The Wisconsin Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Monday on whether a law that legislators adopted more than a decade before the Civil War bans abortion and can still be enforced.

Abortion rights advocates stand an excellent chance of prevailing, given that liberal justices control the court and one of them remarked on the campaign trail that she supports abortion rights. Monday's arguments are little more than a formality ahead of a ruling, which is expected to take weeks.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers acknowledged Wednesday that they will now have to put grudges aside and work together under a tied 67-67 Minnesota House.

Unofficial election results show that the party breakdown is split between Democrats and Republicans in the Minnesota House, effectively ending the two-year Democratic-Farmer-Labor trifecta control of state government. Republicans flipped three key swing districts on Tuesday.

DFL incumbents in two House Districts won their races by razor-thin margins, according to preliminary election data last updated on Wednesday afternoon. Rep. Dan Wolgamott, DFL-St. Cloud, won by 28 votes, and Rep. Brad Tabke, DFL-Shakopee, won by 13 votes. These results will likely be recounted, though they are expected to remain the same.

Democrats still control the Minnesota Senate and the governor’s office. Divided government in recent years has often led to acrimony and stalemate; in 2017, then-Gov. Mark Dayton and the GOP-controlled Legislature wound up in litigation when he vetoed their operating budget.

If elected, Donald Trump has vowed to demolish what he calls the “deep state” – a conspiratorial term for the American federal bureaucracy. A second Trump administration, running mate JD Vance has said, should fire thousands of civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists.

Trump has said he would tap the billionare Elon Musk as the hatchet man to lead his proposed government commission on “efficiency” in government.

Compared with the other fireworks of the campaign – like Trump’s promise to criminally prosecute his political rivals and suppress news organizations – threats to gut the United States’ vast federal bureaucracy don’t get much attention. But doing so is a big a threat to democracy.

For years, conservatives have claimed that taking power from government agencies gives it back to the people. Yet while it might seem counterintuitive, Americans actually exercise their sovereignty through the administrative state.

The American administrative state was established almost 100 years ago by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As a historian of American democracy, I think it’s valuable to remember what the old deal looked like while Trump rails against the New Deal.

For those unaware, a local blog with some great resources on some of the smaller, less covered local elections this (and every) year. Always worth a read.

Many of the state’s abandoned places vanished without a trace. But some still attract visitors.

October has long been associated with ghosts – from ancient Celtic festivals to ward off restless spirits after harvest time to the modern standby of using an old sheet to make a last-minute Halloween costume. In the middle of the 19th century, however, popular portrayals of ghosts became a year-round staple, in part because photographers discovered that they could depict them.

The first ghost photographs were accidents. Early cameras required 30 seconds or more to take a photo. If someone wandered briefly into the shot, the resulting picture would contain their ghostly trace superimposed over substantial furniture, buildings or people who had held still for the full exposure.

When shrewd photographers realized that the inconvenience of long exposure time could become an asset, detailed directions for creating these illusions proliferated. Photographers could cut ghost figures from transparent material and place them onto glass negatives or inside camera bodies. Or they could make real people half-transparent through tricks of double exposure.

Remains in France found by archaeologists and geneticists suggest at least two lineages—not just one—of late Neanderthals in Europe.

The decades out-of-date genetics taught in most U.S. schools stokes misconceptions about race and human diversity. A biological anthropologist calls for change.

Scientists at the University of Waterloo have identified one of the doomed crew members of Captain Sir John S. Franklin's 1846 Arctic expedition to cross the Northwest Passage. According to a recent paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, DNA analysis revealed that a tooth recovered from a mandible at one of the relevant archaeological sites was that of Captain James Fitzjames of the HMS Erebus. His remains show clear signs of cannibalism, confirming early Inuit reports of desperate crew members resorting to eating their dead.

"Concrete evidence of James Fitzjames as the first identified victim of cannibalism lifts the veil of anonymity that for 170 years spared the families of individual members of the 1845 Franklin expedition from the horrific reality of what might have befallen the body of their ancestor," the authors wrote in their paper. "But it also shows that neither rank nor status was the governing principle in the final desperate days of the expedition as they strove to save themselves."

The majority of health insurers in the state’s individual and small employer health insurance markets will raise premiums between 9% and 15% next year, in yet another sign health care costs are back on the rise.

The largest animal on Earth is thought to be the blue whale, but these strange sea creatures can grow even longer — reaching up to 150 feet (46 meters) in length.

There are around 175 species of siphonophores living in the deep sea throughout all of Earth’s oceans, although not every species is found in each ocean. Many siphonophores are long and string-like, but some, like the venomous Portuguese man o'war (Physalia physalis), resemble jellyfish.

Although a siphonophore may look like a single animal, it is actually a colony made up of individual organisms called "zooids," which each have a distinct function within the colony despite being genetically identical. Some catch prey and digest food, while others enable the colony to reproduce or swim. An individual zooid cannot survive on its own because they specialize in one function, so they rely on each other to form a "body."

