The happier the cows at the end of a level, the more milk for the farmer.

Move over, FarmVille. There’s a new farming video game on the market. Mooving Cows, developed by UW–Madison researchers and released on app stores in January, provides an interactive training experience for the dairy industry.

While UW assistant professor Jennifer Van Os traveled the state in her role as an animal welfare extension specialist, the most common request she fielded from dairy producers was to train staff on proper cow handling. Continuing education in animal handling is an industry requirement, but most free training resources are low-engagement readings and videos. Mooving Cows offers an active learning environment that transports players to a virtual farm and simulates cow handling from the safety of a tablet.

“In a digital game setting, we can remove the risks of causing stress or injury to real cows or people,” Van Os says.

In Mooving Cows, players control the actions of a farmhand and are tasked with guiding cows out of a pen or around a milking parlor. Over eight levels with escalating difficulty, they learn how to gently direct the animals’ movement and how to cautiously handle unpredictable cows in heat. The game rewards patience with stubborn cows and penalizes rash actions that can startle them, such as sudden movements and loud noises. The player’s actions affect the cows’ behaviors, stress levels, and productivity. The happier the cows at the end of the level, the more milk for the farmer.

An early evaluation of Mooving Cows found that it increased knowledge and confidence in cow handling for the Wisconsin dairy employees who played it. Within two months of release, the free app had been downloaded nearly 7,000 times by users across 98 countries.

One reviewer wrote: “This is a great move forward for animal handling education. … [The] behavioral tendencies from the animals very much reminded me of difficulties I had in training farmhands.”

Moore played for the UW from 1990 to 1995, helping to return the Badgers to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1947. Jeff Miller

Former assistant basketball coach Howard Moore ’95 was honored on court before a men’s basketball game on March 2. It was his first return to the Kohl Center since a 2019 accident that killed his wife and daughter and seriously injured him. At halftime, UW athletics announced that new offices in the Kohl Center will be named the Howard Moore Family Men’s Basketball Offices. Moore played for the UW from 1990 to 1995, helping to return the Badgers to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1947; and he served as assistant coach from 2005 to 2009 and 2015 to 2019. “Howard Moore represents everything it means to be a Badger,” says UW athletic director Chris McIntosh ’04, MS’19. “His impact here is deep, and his legacy should be attached to this program forever.”

Johnson: “We can shed light on the complex interplay of multiple pathologies contributing to dementia.” Clint Thayer/UW Department of Medicine

The UW School of Medicine and Public Health has received the largest National Institutes of Health grant in the university’s history to lead a national Alzheimer’s disease study.

The grant, with anticipated funding totaling up to $150 million, will fund a five-year initiative that involves all 37 Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers in the United States, establishing a standardized brain imaging and blood plasma test protocol. There is more than one kind of dementia, and patients can have more than one at the same time, known as “mixed dementia.” The project will help physicians determine which type a patient has so they can provide better treatment.

Researchers are beginning to understand that mixed dementia occurs more frequently than previously realized and can cause multiple changes in the brain. For example, individuals can be initially diagnosed with and treated for Alzheimer’s disease, but their brains may also show signs of vascular dementia or Lewy body dementia.

Without knowing the true cause of patients’ dementia, physicians can’t properly treat them, says Sterling Johnson, study leader and professor of medicine at the School of Medicine and Public Health.

“This study represents a significant milestone in Alzheimer’s research,” he says. “We can shed light on the complex interplay of multiple pathologies contributing to dementia, ultimately advancing our understanding and treatment” of the condition.

The research team aims to recruit at least a quarter of participants from historically underrepresented communities.

“Health disparities are associated with a broad, complex, and interrelated array of factors,” Johnson says, “and it is vital we ensure our findings are applicable to all individuals affected by these devastating conditions.”

You could mistake the sleeping vessels for personal spaceships. Bryce Richter

Catnap, meet the Badger nap. Visitors to UW–Madison’s new Bakke Recreation & Wellbeing Center can retreat from the bright lights of its traditional workout areas to a dim, quiet room with a replicated starry sky and a trio of nap pods.

You could mistake the sleeping vessels — formally called EnergyPods by the company MetroNaps — for personal spaceships. Attached to the reclining chairs are white spheres that wrap around the head and upper body, providing both privacy and the option for total darkness. The nap pods may look futuristic, but they satisfy a primal need for a student population that is susceptible to sleep deprivation. According to the National Sleep Foundation, more than half of college students average less than seven hours of sleep per night. And a lack of sleep is frequently linked to worse academic performance and a slew of other health risks.

