As Wisconsin voters prepare for the upcoming Nov. 3 midterm election, the decision to vote in-person absentee has increased, while the decision to send in mail-in ballots has declined, according to Wisconsin Public Radio. Early voting began this week on Tuesday and will continue through Nov. 1.

Voting in-person absentee on the first day of early voting increased by 65% compared to the 2022 midterm election, and mail-in absentee ballots showed a decline by nearly 26% across the state compared to 2022, according to WPR.

This decline in mailed ballots comes as mail-in voting faces legal challenges at the federal level. According to National Public Radio, earlier this year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to the U.S. Postal Service to have requirements for delivering mail-in ballots, though they were not officially implemented.

University of Wisconsin student Drew Barkman, who first voted absentee during the gubernatorial primary this August but is deciding to vote in-person this election, said accessibility was one of his main factors when choosing his voting preference.

“I was in Minneapolis this summer, but I mailed in my ballot for Wisconsin, because I wanted to be present because that’s where I spend most of my year,” Barkman said.

His polling place this election is much closer now that he is back in Wisconsin, so he chose to vote in-person.

When asked his preferred method between sending in a mail-in ballot or voting early in person, he chose in-person.

 “It may be a little bit slower, but there usually isn’t that much of a line,” Barkman said. “It’s more fun cause there’s more people around and I’m like ‘Oh, I did it!’”

As early voting continues in Wisconsin and Election Day approaches, it remains to be seen whether the trend of increasing in-person voting and declining mailed-in ballots will persist.

According to Wisconsin Watch, voting preference can change from voter to voter — whether it be accessibility, concerns over mail-in ballots or simply the feeling of solidarity by voting with others in-person.

City of Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway will not seek reelection in April, citing threats and concern about personal safety, according to a City of Madison news release.

“I am immensely proud of what I and my team have achieved over the past seven and a half years,” Rhodes-Conway wrote in the release, “It has been a tremendous honor to be your Mayor. We have moved Madison forward and our record proves that. But for me, the price of serving has become too high.”

Rhodes-Conway cited harassment, threats and lack of civility as factors that influenced her decision, according to the press release.

Rhodes-Conway had previously announced a reelection campaign in July, according to Channel 3000 News. Rhodes-Conway later received backlash after an encampment erected at the site of the shooting of Corey Ruiz by Madison Police Officer Kiel Baitinger-Peterson was cleared out, resulting in multiple arrests, according to Channel 3000.

“I have always welcomed honest disagreement and invited community input, but over the years the balance has shifted from productive discussion to increasingly vitriolic, personal attacks from people who seem not to care about actually understanding and debating an issue,” Rhodes-Conway wrote in the release, adding that she has experienced sexism since the start of her first campaign.

Rhodes-Conway expressed pride in accomplishments from during her time in office — including implementation of bus rapid transit, housing and infrastructure investments and safety policy, according to the press release.

Dane County Executive Melissa Agard expressed gratitude for Rhodes-Conway’s service.

Syed Abbas, former Madison Common Council president and District 12 alder running for mayor, similarly thanked Rhodes-Conway for her service.

“I first ran for office because I believe in the potential of our city,” Rhodes-Conway wrote in the release. “I believe Madison wants to be the kind of community where anyone can safely step into leadership, and I believe that we can choose to make that a reality.”

Editor’s Note: These Q&As are lightly edited or shortened for clarity and style.

University of Wisconsin professor of physics, Francis Halzen, Ph.D., recently won the Nobel Prize in physics based on his work in researching neutrinos by developing the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in the South Pole. To understand what exactly a neutrino is and why IceCube was so revolutionary, The Badger Herald sat down with UW professor of physics at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center, Justin Vandenbrouke, a long-time collaborator of IceCube. He answers some of our most burning questions about the award-winning research.

First of all, congratulations on being associated with the Nobel. It’s very exciting.

Thank you, it’s been a thrilling week. 

I can imagine. Could you start by telling me a little bit about what your role specifically is with IceCube?

I first learned about IceCube in the year 2000 as an undergrad when I saw Francis Halzen give a colloquium, and it was inspiring. I had started a small neutrino astronomy project at the time, and I decided then that I wanted to go to grad school to work on IceCube. 

I started in 2003 working on IceCube as a PhD student, and I had the opportunity to go down to the South Pole three times to help build IceCube. I took a break as a postdoc, worked on a different project, came back, and I’ve been on the faculty since 2013, working on IceCube again. So, I helped build it, and now my grad students and I analyze the data from it.

Can you tell me a little bit about what kind of data you’re getting from IceCube?

So when a neutrino hits the ice, it makes a flash of light. It basically shatters an atom, and the splinters of that atom make a flash of light, and we record it with these sensors. We have over 5,000 sensors installed in the ice at the South Pole.

Each one of these sensors is like a light bulb in reverse. Instead of converting electricity into light, when light hits the active part of the sensor, it converts into an electrical signal. All the electronics process that signal and send it up to a building on the surface of the ice. Then, that data is relayed to here in Madison, where we process it.

What is a neutrino, and what kind of data are you getting from them?

