What to know when the Vikings travel to play the Green Bay Packers on Sunday afternoon:

Vikings at Packers
When: Noon Sunday
Where: Lambeau Field
TV: FOX / KMSP-Channel 9
Radio: KFAN
Line: Packers -6
Over/Under: 41.5

Keys for the Vikings

— The topic of discussion this week was J.J. McCarthy’s mechanics. That’s also the key to the Vikings pulling off an upset at Lambeau Field. Though there should be ample opportunity for the Vikings to pound the rock against a shaky run defense, McCarthy is going to have to hit on some of his opportunities down the field. If his fundamentals from practice translate to accuracy in the game, the Vikings are at least going to give themselves a chance.

Keys for the Packers

— There’s a reason the Packers traded for Micah Parsons. They brought him in to singlehandedly destroy the confidence of opposing teams, and while the ultimate goal is having Parsons do that in the postseason, Green Bay will certainly take it against the Vikings. It’s on Parsons to make life miserable for McCarthy in and out of the pocket. If he can get him out of rhythm, McCarthy has shown he’ll turn the ball over.

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By JESSICA DAMIANO

We tend to think that fall is when the garden winds down, and spring is when the work begins. But there are several chores that, if completed now, will make your spring job much easier.

For starters, pulling up weeds by their roots in the fall will dramatically reduce their reappearance when the weather warms up again. I’m practically addicted to a long-handled tool called Grampa’s Weeder, which makes easy work of the task.

While you’re at it, thoroughly rake beds and borders where fungus, black spot or mildew diseases emerged this year. This will help prevent the pathogens from taking hold in the soil and infecting next year’s plants. Dispose of the leaves and debris in the trash.

Other disease-preventing measures include removing shriveled, “mummified” fruit from tree branches, and disinfecting tomato cages and plant stakes before storing (use a solution made of 1 part bleach and 9 parts water, or spray with a household disinfectant spray and allow to air dry.)

Clean, sharpen and oil tools now so they’ll be ready when you are. There’s little worse than heading out to plant your new seedlings only to find your spade has rusted over the winter.

Protect your trees and property

This Nov. 10, 2025, image provided by Jessica Damiano shows a coiled plastic trunk guard wrapped around a young peach tree to protect it from rabbit and mouse damage over winter. (Jessica Damiano via AP)

If you planted new fruit trees this year, install protective guards around them to prevent mouse and rabbit damage. I’m partial to coiled-plastic trunk wraps, but mesh, wire and higher-end metal tree surrounds are also highly effective.

For safety’s sake, examine tree branches now, and remove any that are split, dead or broken, lest they rip off during winter storms and threaten people and property.

Prepare for new beds

If you’re planning to start new beds next year, save yourself the back-breaking labor of digging up the lawn (or the money spent on renting a sod cutter) by smothering the grass over winter.

Define the future bed and cover the area with large pieces of cardboard or thick layers of newspaper, using landscape staples or rocks to hold it in place. Then, cover it with a few inches of mulch or compost.

The cardboard may be entirely decomposed by spring, but if not, just leave it in place and dig planting holes right through it.

Clear out the old beds

Clear out spent vegetable beds, then lightly turn the soil, incorporating compost, well-rotted manure and, if indicated by a low pH test result, lime. The amendments will work their way deeply into the soil by spring, enriching the root zone to give next year’s crops a natural, nutritional boost.

And for an early-spring gift to yourself, don’t forget to get flower bulbs (and garlic!) into the ground. The longer you wait, the bigger the risk of delayed blooms, but you can keep planting them as long as the soil is soft enough to dig.

Jessica Damiano writes weekly gardening columns for the AP and publishes the award-winning Weekly Dirt Newsletter. You can sign up here for weekly gardening tips and advice.

For more AP gardening stories, go to https://apnews.com/hub/gardening.

By Robbie Sequeira, Stateline.org

When six Southern public university systems this summer formed a new accreditation agency, the move shook the national evaluation model that higher education has relied on for decades.

The news wasn’t unexpected: It arrived a few months after President Donald Trump issued an executive order in April overhauling the nation’s accreditation system by, among other things, barring accreditors from using college diversity mandates. It also came after U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in May made it easier for universities to switch accreditors.

The accreditation process, often bureaucratic, cumbersome and time consuming, is critical to the survival of institutions of higher education. Colleges and their individual departments must undergo outside reviews — usually every few years — to prove that they meet certain educational and financial standards. If a school is not accredited, its students cannot receive federal aid such as Pell grants and student loans.