The UW’s nap pods make it easy to catch up on z’s. Once you turn on the machine and plug in your headphones, you’re greeted by a soothing voice. You can simply set your timer and pass out, or you can customize your experience: recline or incline your position, turn on massage-like vibration, cycle through relaxing music tracks (or play your own), and adjust built-in lighting. As you approach the end of your rest session, the pods gently rattle you awake with an intensifying combination of light, sound, and vibration. The session times max out at 20 minutes.

“When we talk about sleep hygiene and wellness, we know that the most effective naps are when you’re not going into REM sleep,” says Ellie Knoll ’20, MPH’22, well-being coordinator for University Recreation & Wellbeing.

And Badgers have taken a lot of effective naps. During the pods’ debut semester last fall, they logged 4,538 sessions and 37,466 minutes of rest. They’re most popular on weekends, with highest demand from 4 to 8 p.m.

The nap pods do not require reservation and are located in the Bakke’s Rejuvenation room as part of a calming suite that includes a meditation studio, massage therapy rooms, and consultation space for wellness coaching.

“Bakke doesn’t feel like a traditional gym or rec center,” Knoll says. “It’s really about the whole person — and that includes taking care of your sleep.”

The bills’ passage allows campus to continue research in several high-demand areas. Jeff Miller

UW–Madison is set to receive more than $56 million in new funding for research initiatives after the passage of two federal appropriations packages.

The set of bipartisan bills, signed into law by President Joseph Biden in March, will fund the federal government through September 30. Both pieces of legislation included funding for research projects specific to the UW.

The bills’ passage allows campus to continue research in several high-demand areas, including next-generation energy development and the social and economic vitality of rural communities. Funded initiatives include $28.75 million for the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center; $10 million for PANTHER, a biomedical research program addressing traumatic brain injuries; $5 million for the Center for Unmanned Aircraft System Propulsion; and $2 million to establish a regional center to combat the fentanyl crisis.

The funded initiatives reflect UW–Madison’s diverse research portfolio — one of the nation’s largest. Last year, the university topped $1.5 billion in research expenditures, ranking eighth among all public and private universities.

“This funding is a testament to UW–Madison’s leadership in research and innovation,” says interim vice chancellor for research Cynthia Czajkowski. “It reinforces our commitment to address the state and nation’s most pressing challenges, from enhancing rural economies and driving innovation in the dairy industry to advancing research in sustainability and biofuels.”

Obviously, the problem is not finding the perfect place. The problem is choosing among many perfect places. Here are our top choices; leave yours in a comment below, and we’ll compile responses in the Fall issue. It’d be fun to hear about secret spots and heavenly hideaways, but if 99.9 percent of readers pick the Terrace, who would argue?

The banners replicate the intricacy of beaded bandolier bags, on a grand scale. Jason Weiss

Ho-Chunk artist Molli Pauliot MA’20, PhDx’24 and UW associate professor of design studies Marianne Fairbanks were commissioned to create banners for the university’s 175th anniversary, and they bonded over their mutual love of basketry, textiles, and beadwork. After completing their design work, they sent the two-dimensional graphics to Stephen Hilyard, a UW professor of digital arts, who used 3-D animation software to create the effect of 160,000 individual small beads called “seed beads.”

The banners they designed — three panels, each about seven feet by 16 feet — were hung from the front of Bascom Hall. The piece is called Seed by Seed, incorporating symbols, imagery, and traditional colors of the Ho-Chunk Nation.

“The title of this piece reminds us of the work we are doing to acknowledge that this university sits on the ancestral homeland of the Ho-Chunk people, who were forcibly removed from this place,” Chancellor Jennifer L. Mnookin said at a November 7 ceremony on Bascom Hill. “And it reminds us of our ongoing responsibilities to move our campus community from ignorance to awareness, and that this work can’t be confined to a day, a month, or even a year. It’s a work of a lifetime.”

The installation of the banners coincided with Native November, an annual campus celebration of Indigenous culture. They remained up through the month, then returned during the spring semester as part of a regular rotation of designed banners.

“When the university first raised the flag of the Ho-Chunk Nation [three] years ago, it made national news,” says Pauliot. “It also started a lot of discussions about the university and its relationships with Native Nations. That’s what I’m hoping happens with these banners — that they continue this conversation and expand on it.”

Throughout the design process, Pauliot and Fairbanks drew inspiration from beaded bandolier bags — dazzling Ho-Chunk objects that showcased remarkable technical skill and were highly valued when trading with other tribes. Using the latest 3-D software, Hilyard sought to replicate some of that intricacy on a grand scale.

Pauliot finds the beads an apt metaphor for the developing relationship between UW–Madison and the Ho-Chunk Nation. She serves as the project assistant for Our Shared Future, a university initiative that represents the UW’s commitment to respect the inherent sovereignty of the Ho-Chunk Nation.