A neutrino is a subatomic particle. As far as we know, it’s point-like. It has no volume. We know that it has no electric charge, and it has very, very small mass. So you can think of it as like a cousin of an electron, but because it has no electric charge, it interacts very weakly. So most neutrinos travel straight through us and straight through the Earth. Even our giant detector — which is a billion tons of ice — has billions of trillions of neutrinos passing through it every second, and the vast majority of them never hit anything. But, every once in a while, one hits an atom, splinters it, and makes that flash of light that we detect. 

The reason we’re doing this is partly because the neutrinos are so weakly interacting; they can travel to us straight through vast regions of matter and radiation that other signals cannot escape. I like to think of them as like super X-ray vision, in the same way that X-rays enable us to see bones and other organs inside of people, X-ray neutrinos enable us to see deep into regions of the universe that are otherwise obscured to our vision.

Very cool. The IceCube website mentions that you can get information on topics like cosmic ray physics from neutrinos. What exactly does that mean to a non-physicist?

A cosmic ray is an energetic particle. They were detected over 100 years ago, and they’re still very mysterious. We’ve detected these cosmic rays up to more than millions of times more energetic than humans have figured out how to accelerate particles here on Earth with accelerators, like those at CERN in Switzerland, and it’s a big mystery how those are produced. So we know there are naturally occurring particle accelerators out in the universe. We think that maybe most of them are powered by black holes, and we’re trying to understand what they are and how they work. What’s the physics of them? 

Neutrinos are produced by particle physics interactions, including by those cosmic rays, either those cosmic rays when they’re produced in the astrophysical sources or when they’re traveling to us from the sources. So, by understanding neutrinos from astrophysical sources, we hope to understand what the sources of cosmic rays are and how they work.

So, what makes neutrinos so difficult to study?

They’re difficult because they’re so weakly interacting. Most of them travel all the way through the Earth, so you need a very large detector to detect them. It’s very rare that one collides with an atom, so basically you need to monitor  a huge number of atoms. The way that we detect them is that they make this flash of light. You can think about, where is there a huge number of atoms that are optically transparent? When I say huge, it needs to be many tons of matter, even a billion tons of matter. That’s about a mile or a kilometer on each side. Think about where on Earth that occurs. It basically is only in water in lakes and oceans, or in ice in the polar regions. 

We have built this detector [in the South Pole], which is a kilometer on each side. It’s a cubic kilometer. That’s why we call it IceCube, and it’s a billion tons of ice. So, we can monitor those atoms, and the ice there is crystal clear. There is some dust, a little bit of volcanic ash, but it’s very clear compared to other ice around the world.

Is that why you use ice and not water?

Yeah. There are complementary projects all around the world that are working on similar detectors in water. There are some ways in which the properties of water are advantageous, and there are other ways in which ice is advantageous, including practically. One of the challenges in water detectors is that there are currents, and so even once you install the detector, you have to monitor its motion. Also, installing it on a boat is actually pretty challenging. People think that logistics at the South Pole is very challenging, but people have been doing this for many years, and with the support of the U.S. National Science Foundation, the logistics are actually pretty smooth, because it’s a stable, solid platform. We drill holes, and then we install the sensors, and that’s how we built IceCube.

Can you talk a little bit more about the development and the building of the project?

It took several years to build in the early 2000s. We need to drill down a mile and a half deep in the ice. Basically, we squirt hot water at as high a temperature and high a pressure as we can and keep lowering the drill as it’s doing that. We pull it up, and there’s a standing column of water, and then we install a string of these sensors. So, it’s a very simple concept how we drill the holes, but it’s an enormous engineering challenge to achieve it at the scale that we do. We’ve drilled 91 of these holes now, each a mile and a half deep.

I think some of what you just said kind of relates to this, but what made IceCube so novel and exciting in the field?

It’s the first large-scale neutrino telescope. If you think about the history of astronomy, you know humans have always looked up at the sky and tried to understand what the stars are and how they work, and then we develop technology to do that. A lot of the breakthroughs throughout the 20th century in astronomy were understanding how to do this with other types of light, not just the visible light, but also infrared, ultraviolet, extending to X-rays, gamma rays, radio waves and so on. We call that multi-wavelength astronomy. One of the most exciting parts of astrophysics in the 21st century is what we call multi-messenger astrophysics. That’s using not just the entire electromagnetic spectrum but also using gravitational waves and neutrinos. We’re now doing astrophysics using multiple different types of signals, and neutrinos are one of those.

IceCube is a very big collaboration, with more than 400 people. How does that work? How can you have so many people working on the same thing?

It’s an organizational challenge, but it’s also a lot of fun. Since I started working on this 23 years ago, I’ve gotten to know close collaborators and friends all around the world. I’ve gotten to travel and work closely with them. We have a lot of meetings throughout the week. We were using Zoom long before the pandemic, before everyone was using Zoom. 

We have an organizational structure that enables us to work effectively with one another, and we all bring different expertise. We have people working on the instrumentation, on the hardware, on the data-taking software, on the data analysis software, on the statistics, on the theoretical modeling, all across all the different skills that we need to to make the discoveries that we’ve made.

Would it be correct to say that UW is the center of IceCube? 

Along with the National Science Foundation, UW was the first organization to invest in IceCube, partnering with some other universities, including UC [the University of California] Berkeley in the U.S. and in Europe, like Sweden and Germany, going back to the early days. Ever since then, UW has been the leader of the IceCube project. Our research institute is called the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center, which is affiliated with the physics department but is distinct from it. We operate the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. We’re the worldwide headquarters of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.

