Mayo Clinic researchers have identified a rare mutation in the MET gene that can directly cause metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease. The mutation disrupts the liver’s ability to process fat, leading to inflammation, scarring, and potentially cirrhosis. The discovery began with a father and daughter who had the disease without typical risk factors. Large-scale genomic data suggests similar rare variants may quietly contribute to the disease in many more people.
A mysterious form of plague that spread across Eurasia thousands of years before the Black Death has finally revealed a crucial clue. Scientists analyzing ancient DNA discovered the bacterium Yersinia pestis in a 4,000-year-old domesticated sheep from a Bronze Age settlement in the Ural Mountains—the first time the pathogen has ever been found in a non-human host from that era. Because this early strain couldn’t spread through fleas like the medieval plague, researchers have long puzzled over how it traveled so widely.
A newly identified protein may hold the key to preventing diabetic blindness. Researchers discovered that LRG1 triggers the earliest damage in diabetic retinopathy by constricting tiny retinal blood vessels and reducing oxygen supply. In mice, shutting down this protein stopped the damage before it could take hold. The finding could pave the way for treatments that protect vision before symptoms ever begin.
A team of physicists has experimentally confirmed a long-predicted sequence of exotic magnetic phases in an atomically thin material. When cooled, the material forms tiny magnetic vortices before transitioning into a second ordered magnetic state—exactly as predicted by a famous theoretical model from the 1970s. Observing both phases together for the first time validates key ideas about how magnetism behaves in two dimensions. The findings could help inspire ultracompact technologies built on nanoscale magnetic control.
Gravity may seem constant, but it actually varies across the planet—and one of the strangest places is Antarctica, where gravity is slightly weaker than expected. Scientists have traced this “gravity hole” to slow, deep movements of rock inside Earth that unfolded over tens of millions of years. Using earthquake data to essentially create a CT scan of the planet’s interior, researchers reconstructed how the anomaly evolved and discovered that it strengthened between about 50 and 30 million years ago.
Researchers have discovered a new way to increase a key brain protein damaged in Rett syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that affects thousands of children worldwide. Early studies in mice and patient-derived cells show the approach can restore normal brain cell function, raising hopes for future therapies.
CBD and CBG, two non-intoxicating cannabis compounds, may help combat fatty liver disease by boosting liver energy reserves and restoring cellular cleanup systems. In the study, both compounds improved blood sugar control and reduced harmful lipids linked to fatty liver disease. Researchers say the findings point to a promising new plant-based approach to treating metabolic liver disorders.
Koalas suffered a massive population decline that left them with dangerously low genetic diversity. However, new genomic research suggests their rapid rebound may be helping reverse some of that genetic damage. As koala numbers rise, recombination is mixing their remaining DNA into new combinations, which can rebuild functional diversity. The findings suggest that fast population recovery can sometimes help species regain lost evolutionary potential.
A Rutgers-led study found that eating less protein may help slow liver cancer in people with impaired liver function. When damaged livers can’t properly clear toxic ammonia from protein metabolism, the excess ammonia can feed tumor growth. In mice, reducing dietary protein lowered ammonia levels, slowed tumor growth, and significantly improved survival.
Researchers in Sweden have engineered a cell-free cartilage scaffold that can guide the body to rebuild damaged bone. By removing the cells but preserving the structure and natural growth signals, the material acts as a blueprint for the body’s own repair process. In animal studies, it helped regenerate bone without triggering strong immune reactions. The team now plans to scale up production and begin testing the approach in humans.
Most of our daily actions may happen without much thought. Researchers found that around 65% of everyday behaviors are triggered automatically by habit rather than conscious decisions. Many of these habits actually support our personal goals, helping us follow through on things like healthy routines. The key to lasting change, scientists say, is building new positive habits while disrupting the cues that trigger bad ones.
Scientists have discovered a newly identified marine fungus that can infect and kill toxic algae responsible for harmful blooms. The microscopic parasite, named Algophthora mediterranea, attacks algae such as Ostreopsis cf. ovata, which produces toxins that can irritate the lungs, skin, and eyes of people exposed during coastal blooms. Remarkably, the fungus can infect several different algae species and even survive on pollen, suggesting it is far more adaptable than most known marine parasites.