Some accreditation agencies acknowledge the process needs to evolve. But critics say the Trump administration is reshaping accreditation for political reasons, and risks undermining the legitimacy of the degrees colleges and universities award to students.

Trump said during his campaign that he would wield college accreditation as a “secret weapon” to root out DEI and other “woke” ideas from higher education. He has made good on that pledge.

Over the summer, for example, the administration sent letters to the accreditors of both Columbia and Harvard universities, alleging that the schools had violated federal civil rights law, and thus their accreditation rules, by failing to prevent the harassment of Jewish students after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel.

The administration’s antipathy toward DEI has prompted some accreditors to remove diversity requirements. The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, for instance, removed diversity and inclusion language from its guiding principles earlier this year. Under White House pressure, the American Bar Association this year suspended enforcement of its DEI standards for its accreditation of law schools and has extended that suspension into next year.

But state legislatures laid the groundwork for public university accreditation changes even before Trump returned to the White House.

In 2022, Florida enacted a law requiring the state’s public institutions to switch accreditors every cycle — usually every few years — forcing them to move away from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, known as SACSCOC.

North Carolina followed suit in 2023, with a law prohibiting the 16 universities within the University of North Carolina system and the state’s community colleges from receiving accreditation from the same agency for consecutive cycles.

Then, the consortium of six Southern university systems this summer launched its new accreditation agency, called the Commission for Public Higher Education. The participating states include Florida and North Carolina, along with Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a news release that the commission will “break the ideological stronghold” that other accreditation agencies have on higher education. Speaking at Florida Atlantic University, he said the new organization will “upend the monopoly of the woke accreditation cartels.”

“We care about student achievement; we care about measurable outcomes; we care about efficiency; we care about pursuing truth; we care about preparing our students to be citizens of our republic,” DeSantis said.

Jan Friis, senior vice president for government affairs at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which represents accrediting agencies, said the century-old system is in the midst of its most significant changes since the federal government tied accreditation to student aid after World War II.

“If the student picks a school that’s not accredited by a recognized accreditor, they can’t spend any federal aid there,” Friis said. “Accreditation has become the ‘good housekeeping seal of approval.’”

What’s next for the new accreditor

Dan Harrison, who is leading the startup phase of the Commission for Public Higher Education, described accreditation as “the plumbing of the whole higher ed infrastructure.”

“It’s not dramatic. It’s not meant to be partisan. But it’s critical to how schools function,” said Harrison, who is the University of North Carolina System’s vice president for academic affairs.

Though the founding schools of the new commission are all in the South, Harrison said, he expects accreditation to shift away from the long-standing geography-based model. In the past, universities in the South were accredited by SACSCOC simply because of location. In the future, he said, public universities across the country might instead be grouped together because they share similar governance structures, funding constraints and oversight.

“In 2025, if you were designing accreditation from scratch, you wouldn’t build it around geography,” Harrison said. “Public universities have more in common with each other across states than they do with private or for-profit institutions in their own backyard.”

The Commission for Public Higher Education opened with an initial cohort capped at 10 institutions within the first six states. Harrison said that based on the interest, the group could have accepted 15 to 20.

“I thought we’d be at six or seven. We reached 10 quickly and across a wider range of institutions than expected,” he said. “We already have an applicant outside the founding systems. That’s well ahead of where I thought we would be.”

That early interest, he said, reflects frustration among public institutions around finances. In particular, public universities are mandated to undergo audits from the state, but also feel burdened by audits required by accreditors.

“Public universities already undergo multiple audits and state budget oversight,” he said. “Then accreditation requires them to do the same work again. It feels like reinventing the wheel and it pulls faculty and staff away from teaching and research.”

Harrison estimates it will take five to seven years for the new accreditor to be fully up and running, and that institutions will need to maintain dual accreditation to avoid risking Pell Grants and federal loans.

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The commission is busy assembling peer review teams made up primarily of current and former public university leaders such as governing board members, system chancellors, provosts, chief financial officers, deans and faculty. In contrast to regional accreditors, which typically draw reviewers from both public and private institutions, the new commission is prioritizing reviewers from public universities.

“Ultimately, we want to be a true nationwide accreditor,” Harrison said. “Not a regional one. Not a partisan one. Just one that is organized around sector and peer expertise.”

While the creation of a public university accreditor is new, the concept of sector-specific accreditation exists in other parts of higher education, including for two-year colleges.