I have to ask a little bit about the reaction to the Nobel announcement. What was that like?

It’s been thrilling. People say that births, marriages and deaths bring people together. So do Nobel prizes. I’ve been hearing from extended family, friends, colleagues all across the world for the last week, and it’s been really fun to reconnect with everyone.

A lot of the articles about the Nobel Prize have mentioned ‘high energy neutrinos.’ What exactly is like a high energy neutrino? What kind of scale are we talking about there?

We’re talking about particle physics energies. Previously, there were major discoveries in neutrino physics and neutrino astrophysics at moderately high energies, what we would consider nuclear reaction energy scales. These are at even higher energies, at energies where, on Earth, we can only access them with particle accelerators and particle physics. So, when we say an energetic neutrino or a high energy neutrino, that’s what we mean. That it’s such high energy that it’s interacting with not just the atoms, not just the nuclei, but the constituents of the nuclei. So, subatomic particle physics interactions. 

What does a typical research day look like for you?

The main defining feature is that there is no typical day. I have a nominal schedule. I have a lot of meetings with students and collaborators, and a lot of teleconferences, especially in the morning, collaborating with people in Europe and around the world. I teach also. I also am involved in a project that’s complementary to IceCube using gamma rays, and so I juggle meetings between the two projects. 

But, every day there are unexpected things that happen. Sometimes it’s frustrating, but also that’s the exciting part of life and research. Sometimes it’s good news. Sometimes it’s challenging news. But, every day, new unexpected developments occur through communications that I get by email or talking to people locally and around the world.

Do you ever get to go back on site with IceCube?

I haven’t since grad school. I’d be happy to go back, but a lot of other people get the opportunity to go currently. We just completed a major upgrade to IceCube, simply called the IceCube Upgrade. This past December and January, we installed five new strings of these sensors with hundreds of these sensors, so that’s the first major new instrumentation in IceCube in the last 15 years. So that’s really exciting.

What was the development of IceCube like? I read that there was AMANDA before IceCube – what’s the major difference between the two?

AMANDA [Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array] was a predecessor of IceCube. You could think of it as a prototype. It was also pretty large. It was basically establishing the technology. AMANDA detected that these neutrinos are produced in the atmosphere, and it could detect them and measure them reliably. We knew that they were produced in the atmosphere, but AMANDA demonstrated that you could successfully use this technology to detect neutrinos. Then we had to do it at a much, much larger scale, almost [a] 100 times larger scale, for IceCube. 

There were theoretical calculations that the size of IceCube, a billion tons of ice, was what you needed to detect the signals that we were really excited about, which are the ones from beyond the atmosphere, from astrophysical sources. Indeed, after constructing it, analyzing data with the first couple years of the completed array, we saw that the universe glows brightly in these energetic neutrinos, very close to the level that was predicted theoretically.

When you all were first developing IceCube, was this something that other people believed in, or did they think it was too out-there?

It was a mixture. I’d say there were a lot of skeptics, even those of us within the collaboration working on it for years. We thought it was a lot of fun. We thought it had a good chance of detecting the signal, but you never know. That’s one of the fun, sometimes frustrating, but fun parts of experimental research is that you’re trying to measure what’s out there in the universe, and you don’t know what it is. You have theories. You have hypotheses. The signals that you’re looking for might be there, but they might not be, and so we were fortunate that the technology was successful, and then the technology enabled us to make the discoveries that we’ve made so far. 

What was that timeline from conception of the idea to realizing it actually works?

Francis Halzen and collaborators started writing papers and talking about the idea of a detector like this in ice in the 1980s. Then, there were just a handful of these sensors that were installed in ice in Greenland, and that demonstrated the very basic idea that it worked. That was detecting something that’s not an electron, not a neutrino, but it’s a muon. A muon is like a heavy electron, and those are also produced even more frequently in the atmosphere. So, in Greenland, they detected these muons, and they show that you can do particle physics detections in the ice. 

They also figured out pretty quickly that the Greenland ice is relatively dirty, because it’s close to continents with dirt and dust that’s then picked up in the wind and deposited in Greenland. They realized that Antarctica would be a better place to do this research, and then they built AMANDA to go the next level from detecting muons in Greenland to detecting neutrinos in Antarctica.

Today, what are the next steps with IceCube?

We just finished installing this upgrade in the last few months. We’re commissioning it. We’re getting the data taken to integrate the upgrade with the original strings. That’s very exciting. That’ll lower our energy threshold, so we’ll detect even more neutrinos, both from the atmosphere and beyond. We also have lots of data ongoing from the original IceCube detector that we’re analyzing.

We’re working on a next generation project. We call it IceCube-Gen2, which is a little bit of a pun because there’s a gentoo penguin. We have a concept for an even larger detector, about a factor of 10 larger than IceCube, and that’s what we need to go beyond these initial discoveries — to understand not just the fact that the universe is glowing brightly in these neutrinos, but what exactly is producing them, which for the most part is still a mystery. We’ve detected that there are giant black holes at the center of distant galaxies that are producing these neutrinos, but we haven’t yet identified enough of the sources to explain why the universe glows so brightly in these neutrinos. That’s still an exciting mystery.