“In beadwork, you weave together, one by one, thousands of seed beads to form something beautiful,” Pauliot says. “That’s how I view Our Shared Future. With each little positive interaction, we are hopefully weaving together, seed by seed, a future based on collaboration and mutual respect.”

Campus will become a living laboratory for sustainable practicers. Althea Dotzour

Chancellor Jennifer L. Mnookin has unveiled a set of new initiatives designed to address global challenges, including artificial intelligence (AI) and environmental sustainability.

The Wisconsin Research, Innovation, and Scholarly Excellence (RISE) Initiative will facilitate transformative discoveries and translate them into real-world impact. Over the next three to five years, UW–Madison expects to add between 120 and 150 faculty through RISE in addition to regular hiring, reflecting about a 40 percent increase in faculty hiring.

“We’re going to look at the grand challenges facing our state and the world and grow the faculty in a targeted way that builds on our existing strengths in places where, with strategy and investment, we can accelerate discovery and world-changing research and education,” Mnookin says.

The first area of focus under RISE will be artificial intelligence. UW–Madison researchers have already employed AI to improve the diagnosis of genetic disorders and help farmers detect disease in their crops before it spreads. It can accelerate the pace of discovery, but it also requires thoughtful attention to ethics and security.

RISE will increase UW–Madison’s network of AI innovators, adding up to 50 faculty positions across campus to complement regular hiring already planned in AI and AI-adjacent areas.

The UW is also launching a cross-campus initiative focused on environmental sustainability, including a new interdisciplinary research hub. The initiative represents the most comprehensive environmental sustainability effort in the university’s history and will make campus a living laboratory for sustainable practices.

UW–Madison will be on a course to drastically reduce campus’s environmental impact, cultivate a culture of sustainability, build climate resilience, and spark discoveries that will benefit the university, the people of Wisconsin, and the planet.

Finally, the UW will strengthen its commitment to innovation and entrepreneurial excellence.

“Entrepreneurship is an area where we have opportunities to magnify our economic impact on this state and to shepherd life-changing innovations out into the world,” Mnookin says.

Rosenhagen: “We tend to lack the institutions that train people to be a little more civilized.”

UW–Madison launched the Center for Interfaith Dialogue last year — and not a minute too soon, given the onset of the Israel–Hamas war. Though it had been in the works for a while, the center opened just as the university urgently needed a place where students from different religious backgrounds could get to know one another and engage in civil dialogue. Interim director Ulrich Rosenhagen envisioned a program in which undergraduates serve as “interfaith fellows,” educating themselves about religious traditions while fostering a spirit of understanding in the UW community. He wants them to graduate with the skills to live amicably with fellow citizens, even amid disagreements.

Does that sound like an impossible dream at this turbulent moment? The Center for Interfaith Dialogue plans to make it a reality.

The center is a successor of the UW Center for Religion and Global Citizenry and the Lubar Institute. What is the current mission?

One of the core ideas is to have a learning community with students of different religious and nonreligious backgrounds, including religious minorities. They learn together and get to know each other, and then they serve on campus as ambassadors-at-large for interfaith matters.

What do students get out of the experience?

As a big public university, we have a mission to form responsible citizens. They need to have four years after high school to go out and see how they can contribute to society, function in a democracy, and manage diversity. Student Affairs invested in this effort by starting the Center for Interfaith Dialogue.

How does the program work?

Ten to 15 students meet for a full year, hopefully stay together even when times get rough, and learn to accept each other. On social media, people don’t listen anymore, but here, you need to listen. You can’t just dominate the conversation. And that’s a learning process.

In the first semester, we build trust and form community. The next stage is religious literacy, because interfaith dialogue only works when you know a bit about other practices and convictions. Your peers share their traditions and how they make sense of the world. Then second semester starts with visiting different worship spaces and exploring contemplative practices so students can experience other traditions in the safety of the group. Finally, they have to run events on campus, like interfaith storytelling or an interfaith conference.

So when the students graduate, they’re ready for interfaith leadership.

What role did the center play when the Israel–Hamas war broke out?

We created a faith-leaders advisory board, which is a diverse group of people who work with students. We got them talking to each other after October 7 and came up with an important statement that reflected on civil engagement without harming each other. And that was very helpful.

I know of parents on either side who have called the dean of students and asked, “Is my child safe?” There is a lot of concern, and we need to find ways to bring together the different student groups with their very different perspectives on what’s happening in the Middle East. The center is holding a shared space for the students.

At stressful moments, how can campus balance freedom of speech with a sense of belonging?