A tiny piece of moss helped expose a cemetery scandal in Illinois, where workers allegedly dug up graves and resold burial plots. By identifying the moss and analyzing its chlorophyll to estimate its age, scientists proved the remains had been moved recently—evidence that helped secure convictions.
Cocaine addiction isn’t simply a failure of willpower — it’s the result of lasting biological changes in the brain. Researchers at Michigan State University discovered that repeated cocaine use rewires communication between the brain’s reward system and the hippocampus, the region responsible for memory. A protein called DeltaFosB builds up with continued drug use and acts like a genetic switch, altering how neurons function and strengthening the brain’s drive to seek cocaine.
Advanced 3D reconstructions of the comb jelly’s aboral organ reveal a sensory system far more complex than scientists expected. The organ contains a wide variety of specialized cells and is closely linked to the animal’s nerve network, allowing it to coordinate behavior and orientation in the water. Researchers say it may function as a primitive brain-like center. The discovery suggests that centralized nervous systems might have evolved independently in different animal lineages.
(The Center Square) - A Wisconsin bill would ban student cell phone use throughout the school day, expanding on a previous law that requires all school districts to approve a plan to prohibit cell phones during instructional time by July…
(The Center Square) - Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers signed bills Friday to define grooming as a crime and requiring school districts to define appropriate communication between staff and students.
(The Center Square) – School leaders in New Richmond, Wisconsin could soon be answering questions from federal investigators about their school bathrooms.
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race could have spurred another bank-breaking election cycle. Instead, national super donors have kept their pocketbooks closed, and with only a month until the election, the liberal candidate appears to be sailing ahead in contributions.
Wisconsin Court of Appeals Judge Chris Taylor, the liberal candidate, has raised more than $3.8 million over the past year, compared to the $438,000 conservative candidate Maria Lazar, who is also an appellate judge, has brought in.
The low-key nature of this year’s race is a sharp reversal from the 2025 state Supreme Court contest, in which the candidate campaigns, political parties, outside interest groups and mega billionaire Elon Musk combined to spend a record $144.5 million on the contest. Brad Schimel lost to Susan Crawford, maintaining the liberal majority on the court.
But the financial landscape of the election is not a done deal, both camps say.
“We can’t take anything for granted on our side,” said Sam Roecker, a Taylor adviser. “We know that there are supporters of (Lazar’s) who have the capacity to dump a lot of money in this race, and we saw what happened last time around when tens of millions of dollars got poured in.”
And as more voters start paying attention to the race, Lazar has a “window of opportunity” in the weeks leading up to the April 7 election, Republican strategist Bill McCoshen said.
“The truth is a lot of folks on the conservative side thought that our candidate wasn’t going to have a very strong chance a month ago. Now we think she could actually win,” McCoshen said.
Without big spending, this year’s state Supreme Court campaigns aren’t breaking through to voters like they did in 2025. Just 6% of voters said they had heard a lot about the election, compared to 39% at the same time last year, according to a Marquette Law School Poll released last month.
Despite Taylor’s wide fundraising advantage and outsize TV advertising, about two-thirds of voters are undecided, the same poll found. Taylor polled 5 percentage points higher than Lazar among voters who have made a decision, narrowly outside the margin of error.
“The real point is it’s not getting through to voters, or voters haven’t tuned into it. But you know, that’s more than a six to one greater awareness a year ago than it is today,” said Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll. “I’m not saying that we’ll go into election day without anybody having heard anything, but it was an earlier campaign last year and with more resources behind it.”
Generally, liberal candidates have an advantage in spring judicial elections, Franklin said. College graduates and older voters, who have shifted leftward over the past several decades, are the primary voting blocs in spring court elections.
The stakes are different this cycle. The court’s liberal majority is secure. The winner will replace retiring conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley. Still, losing this race would make it even harder for conservatives to regain power on the state’s high court. If they lose this year, they would have to retain the seats held by conservatives Annette Ziegler next year and Brian Hagedorn in 2029 and then flip seats held by liberals Rebecca Dallet and Jill Karofsky in 2028 and 2030.
“Last year’s was to determine which ideological faction will have control of a majority of the court, and this year’s won’t change that. This year’s is to replace a conservative on a court that leans liberal already,” said Jeff Mandell, the co-founder of the progressive organization Law Forward.