Can undergraduate students at UW get involved with IceCube?

Yeah. We have quite a few undergraduate research, as well as graduate students. If people are interested in getting involved in research, I recommend they browse the IceCube website, IceCube.wisc.edu, and there’s a ‘contact us’ link there. They can also subscribe to a newsletter where you get regular news updates on the research that’s going on at the South Pole and here in Madison.

Is there anything else that you’re excited to talk about that I didn’t bring up?

One particularly exciting recent development is that we’ve detected that not only the universe as a whole beyond our galaxy glows brightly in these neutrinos, but our own galaxy also glows brightly in the neutrinos. Similar to the extragalactic neutrinos, we’re trying to figure out exactly what’s producing those neutrinos. Our own Milky Way is not as bright as the other galaxies that we’ve detected. That’s something we’re trying to understand. It’s probably because we don’t have an active black hole like the other galaxies do. There might be sources throughout our galaxy that are producing those neutrinos, or it might be due to cosmic rays interacting within the galaxy.

We’re also excited about the prospects for dark matter. Dark matter makes up most of the matter in the universe, and we basically have no idea what it is. We’ve measured through lots of different mechanisms of its gravitational interaction in lots of different sources, but we don’t know its behavior beyond gravity. We’d really like to be able to detect that it is a subatomic particle that can annihilate or decay into neutrinos, and therefore we could understand exactly what it is.

…

Vandenbrouke ends the interview by highlighting the importance of funding from the National Science Foundation. He also takes us to a computer room in Chamberlin Hall, which mirrors the larger computer room in Antarctica. Here, researchers on campus can test software updates before installing them on-site at IceCube. 

For more information on IceCube, visit the IceCube website. The UW community is also invited to a Nobel Prize celebration on Friday in the Great Hall of Memorial Union. 

The Wisconsin State Building Commission approved plans for nearly 1,700 new student beds and a 400-seat dining hall at UW, as the university welcomes its largest ever freshman class, according to University of Wisconsin news.

The proposal would create two new residence halls expected to open in the fall of 2029, and the $338 million project would be financed through University Housing revenues, without tuition or taxpayer funding, according to UW news.

The proposal will now move to the Wisconsin Legislature’s Joint Committee on Finance for final review, according to UW news.

UW welcomed 3,920 Wisconsin residents in its fall 2026 freshman class, the most in university history with 93% of first-year students choosing to live on campus, making University Housing operate at approximately 115% of its designated capacity, according to UW news.

University Housing has accommodated over 1,100 students by adding beds to existing rooms and converting common spaces, according to UW news.

Kaya Goldberg, a freshman living in Ogg Residence Hall, said her room was supposed to be a double but was turned into a forced triple.

“It is really squished, so I think it’s a good idea [building new residence halls] because then they can space people out, hopefully,” Goldberg said.

The new residence halls would help ease pressure and allow more students to live on campus so study and social spaces currently being used for housing could return back to their original purposes, according to UW news.

Finding affordable apartments for other years of college is difficult because a lot of buildings are expensive, so building dorms could be a cheaper option for students, Goldberg said.

“I think the new dorms would definitely be helpful because just being less packed in and having more options — I’m sure they’d get filled up anyways because there’s so many people,” Goldberg said.

The project would be developed through a public-private partnership that the Wisconsin Department of Administration expects to deliver housing about two years sooner than the traditional state budget process, saving an estimated $55 million, according to UW news.

University of Michigan Associate Professor Karen Alofs spoke as the keynote for the Center for Ecology and the Environment Fall Symposium Oct. 22 to present research using historical data on climate change-related impacts on freshwater fish in Michigan. 

Climate change has brought increases in temperatures to the Great Lakes, according to Alofs. Since 1951, Great Lakes temperatures have increased by 1.3 degrees Celsius, Alofs said. Though, the temperature increases are not consistent across the region, according to Alofs. 

“By 2050, increases have been projected to be as much as 3.3 degrees Celsius and 6.1 degrees Celsius by the end of this century,” Alofs said.

The historical data Alofs and her team used were from lake survey cards collected for over a century across different lakes in Michigan, according to Alofs. There were over 75,000 historical records of various card types, providing different information about fish in the freshwater lakes, Alofs explained. With collaboration from data scientists and the community science-based organization Zooniverse, the research team was able to disseminate insights from the historical cards, according to Alofs. 

With the records, the team looked at a few key questions when it comes to climate change impacts and fish in freshwater, according to Alofs. The research team’s main points explored changes to fish abundance, fish mortality and fish growth, Alofs said. 

Using data from the historical cards, the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology and utilization of various analysis methods, the researchers investigated the changes to fish abundance in freshwater lakes in Michigan, according to Alofs. The team found as temperatures increased, abundance of bass fish increased, but that change was uneven across regions, Alofs said. 

“[Bass] are a warm water-adapted, predatory fish,” Alofs said. “Changing the temperature from historical temperatures, this is the pattern you would expect to see.”

Mortality changes in freshwater fish can be attributed to shifts in seasonality from increasing temperatures, according to Alofs. For freshwater fish, understanding the mortality is more complex, Alofs said.

“In lakes, fish kills are poorly understood,” Alofs said. “It’s because it is caused by many interacting stressors.”