The First Amendment is one of the great accomplishments of civilization, but if free speech means that we dominate conversations with no concern for what holds us together as a community, then we need to readjust this approach. Often, it’s the better choice not to provoke and not to push. That might be different for different people. But I think our insistence on First Amendment rights is moving us toward exhaustion. If we just take a deep breath, listen, maybe not use social media constantly, we’ll have more time to digest. And if students can learn this during their four years here, that’s a big step.

What will it take to learn that lesson?

Students have safe spaces on campus that allow them to freely be themselves. This is important. But as a larger community, we also need to learn how to work through different perspectives and disagreement. The center wants to create a safe space for students to express themselves while also training them to engage in conversations across differences.

How will UW–Madison — and the world — benefit when that happens?

Campus is a diverse community, and it’s all very fragile. This is not a factory to produce engineers. It’s a vibrant space that reflects society and culture. The diversity we have here is the diversity we have in America. Universities are trying to model a way to interact with each other and live together as a community, despite our disagreements.

We tend to lack the institutions that train people to be a little more civilized. And I think we have an opportunity to do precisely that with our students at the Center for Interfaith Dialogue.

But torching your regional roots was not the era’s only literary model. Consider the case of Pulitzer-winning writer Zona Gale 1895, MA1899.

As an only child in Portage, Wisconsin, Gale gazed at the wide Wisconsin River that flowed along Canal Street. In 1881, at age seven, she wrote her first story on sheets of wrapping paper and used a ribbon to bind the pages into a book. She read canonical works, including John Milton’s Paradise Lost and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and recorded each plot in a notebook. Clearly this was an author in the making, and her parents supported her literary efforts — unusual for her time and place, not to mention her gender. With her mother’s encouragement, she submitted a novel for publication at age 13 and received the first of what would be many rejection letters.

In 1891, Gale entered the University of Wisconsin and made a mark on the male-dominated campus. She achieved her first success as a writer, publishing in the college literary magazine. In her spare time, she even placed a story in Milwaukee’s Evening Wisconsin. When the newspaper mailed her first professional payment — a three-dollar check — she rode the train all the way from Madison to Portage to show it off to her parents. Following graduation, Gale headed straight for the Evening Wisconsin office, presenting herself to the editor every day for two weeks until he agreed to let her write another story. It was a trifling assignment — a report on a flower show — but Gale gave it everything she had. “I have never put so much emotion into anything else that I have written,” she recalled. Knowing a star when he saw one, the editor made a spot for her on staff.

After earning a master’s degree in literature from the UW, the ambitious writer applied herself to breaking down doors in New York City. She showed up at the New York World day after day with a list of stories she was prepared to write, until the skeptical editors finally relented. She secured a staff job, impressed the Manhattan literati, and — after a few more rejection letters — published short stories in prominent magazines.

In 1904, however, Gale made a career move that would have baffled Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Wolfe. She returned to Portage for the rest of her life.

The Home Folks and Neighbors

The small-town setting became the wellspring of Gale’s fiction: the courthouse, post office, churches, bakeries, twilight bonfires, holidays, funerals, young lovers, town gossips, wise elders, and, of course, the life-giving river. Birth, Miss Lulu Bett, and other best-selling books inspired by Portage made her a leading practitioner of literary realism. She drew on her journalistic skills to examine the pleasures and pitfalls of provincial life, particularly the obstacles to women’s fulfillment.

The plight of one such thwarted heroine is the subject of Miss Lulu Bett, which Gale turned into a daringly true-to-life play that won a 1921 Pulitzer Prize in the drama category — the first ever awarded to a woman or a UW alum. Gale sat in the audience with her Portage friends when a touring production of Miss Lulu Bett opened in Madison later that year. Cheered by the crowd, the author went on stage to thank “the home folks and neighbors.”

Gale used the substantial earnings from her books’ sales to build a Greek Revival–style house on Canal Street, with a study facing the beautiful Wisconsin River. She didn’t hole up there, though — not with a host of problems to solve in her city and state. Few writers have matched Gale in civic involvement. She spoke out for women’s rights, racial equality, education, and pacifism, and she put her time and money where her mouth was. Her advocacy for women students earned her a spot on the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents. She also joined the University of Wisconsin Board of Visitors, the American Union against Militarism, the Wisconsin Free Library Commission, the Woman’s Peace Party, and the National Woman’s Party, helping to draft the Wisconsin equal rights law in 1921. So greatly did she care about her hometown that she even advocated for saving a stately oak tree that was endangered by a new building.

Why would a rich, famous, critically acclaimed writer choose to spend her days in Portage? Gale put it simply: “I have my river.” •