Janine Geske. a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, said that liberal voters have been galvanized to turn out for judicial elections by hot-button national issues like abortion and gerrymandering that have taken center stage in the state’s highest court.
“Those issues became really the issues on the ballot versus the candidates themselves. As a result, I think we had more progressive candidates,” Geske said.
It’s a playbook that was adopted by Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz, who won Wisconsin’s high-profile race in 2023 on a platform of sharing her “values” regarding political issues that were likely to come before the court.
Lazar just might find success with that strategy, too, McCoshen said.
“Judge Lazar is doing a better job of at least tipping her hat to what her conservative leanings may be so that voters have a better understanding of what they’re voting for,” McCoshen said.
This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.
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After a federal appeals board barred most detained immigrants from seeking bond, court filings challenging their confinement have surged in Wisconsin and nationwide.
Over the past six months, dozens of immigrants held in Wisconsin jails awaiting deportation have asked federal judges to review the legality of their detention — a legal strategy rarely used here in recent years. Judges have ruled in their favor in more than half the cases.
Two forces are driving the influx: an ICE enforcement surge in neighboring Minnesota and a ruling that makes nearly all unauthorized immigrants in ICE custody ineligible for bond.
A federal judge in California has since invalidated that bond restriction everywhere except Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi — states in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the rule. Immigration attorneys are now working to keep clients’ cases in Midwestern courts and out of the South, home to some of ICE’s largest detention facilities.
Over the past six months, dozens of immigrants held in Wisconsin jails awaiting deportation have challenged their detention in federal court. Judges ruled in their favor in more than half the cases, pushing back on new federal immigration enforcement practices.
Wisconsin’s federal courts have not seen comparable volumes of immigration-related habeas corpus petitions, which challenge the legality of a person’s detention, in at least a decade. More than a third of the petitions heard in Wisconsin since 2016 were filed in the past six months.
Two forces are driving the influx: the Trump administration’s effort to halt bond for virtually all detainees and its enforcement surge in neighboring Minnesota.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Board of Immigration Appeals ruled last September that all unauthorized immigrants in ICE custody are ineligible for bond, meaning they must remain in custody while their case plays out.
The ruling reversed a long-standing practice that previously enabled many immigrants to continue their cases while out on bond. In its wake, habeas petitions became one of few remaining paths to an exit.
Soon after the board’s ruling, the Trump administration targeted Minnesota in its immigration crackdown, deploying thousands of federal agents to patrol the Twin Cities and nearby rural communities. The White House claimed in early February that the campaign resulted in the arrests of more than 4,000 immigrants.
Since January 2025, ICE has transferred at least 108 immigrants from Minnesota to the Douglas County jail in Superior, Wisconsin. The sheriff’s office contracts with ICE for detainee housing, as do three other Wisconsin counties.
ICE transferred at least 108 immigrant detainees from Minneapolis to the Douglas County Jail in Superior, Wisconsin, between January and October 2025
Source: Wisconsin Watch data analysis
At least 15 immigrants held in Douglas County have filed habeas petitions in Wisconsin’s Western District Court since September 2025. Judges have thus far sided with immigrants four times, including two Ecuadorian men arrested in a raid on a construction site in a Minneapolis suburb. Five of the cases remain pending.
Those detained in the Douglas County jail made up two-thirds of the Western District’s immigration-related habeas petitions between September 2025 and February 2026.
While arrest locations were not available for every case, available data indicates that 60% of immigrants who passed through the Douglas County jail between January and October 2025 were arrested in Minnesota.
The Madison-based court had not previously handled an immigration-related habeas case in over a decade.
Habeas petitions in the recent past were a “hodgepodge,” said Milwaukee immigration attorney Benjamin Crouse, and were often dismissed or denied by judges in Wisconsin’s Eastern District.
Prior to last September, many habeas petitions challenged the legality of detaining immigrants for months at a time without a clear end date. A Colombian man transferred into ICE custody after a drug arrest in 2014 filed a habeas petition after spending more than 20 months at the Dodge County Detention Facility in Juneau, arguing his detention had stretched beyond reasonable time limits.
Judge William Griesbach denied the man’s petition in 2016. Griesbach has ruled on 17 habeas petitions in the past decade, granting only one: a 2018 petition filed by a Mexican asylum seeker who spent more than two and a half years in the Kenosha County Detention Center without a bond hearing.