In winter, fish kills are caused by thick ice and snow cover on the lake that depletes oxygen, according to Alofs. Historically, winter fish kills were more common than summer fish kills, Alofs said. But, data shows that summer fish kills may be increased by six to 34 times more by 2100, Alofs said. Looking at the historical cards, fish kills were more concentrated in the months of March or April, according to Alofs. By the 2010s and 2020s, the fish kills extend into the fall months, according to Alofs. 

Changes to fish size due to climate change provided more mixed results than anticipated, according to Alofs. In other organisms such as trees and birds, climate change decreased growth and size, Alofs said. While fish were also seen to shrink with temperature increases, the data was much more mixed than for other organisms, according to Alofs.

The research team found that fish species with a greater affinity for warm water were more likely to shrink, whereas larger-sized species were more likely to increase in size, according to Alofs. Using the historical cards, the team found that 13 analyzed fish all decreased in size, with some differing in decline rate, according to Alofs. The decrease in size from climate change is attributed to limited food, particularly for the bluegill fish, according to Alofs.

The changes to fish populations in freshwater lakes have several effects, according to Alofs. Changes can impact population functions such as competitive effects or predation risks, which can alter population dynamics and the ecosystem, Alofs explained. 

Utilizing historical data to uncover impacts of climate change allows for researchers to look at impacts previously unknown, Alofs said. Next steps for the research team include investigating if certain traits make particular fish more vulnerable to climate change impacts, and if there are differences between streams and lakes for fish populations, Alofs said.

Wisconsin State Assembly member Francesca Hong and other speakers met with students at a rally Oct. 22 at Library Mall regarding the Nov. 3 gubernatorial election, discussing the importance of voting and reproductive health.

Hosted by the Wisco Project, the rally’s objective was to encourage students to cast their ballot. Event speakers said that the upcoming election is incredibly important for Wisconsin’s next chapter of government. 

Hong spoke to students at the rally on how the election will be defining for reproductive health, affordability and education in Wisconsin. 

“This is about healthcare for everyone; this is about raising wages for everyone; this is about making sure that we’re rallying together so that people’s access to freedoms are protected,” Hong said. “There is nothing we can’t do when ordinary people choose to stand up to oligarchs, billionaires and fight for one another.”

From June 24, 2022 to Sept. 18, 2023, Wisconsin upheld a total abortion ban due to the reinterpretation of a pre-Roe v. Wade 1849 abortion ban, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin Public Affairs Organizer Sydney O’Hare said at the rally.

Reproductive clinics unfroze their services in September 2023 after a Dane County judge determined the law to be inapplicable to consensual abortions, according to previous reporting from The Badger Herald. Then, in 2025 the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled to strike down the statue, according to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

“Wisconsin has made it abundantly clear in the last four State Supreme Court elections [that] we demand to live in a state with reproductive freedom,” O’Hare said.

Republican candidate U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis, plans to uphold the five-month (20 weeks) abortion bill he voted for in 2015 when he was serving in the Wisconsin State Senate as governor, he said during the Oct. 21 WISN 12 gubernatorial debate.

Democratic candidate and Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley was endorsed by Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin. His plan for reproductive health has previously proposed to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution, according to Wisconsin Public Radio.

“Between now and Nov. 3, we have a chance to show up again and demand reproductive freedom, to demand that respect and to demand that we move forward,” O’Hare said. 

Hong narrowly lost the August primary to Crowley, with the voter margin being 0.5%, according to previous reporting by The Badger Herald. 

The loss has not kept Hong away from the election, and she continues to speak at rallies similar to this one to encourage young voter turnout, according to the We Make Better Possible Trifecta Tour website.

“You all have a chance to shape the futures that you deserve,” Hong said. “And I’m asking you to infiltrate those group chats. Ask folks to vote early, make their plan, and make their plan not just to vote, but to help someone else get to the polls.”

New York Times journalist Michael Barbaro discussed how political polarization, declining local news and public distrust shape the current U.S. media landscape during a discussion at the University of Wisconsin Tuesday, Oct. 20.

UW’s La Follette School of Public Affairs hosted the event which featured Barbaro, host of The New York Times’ “The Daily” Podcast. The director of the La Follette School, Susan Yackee, interviewed Barbaro.

“The Daily” launched two weeks into Trump’s first presidency — Barbaro said he expected “calmness” after Trump left office, but he and “The Daily” team were met with the opposite.

Barbaro described the first Trump Administration as an “earthquake,” that carried into coverage of COVID-19, to indictments of then-former president Trump, to Oct. 7 and to the war in Iran.

“It’s been a ceaseless decade,” Barbaro said.

“The Daily” is ranked as the number one news podcast by both Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Barbaro said he attributes this popularity to the podcast’s lack of partisanship.

While partisanship is a massive part of the current media ecosystem, “The Daily” aims to compel people using facts and human stories, which is more work than simply stating an opinion to rile people up, Barbaro said.

Polarization is rooted in the collapse of local news, which leaves people more animated by distant national fights than by issues in their own communities, according to Barbaro.

“When all politics is national and not really local anymore, and when all news becomes nationalized, I think that is gasoline on our polarization,” Barbaro said.

