’ and lucrative as ever

Leslie Bow, a professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that while many Asian and Asian American women see Hello Kitty as a symbol of defiance, the protective, caretaking instinct aroused by “kawaii” isn’t without power.

NFL owners support policies that benefit them. But what about fans?

“These things can often appear to be disconnected,” said Kenneth R. Mayer, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin. “It wouldn’t be at all surprising for people to not make a strong link between gerrymandering and the success of the Cleveland Browns.”

Case-Shiller shows dip in home prices, breaking 2024 uptrend

Ebbing price growth might seem novel, but it’s not surprising. Mark Eppli, director of the real estate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, identified three main reasons price hikes are cooling. One is the supply of homes for sale.