In some cases, Griesbach and other federal judges had no choice but to deny or dismiss habeas petitions: In at least 10 cases filed in Wisconsin’s Eastern District Court since 2016, federal immigration officials deported immigrants before the court could fully consider their petitions.
Nearly as many immigrants left ICE custody through other routes, including community supervision and asylum, before a judge could rule on their habeas petitions.
Despite the influx of new cases in the Western District, the Eastern District has still heard roughly two-thirds of the immigration-related habeas petitions filed since September.
Most federal district court judges who have considered habeas petitions since September have ruled against the Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision prohibiting bond hearings for detained immigrants.
Wisconsin’s Eastern District judges are split. Griesbach called the board’s position “persuasive” in December, rejecting a habeas petition filed by a Venezuelan man arrested alongside his wife during a routine check-in at the Department of Homeland Security’s downtown Milwaukee office earlier that year. That man, Diego Ugarte-Arenas, left ICE custody after receiving asylum in January.
Judge Brett Ludwig also sided with the Trump administration’s position on detaining immigrants without bond. Trump appointed Ludwig to the Eastern District bench in 2020; then-President George W. Bush appointed Griesbach to the court in 2002.
Eastern District judges Byron Conway, a Biden appointee, and Lynn Adelman, a Clinton appointee, have both criticized the board’s ruling. “Courts have nearly universally rejected the conclusion of the Board,” Conway wrote in an October order granting the habeas petition of a Nicaraguan man arrested during an incidental run-in with ICE agents.
Western District judges have uniformly ruled against the Board of Immigration Appeals’ bond decisions.
Keeping cases in courts like Wisconsin’s Western District is a high priority for attorneys representing detained immigrants.
“It’s less about jurisdictions where you’re successful and more about avoiding jurisdictions where it’s more problematic,” said St. Paul immigration attorney Solomon Steen, who has represented two clients detained in the Douglas County jail.
When a client arrested in Minnesota lands in a Wisconsin jail, Steen said, attorneys can find them within “hours or days.” Tracking clients’ locations becomes tougher once they are transferred to larger detention facilities elsewhere, he added.
With thousands of immigrants now bouncing between distant detention centers, Steen said many face pressure to give up on their legal cases. “You won’t know if you’ll be able to contact a lawyer if you get detained,” he said. “So wouldn’t it be easier to just take a voluntary departure or take a removal order in immigration court just so that you will know where you are and what’s happening?”
Steen and other attorneys are now working to keep clients’ cases in Midwestern courts — and out of the 5th Circuit’s jurisdiction — even when their whereabouts are unclear, preserving their chances of a successful habeas petition.
Even before the Board of Immigration Appeals blocked most detainees from seeking bond, voluntary departures — wherein an immigrant leaves the U.S. to avoid a deportation on their record — increased 21-fold between January and September of last year.
Meanwhile, an order from a federal district court judge in California has opened the door for many of Wisconsin’s current ICE detainees to request bond for the first time in months.
Judge Sunshine Sykes of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California initially ruled in November that the Department of Homeland Security’s practice of denying bond hearings to most immigrant detainees ran afoul of federal law.
DHS didn’t budge, maintaining that the Board of Immigration Appeals’ rulemaking authority takes precedence over a ruling in federal district court. Chief Immigration Court Judge Teresa Riley, a Department of Justice employee, later directed judges in immigration courts nationwide to continue denying detained immigrants’ requests for bond hearings.
Sykes doubled down last week, rebuking DHS for ignoring her earlier order.
“It is not the executive department’s province and duty to say what the law is,” she wrote.
Sykes vacated Board of Immigration Appeals bond rules in all states outside of the 5th Circuit, which still leaves most immigrants in ICE’s largest detention centers unable to request bond hearings.
Crouse recently observed one Chicago immigration court judge notify immigrants about Sykes’ latest order.
“They’re taking this a little more seriously now, but we still don’t know exactly what this looks like,” he said. He and other Milwaukee-area immigration attorneys are again filing bond motions for their clients. “We’re getting hearings,” he added.
Aissa Olivarez, an attorney with the Community Immigration Law Center in Madison, confirmed that immigrants detained in Dodge County are receiving notice that they are eligible for bond. So far, she said, there is no indication federal immigration authorities are rushing to move Wisconsin detainees to holding facilities farther south.
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