UW In The News

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.

What you need to know about the Electoral College as 2024 race nears end

“It’s really 51 separate elections,” Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told ABC News. “Every state and the District of Columbia has its own rules for running the election. Then each state awards its electors separately, and it’s up to candidates to win a majority of those electors to be elected president.”

AI is transforming weather forecasting. Is the U.S. falling behind?

Another AI model, developed by NOAA and the University of Wisconsin, has shown skill in predicting the rapid intensification of hurricanes, an area where global AI models have struggled.

Why Nerds Gummy Clusters Are Everywhere This Halloween – WSJ

Achieving the right balance of crunchy and chewy in nonchocolate candy is tricky because of “moisture migration,” in which water moves between components and can affect the product’s quality, said Rich Hartel, a University of Wisconsin-Madison food scientist.

Rick Singer, man behind college admissions scandal, back in business

If Varsity Blues accomplished anything, it affirmed the value of regular colleges, said Nick Hillman, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Most students, he said, don’t attend universities with single-digit acceptance rates accused of taking bribes. Two-thirds of undergraduates attend college within 50 miles of home, according to the Institute for College Access & Success. “There’s been this acknowledgment over the last few years that geography really matters,” Hillman said. “The majority of students don’t attend places like USC or the Ivy League.”

Mass Food Poisoning Incident Leaves 46 Hospitalized

Food poisoning is likely to affect more people in the future as humid temperatures—which allows strains of bacteria to form and thrive—become more common due to climate change, microbiologists have warned. “Climate change will increase the risk of foodborne illness from consumption of raw produce,” said Professor Jeri Barak, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who unveiled the results of a study in August.

Electric Motors Are About to Get a Major Upgrade Thanks to Benjamin Franklin

Leading the effort to resuscitate Franklin’s concept for motors big enough to use in industrial applications is C-Motive Technologies in Middleton, Wis. It is a 16-person startup founded by a pair of University of Wisconsin engineers named Justin Reed and Daniel Ludois who spent years tinkering with electrostatic motors to see if they could be improved.

How Long Does Halloween Candy Last?

Yes, but not in the same way that perishable items such as eggs, chicken and produce do. When candy goes bad, it’s “almost always a physical (drying out) or chemical (lipid oxidation, flavor change) change and not microbial,” Richard W. Hartel, a food science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says.

When Does a High Become a Trip?

Non-hallucinogenic, consciousness-altering experiences, like those reported to result from tabernanthalog use, sound far away from such mystical experiences, and more akin to how some people might feel after drinking a glass of wine or a strong cup of coffee. “Many of us are just filling our bodies with substances that cause acute alterations in consciousness of various degrees,” says Chuck Raison, a psychiatry professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

What we know: Fate of Texas death row inmate’s testimony before a state legislative committee is uncertain

“It’s the entire case, and that is Mr. Roberson’s case,” Keith Findley, professor emeritus with the University of Wisconsin Law School, testified before the Texas Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence last week. “When you have a prosecution, a conviction that rests entirely upon medical, scientific opinion, and it turns out that medical science is, at best, deeply disputed, you have a recipe for real problems.”

To save monarch butterflies, these scientists want to move mountains

“If the monarch migration to this part of the world is to continue, both the trees and the monarchs will need to move,” says Karen Oberhauser, a biologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study. According to Oberhauser, who studies monarch butterfly ecology, assisted migration could be a possible solution; however, whether it will work remains to be seen.

Column | Climate change is transforming homeownership in the U.S.

To test this idea, Keys and Philip Mulder, now on faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s business school, searched for the prelude to a housing crash: a distinctive “lead-lag” pattern of a spike in unsold homes (“the lead”), followed by falling prices (“the lag”).

The Real Reason You Shouldn’t Let Your Dog Stick Its Head Out the Window

“The quick and dirty answer is that [we] discourage it,” Amy Nichelason, a veterinarian and clinical assistant professor of primary care services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, tells Inverse. She says it’s not difficult to understand why dogs might enjoy riding with their heads out the window. With their keen sense of smell, “it really is just like sensory overload,” Nichelason says. “It’s like me in the candy store.”

How much longer will invasive stink bugs be around?

If you’re hoping to keep the stink bugs out, your options are slightly limited. The best way is physical exclusion, according to PJ Liesch, the director of the UW-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab who is aptly referred to as “the Wisconsin Bug Guy.”

The Scourge of ‘Win Probability’ in Sports

Apart from this niche-use case, it’s not clear whether these statistics are even helpful for the people who watch games with the FanDuel app open. When I called up Michael Titelbaum, a philosopher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who works on probability, he told me that these statistics are easy to misinterpret. “Decades of cognitive-science experiments tell us that people are really, really bad at making sense of probability percentages,” he said.

Trump wages campaign against real-time fact checks

Lucas Graves, a journalism and mass communications professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said that publicly chafing at fact-checking has become a form of tribalism among some Republicans.

Trump and Harris Have Vastly Different Plans for Public Education

“A big concern for me [is] that the kids who are already poorly served will fall further behind because there won’t be anything that requires states” to use the funding equitably, says Gloria Ladson-Billings, a professor emerita of education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

News on Hurricane Milton

The amount of lightning in Hurricane Milton is “unlike any event” meteorologist Chris Vagasky has ever seen in the Atlantic Basin. Hurricane Milton’s eyewall, where the storm’s strongest winds are, exhibited more than 58,000 lightning events in just 14 hours, according to Vagasky, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That’s more than one lightning event every second, which he described as “astounding.”

Forceps. Scalpel. Nerve Ninja: UW-Madison engineers devise tool to limit nerve damage in surgery

A patient should never come out of the operating room with more pain than they went in with.

That’s the thinking behind a group of UW-Madison engineers whose invention aims to make surgical incisions easier and reduce the incidence of accidental cuts from free-floating scalpels.

Why Cheeses Such as Mozzarella and Cheddar Melt Differently Than Ricotta

Cheese makers’ key tool in adjusting the number of these bonds is acidity, says John Lucey, a food scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and director of the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research. In cheese made at a relatively neutral pH, there are enough calcium bonds that casein molecules are stiffly bound to each other.

Mushrooms are now becoming leather, packaging, bacon and more

There is such a thing as an endemic fungus, a place a fungus grows and where it doesn’t. So, moving it should be done thoughtfully,” said Anne Pringle, a professor of botany at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In practice, we’re only about conserving plants and animals. We don’t have that sense of the biodiversity of fungi. But we’re starting to have that conversation.”

Nearsightedness Has Become a Global Health Issue

Terri L. Young, co-chair of the NASEM committee that produced the report and chair of the department of ophthalmology and visual sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, talked with Scientific American about the implications of the myopia epidemic for people with myopia and policymakers.

Is Pumpkin Spice Dangerous To Dogs? Here’s Why They Should Avoid It

Pumpkin on its own is not toxic to dogs. In fact, a little pumpkin can do some good in some cases because it’s high in fiber. “If people are worried that their dog’s stool is a little firm or hard, or that they’re constipated, we’ll use it because of its nice, high fiber content to help soften stool,” Calico Schmidt, a veterinarian and clinical instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, tells Inverse. “So it can be nice and beneficial, and many dogs like it, which is a plus, too.”

Arizona official who certifies elections alleges fraud after his defeat

Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and director of its Elections Research Center, said Cavanaugh’s title could bring legitimacy to the notion that election officials are conspiring to falsify election outcomes. And the claim comes just as many voters are beginning to pay attention to the coming election, Burden said.