Local newspapers were once robust, with people invested in their communities, but that time is likely not coming back, according to Barbaro.

He acknowledged that The New York Times benefits from people looking to a national newspaper when there is a lack of local news, but said the organization recognizes the dangers associated with polarization and said their mission depends on good faith civil discourse.

But the current volume of vitriol against reports and journalists is higher than it has ever been, Barbaro said. President Trump’s attacks on the press make it difficult for objective, nonpartisan journalism to have necessary credibility, Barbaro said.

“There is a reality that being a journalist now makes you subject to greater, especially online, aggression than ever before,” Barbaro said. “And here I do think we owe a special debt of gratitude to our President because of the campaign messages he used both in his first term and in his second term, and the way he talks to reporters, the way he, in some cases, insults them, including my colleagues.”

Barbaro discussed other ways in which President Trump has changed expectations of what a president can be and do, saying it was hard to know what his presidency would look like when he ran for president the first time.

In 2016, The New York Times predicted Hillary Clinton to win the presidential election, and when that was not the outcome, the staff had to contend with how badly they had misread the country’s mood.

Since then, “The Daily” has spent the decade making sure that doesn’t happen again — trying to be more curious and correct by going beyond their first instinct and informing listeners why certain things may or may not happen, Barbaro said.

“I’m doing that right now in my head when people talk about a blue wave on Nov. 3,” Barbaro said. “I say to myself, ‘Nope, and make sure that the listener of ‘The Daily’ anticipates that that’s not going to happen.’ It could happen, but it might not happen. And here’s all the reasons why not. That’s a huge lesson for us.”

Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Oct. 5 for their discoveries in optogenetics, which may one day lead to a treatment for blindness, according to an article from the New York Times. Optogenetics research is also happening right on the University of Wisconsin campus.

Optogenetics is a biological technique involving the use of light to control neurons that have been genetically modified to express light-sensitive ion channels in their cell membranes, according to assistant professor of the UW Department of Psychology and member of the McPherson Eye Research Institute, Rosa Lafer-Sousa.

The Lafer-Sousa lab looks to further investigate and map out the brain in hopes to further understand the mechanism behind how the brain transforms sensory input into visual information and behavior by using optogenetics, Lafer-Sousa said.

Optogenetics can be used to test whether specific neurons cause a change in perception as opposed to merely observing, according to Lafer-Sousa.

“Basically, what optogenetics gives us is a way to manipulate the activity of specific neurons using light to allow us to test whether their activity causes changes in perception,” Lafer-Sousa said.

Optogentics has enhanced precision relative to more traditional methods to study particular regions of the brain, with one such method being electric stimulation, Lafer-Sousa said. Optogenetics is a genetic tool where you inject a virus into a specific brain region making it light sensitive, thus only affecting a specific area, she said. In electric stimulation, an electrode would be placed into the brain and a current is passed through, activating neurons and axons in the general location, Lafer-Sousa said.

“Another powerful feature of optogenetics, compared with electrical stimulation, is that it allows us not only to activate neurons, but also to inhibit their activity—essentially, to switch them off,” Lafer-Sousa said.

The long term aim for the Lafer-Sousa lab is to advance the development of neural prosthetics, in hopes of creating prosthetics that engage the visual cortex in high levels to help achieve rich visual experiences for the profoundly blind, Lafer-Sousa said.

The McClean Lab also looks to study optogenetics but in the field of cell signaling and protein modification, McClean lab PhD student Eli Cytrynbaum said.

In this wing of optogenetics, proteins can be modified to be light sensitive, and shining a light can kick off protein modification, Cytrynbaum said. Shining a light can allow proteins to bind together and potentially initiate DNA transcription, according to Cytrynbaum.

“We mostly use transcription factor-based systems, meaning that we will shine light, which will then make a transcription factor work,” Cytrynbaum said.

While optogenetics has shown promising results in being able to manipulate DNA transcription, there are certain roadblocks present in manipulating non-human species of organisms, Cyntrynbaum said.

In their current project, Cytrynbaum is working to develop functional optogenetics in Candida albincans, a microscopic, naturally occurring yeast found in humans, Cytrynbaum said. Unfortunately, because of the differences between humans and yeast, a working model hasn’t yet been developed, according to Cytrynbaum.

“We think of DNA as a universal language of life and it’s not actually totally true,” Cytrynbaum said. “We have what are known as codons, which are little sets of three DNA base pairs, which then get translated as a specific amino acid. And the translation between codons and amino acids is not quite the same in Candida albicans as it is in humans.”

Optogenetics in the cell signaling also benefits from enhanced precision relative to other techniques such as chemical induction systems, Cytrynbaum said.

Chemical induction systems add a certain chemical such as estrogen or doxycycline to turn on genes, but as a side effect, have potent impacts on the cell in general, Cytrynbaum said.

“If you want to turn [a gene] off, you have to change the media and there will still be some of the chemical left in the cells,” Cytrynbaum said. “You have to wash them a few times and then wait a while and there’s all sorts of messiness there. Whereas with optogenetics, you turn off the light, and [the gene] just turns off.”

Beyond the applications of optogenetics, supporting the researchers behind these advances requires opportunities for mentorship and networking, Lafer-Sousa said.