Members of a task force in Minnesota are making progress toward issuing a report on how the state might regulate psychedelics, including psilocybin, MDMA and LSD. The group earlier this month held preliminary votes on certain policy recommendations—including on eliminating penalties for personal possession and regulating clinical access to some entheogens—with more votes expected at its next meeting in October.

Two recommendations that are already approved by the body are the creation of a state-regulated clinical psilocybin program and the appropriation of research dollars to study the therapeutic use of psilocybin, MDMA and LSD. It will be up to lawmakers, however, to introduce and pass any psychedelics-related legislation to formally enact the suggestions.

As Russian missile strikes and heavy assaults by ground troops pace deadly attacks on Ukraine, a new report by University of Virginia researchers reveals another destructive facet of Russia's invasion.

Using commercial satellite imagery and other open-source information, associate professor of sociology Fiona Greenland and other researchers with UVA's Cultural Resilience Informatics and Analysis, or CURIA, Lab determined that multiple ancient Ukrainian burial mounds have been damaged in two locations currently occupied by Russian troops—a potential violation of international law.

These historically significant burial sites, called "kurgans," were constructed by the ancient peoples of the Ukrainian steppe. The mounds, up to 65 feet tall, contain human remains and artifacts dating back as far as 3000 B.C.E.

A team of student volunteers on an archaeological dig in northern France has had a surprise communication from the past.

Regulators issued a permit to Magellan Pipeline Company at a hearing last week, keeping in view the objections of several tribal nations who say the pipestone quarried at the national monument and the surrounding areas are central to the spiritual practices of tribes across the continent.

“It’s just too much of a risk,” Upper Sioux Community tribal historic preservation officer Samantha Odegard told the commission.

Pipestone National Monument was created in 1937 to protect the rights of Indigenous people to quarry pipestone — or catlinite, a soft, red stone used to make pipes and works of art. The National Park Service consults with 23 tribal nations with documented ties to the quarry on the monument’s activities.

On Saturday, the Minneapolis Institute of Art will open the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room. According to Mia, the shrine is only the third of its kind in the U.S. and the only one outside of the East Coast.

At a preview event, Gelek Namgyal, the vice president of the Tibetan American Foundation of Minnesota, spoke about what this means for the local Tibetan community. According to the foundation, Minnesota has the second largest Tibetan population in the country after Queens, N.Y., with an estimated 5,000 Tibetans living in the state.

“This is a great opportunity for everyone, regardless of cultural and religious background, to be able to explore Tibet culture, religion and Tibetan arts, which basically emphasizes love and compassion,” Namgyal said.

Researchers still don’t know the cause of a recently discovered malware infection affecting almost 1.3 million streaming devices running an open source version of Android in almost 200 countries.

Security firm Doctor Web reported Thursday that malware named Android.Vo1d has backdoored the Android-based boxes by putting malicious components in their system storage area, where they can be updated with additional malware at any time by command-and-control servers. Google representatives said the infected devices are running operating systems based on the Android Open Source Project, a version overseen by Google but distinct from Android TV, a proprietary version restricted to licensed device makers.

Researchers in Mississippi have discovered a previously unknown species of parasitoid wasp that matures inside the bodies of living, adult fruit flies before bursting out of them like a xenomorph in the "Alien" movies.

The sneaky predator, which researchers have named Syntretus perlmani, is the first wasp found to infect adult fruit flies — similar wasp species are known to target flies during their younger, more vulnerable larva and pupa life stages. The wasps are parasitoids rather than parasites because they always kill their hosts, while parasites usually don't.

A team of scientists came across the wasp by chance while collecting a common fruit fly called Drosophila affinis in their backyards in Mississippi. They published their findings Wednesday (Sep. 11) in the journal Nature.

Last month, in a profile of newly named Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, The New York Times included a throwaway line about "the time his wife had seized his Dreamcast, the Sega video game console, because he had been playing to excess." Weeks later, that anecdote formed the unlikely basis for the unlikely Crazy Taxi: Tim Walz Edition mod, which inserts the Minnesota governor (and top-of-the-ticket running mate Kamala Harris) into the Dreamcast classic driving game.

"Rumor has it that Tim Walz played Crazy Taxi so much his wife took his Dreamcast away from him... so I decided to put him in the game," modder Edward La Barbera wrote on the game's Itch.io page.

It’s a well-worn cycle by this point.

A politician suggests Minneapolis is a charred husk of the city it once was, and Minnesotans take to social media to share picturesque images of its parks and skyline with sarcastic captions. Tuesday was no different.

Former President Donald Trump asserted that the state’s largest city “burned down” during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris and, within moments, social media was rife with posts depicting grassy hills and scenic sunsets.