Women and other underrepresented groups can encounter challenges in advancing in the scientific field, which emphasized the need for mentorship and opportunities to be able to connect with researchers who had to navigate these issues, Lafer-Sousa said.

“One kind of thing that can be done to support women is to provide opportunities like that for networking and solidarity building and mentorship and growth,” according to Lafer-Sousa.

Growing up with a mother who ran her own lab and working with a successful female graduate adviser helped her see women’s leadership in scientific research was undoubtedly attainable, Lafer-Sousa said.

After nearly seven hours of public comment and around four hours of staff questions, the City of Madison Common Council voted 14-6 in favor of the immediate termination of the Interim Independent Police Monitor Aeiramique “Meeka” Glass of the Office of the Independent Monitor during a council meeting. The meeting began Tuesday evening, and the vote took place around 6:30 a.m. Wednesday.

The resolution was proposed by District 2 Alder Will Ochowicz during an Oct. 6 Common Council meeting, and was subsequently sponsored by eight other Aldermen prior to the Oct. 20 meeting.

In an Oct. 15 blog post, Ochowicz said Glass’ lack of progress on hiring a permanent IPM and the recent revelation of an alleged request to the Police Civilian Oversight Board in “late April or May 2026” to pause the search for who would fill the permanent role, influenced his decision to introduce the proposal.

Glass was hired as the interim IPM for the Madison Police Department on the basis that she would not be allowed to apply for the permanent position, as one of the role’s responsibilities was to conduct the search for and hiring of a permanent IPM, according to the Office of the City Attorney.

Glass was appointed Dec. 8, 2025, her term extending through the duration of the permanent monitor search, which was anticipated to last six to nine months, according to the Office of the City Attorney.

During questioning by District 8 Alder Carmella Glenn, Glass said she was asked by Human Resources Director Erin Hillson if she would consider extending her appointment to 13 months, rather than the timeframe laid out in her job offer, before she even began working as interim IPM.

Glass said the City Attorney Michael Haas and Hillson needed to come to an agreement on whether or not she would be allowed to accept an extended appointment before she would sign onto serving as the IPM for the longer duration.

The Common Council voted June 9 to extend Glass’ appointment until March 31, 2027, as a permanent IPM had not been hired, according to the Office of the City Attorney.

“I love y’all, but I never said I wanted to stay here,” Glass said during questioning from Ochowicz. “What I did to make sure [the PCOB] knew I was going to stay if they needed me to stay was say, ‘I will stay as long as I need to in the interim role, but I would not be applying [for the permanent position].’”

The Office of the City Attorney released an employment review of the interim IPM Oct. 2 that outlined several tasks Glass had yet to complete that are required to finalize the permanent position hiring process, concerns raised by various city officials about Glass’ ability to collaborate and alleged issues with Glass’ adherence to City Administrative Procedural Memoranda.

The PCOB, which serves as the oversight mechanism for the OIPM, released its own evaluation of the interim IPM Oct. 19, which found Glass to be performing at high levels across the board.

PCOB members specifically highlighted Glass’ strengths in leadership, community engagement and communication as aiding in her commitment to independent oversight, her efforts to expand the capacity of the OIPM and her dedication to improving transparency, according to the PCOB evaluation.

“I’ve been here for 10 months, the [OIPM] has been in existence for six years,” Glass said. “We’ve closed the first cases in the time that I’ve been here. I’m the only one in the state who has done this in multiple states and cities, and built oversight agencies from the ground up. [The PCOB] recognizes the skillset that I brought.”

Glass said Corey Ruiz’s death caused the OIPM and the PCOB to put aspects of the hiring search, like the community engagement portion, on the back burner in order to address community engagement surrounding MPD’s role in the fatal shooting.

Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said 140 community members registered for the public comment section of the meeting. The overwhelming majority spoke passionately in opposition to firing Glass.

Speakers opposed to the resolution included members of Madison Students for a Democratic Society, Urban Triage CEO Brandi Grayson, Freedom Action Now, Freedom Inc., former PCOB Chair Maia Pearson and Corey Ruiz’s mother, Elsa Ruiz.

“First, they took away my son, and now they want to take away Glass, someone that I need desperately in my corner,” Elsa Ruiz said. “I trust my community more than I do the police.”

Several community members spoke in support of her termination, citing the recent investigation — conducted by Glass that concluded the way MPD handled the arrest of Richard Johnson contributed to Johnson’s cause of death — as agenda-laced, as well as her involvement in an altercation Aug. 4 with an MPD officer during the Williamson “Willy” St. protests and her subsequent response.

Nicole Graham, a lifelong resident of Madison, said during public comment that she was devastated after MPD fatally shot Corey Ruiz in late July this year, and understands why the Madison community is hurting.

“I myself, at 17 years old, was charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing a officer, and that’s exactly what I saw [Aug. 4],” Graham said. “Accountability doesn’t have a race, it doesn’t have a gender. It has a position when we hire somebody in a position of leadership, that you have to demonstrate that. What I saw was somebody attacking the police.”

A Dane County District Attorney granted a four-year restraining order against Glass filed by the MPD officer involved in the Aug. 4 altercation after the incident, according to WMTV 15 News.

The petition for the restraining order alleges that Glass swatted at and pushed MPD officers multiple times while the encampment formed on Willy St. to protest Corey Ruiz’s death was being torn down by the city, according to WMTV 15 News.

“Do I think that there are opportunities for restorative and transformative practices? 100%,” Glass said during questioning about community accountability. “But do I think everything is a two-way street? Absolutely not. Sometimes the police are wrong, sometimes the police cause harm, and it’s not a time to deflect.”

 A motion to recess the meeting prior to voting on the resolution failed to pass, leading to the final vote in favor of terminating Glass’ appointment immediately. The alders who voted “no” were Glenn, Ellen Zhang, Julia Matthews, Barbara Harrington McKinney, Davy Mayer and Devine Nzegwu.

The meeting room erupted into chaos throughout the vote, with audience members’ disapproving yells toward the aldermen, mayor and city attorney increasing as it became clearer that the resolution would pass.

“To the officials supporting this effort, you may control the agenda, but you don’t control the narrative,” Kylie Tendler, a Madison resident, said. “You may have the votes, but you don’t get to dictate what the community sees, and we see the retaliation, the systems being protected over people and we’re gonna hold you accountable for the choices you make today.”

Editor’s Note: This article was updated Oct. 23 to add “Corey” in “Glass said Corey Ruiz’s death” and “Willy St. to protest Corey Ruiz’s death” for clarity and to distinguish from Elsa Ruiz, Corey Ruiz’s mother.

The University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention received an $11.1 million grant from the National Cancer Institute Sept. 25 to be used to improve strategies for tobacco treatment at community health centers based in Wisconsin and Massachusetts, according to the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.

While there are downward trends in smoking rate in the general population, progress hasn’t been as consistent for groups under socioeconomic pressure and suffering from mental illness, according Danielle McCarthy, one of the UW-CTRI Directors of Research and co-principal investigator of the project.

“The disparities are not around motivation to quit, attempts to quit [or] interest in quitting,” McCarthy said. “It’s about getting the help you need and staying quit long-term,”

Community health centers provide services to populations under socioeconomic and mental distress — patients receiving care at these centers smoke at more than twice the rate of the general population, according to McCarthy.

Researchers will help existing care teams discuss tobacco treatment during appointments for respiratory infections, diabetes management and other concerns, McCarthy said. The project will also connect patients with publicly-funded quit lines that offer medication and expert coaching at no cost, McCarthy said.

“What we’re hoping to accomplish in this project is to give community health centers a suite of tools that can help them offer effective options to the patients who want to change their tobacco use,” McCarthy said.

Unfortunately, treatment for tobacco addiction often lasts only 8-12 weeks, which is not the ideal for treating chronic addictions. McCarthy said. McCarthy looks to put efforts into furthering care into the long term for such patients.

Programs such as the quit line would look to adjust anti-tobacco treatments proactively according to the patient’s needs, with participants working through rounds of treatment for over a year, according to McCarthy.

“We can tweak some things, we can make some changes, we can learn from what worked and what didn’t,” McCarthy said.

Though treatment access can be an issue, withdrawal caused by nicotine addiction can make the process much harder, McCarthy said. Nicotine exposure can often make the brain less sensitive to nicotine and require higher doses, leading to withdrawals that cause irritability, restlessness and difficulty concentrating, according to McCarthy.

Oftentimes, stressful moments in people’s lives can feel similar to nicotine withdrawal, which is often why they turn to it, according to McCarthy. Nicotine medication, such as patches and gum, releases nicotine at lower levels, helping patients manage symptoms of stress and withdrawal when attempting to quit.

“[Nicotine medications] just don’t release the nicotine in your system as quickly, but they can just take the edge off withdrawal and help you get through the worst of it,” McCarthy said.

For college students, the Wisconsin Tobacco Quit Line provides support for quitting vaping and other forms of tobacco, McCarthy said. While the grant focuses on community health center patients, the center’s work still looks to improve addiction treatments to the broader community.

People seeking to quit can learn from previous attempts and return to treatment with adjustments. While quitting may be a long process with a lot of trial and error, professional support can improve people’s chances of achieving change, McCarthy said.

“It’s hard to change,” McCarthy said. “It is possible to change, and there are supports out there that can make it easier and double or even triple your chances of succeeding.”

While environmental factors can influence nicotine use, addiction can affect anyone who smokes or vapes.

Education about nicotine and awareness of available support can often be lacking, leading to addictions more easily, according to UW senior and research assistant at UW-CTRI Stevie Sauler.

“Overall, nicotine is an addictive substance in general,” Sauler said. “So, pretty much anyone is susceptible.”

Sauler primarily works on the Vape Check study, which looks to research the long-term impacts of vaping to the lungs. As an undergraduate researcher, she helps with participant communication, follow-up calls every six months and recording information in the center’s research database.

While vape products can be safer than smoking cigarettes, risks still exist because of their link to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Sauler said.

“We don’t know much about these products. So far, it does seem like it is a little bit better than, a little bit less harmful than smoking,” Sauler said.

In 2021, 4.5% of adults over age 18 were current electronic cigarette users, and e-cigarette use was highest, at 11%, among young adults ages 18-24, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Students interested in Vape Check or other UW-CTRI research can make connections with UW-CTRI researchers and should look into participating in studies when they meet the eligibility requirements, Sauler said.

“I think it’s always worth it to just reach out,” Sauler said.