Mac Powell, president of the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, said that tailoring accreditation to a sector can make the peer-review model more meaningful, because reviewers can identify with similar challenges. He said reviewers have been moving away from measuring resources and bureaucratic compliance toward assessing what students actually get out of their education.

“The big shift was moving from counting inputs to asking, ‘Did students actually learn what we said they would learn?’” said Powell, whose organization accredits 138 colleges across Arizona, California, New York and the Pacific.

The most important metric all accreditation models should value is how they transition their students into the workforce, he said.

“Every accreditor today is paying much more attention to retention, persistence, transfer, career outcomes and return on investment,” Powell said. “It’s becoming less about how many books are in the library and more about whether students can find a pathway to the middle class.”

The institution evolves

Stephen Pruitt is in his first year as the president of SACSCOC, the accreditation organization that the half-dozen Southern state university systems just left. Pruitt, a Georgia native, jokes that his “Southern accent and front-porch style” has helped him break down the importance of accreditation to just about anyone.

In simple terms, he said, accreditation is the system that makes college degrees real. But he feels he has to clarify a misconception about the role of accreditation agencies like SACSCOC.

“There’s this myth that I’m sitting in Atlanta deciding if institutions are good or not,” he said. “That’s not how American accreditation works. Your peers evaluate you. People who do the same work you do.”

At the same time, Pruitt isn’t dismissing the concerns that prompted states such as Florida and North Carolina to explore alternatives to SACSCOC. According to Pruitt, institutions have long raised concerns about slow turnaround times, redundant paperwork and standards that have not always adapted quickly to the evolving landscape in higher education.

“Some of the frustration is real. Institutions want less redundancy and more responsiveness. Competition isn’t something we’re afraid of,” he said. “We’re doing a full audit of our processes. We have to be more contemporary. Faster approvals, more flexibility, more transparency. Accreditation shouldn’t just be the stick. It should be the carrot too.”

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Miriam Fauzia, The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS — The saying goes that you should stay out of the kitchen if you can’t take the heat, but new research suggests otherwise — for the sake of your blood pressure.

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In a study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, researchers at UNT Health Fort Worth found at-home heat therapy may hold the key to lowering blood pressure. A group of older adults wore heated pants for an hour a day, four days a week. After eight weeks, their blood flow improved and their systolic blood pressure, which measures blood flow when the heart beats, dropped by around 5 points.

The study comes at a time when nearly 120 million American adults have high blood pressure, but only one in four of those adults has it under control. In Texas, about 32% of adults report being told by a health care professional they have high blood pressure. And in 2023, high blood pressure was a primary or contributing cause in over 664,000 deaths in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Exploring ways to reduce the risks of high blood pressure — like stroke and heart attack — is crucial, and “this is an important proof-of-concept study,” said Dr. Amit Khera, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center, who was not involved in the research.

Khera doesn’t see heat therapy “as a replacement for blood pressure medicine,” he said, but he does find it intriguing. “It could be a potential adjunctive treatment for other heart diseases and problems.”

Crank up the heat

Anyone who’s stepped out of a sauna or settled into a hot tub knows heat can feel good. Research backs that up: A 2025 study found soaking in hot water can lower blood pressure, stimulate the immune system and, over time, improve how the body handles heat stress.

Other studies similarly found heat therapy can improve cardiovascular function in middle-aged and older adults — whether or not they have chronic diseases — and that its benefits can be comparable to aerobic exercise, said Scott Romero, an associate professor of physiology and anatomy at UNT Health, who led the study.

“The crazy thing is, the cardiovascular responses to heat exposure are almost identical to exercise,” Romero said. “Heart rate changes, blood flow changes, muscle changes. It’s almost identical, which is one of the reasons why we think that heat therapy is efficacious, especially in a clinical population, because it almost mimics exercise.”

Raising your core temperature with heat therapy usually means regular time in a sauna or hot tub — tough if you don’t have either. To make heat therapy more accessible, Romero and Ysabella Ruiz, the study’s first author and a graduate student in Romero’s lab, tested whether pants lined with tubes that circulate hot water could deliver similar cardiovascular benefits. (The pants, Romero said, were adapted from suits developed by NASA to study cardiovascular function during heat stress.)

The researchers recruited 19 adults, aged 55 to 80, without a diagnosed condition of high blood pressure and split them into two similarly aged groups. One wore heated pants circulating water at nearly 124 degrees Fahrenheit, which raised skin temperature to about 104 degrees. (Romero and Ruiz chose that setting based on earlier work showing it nudged up core body temperature by about one to two degrees Fahrenheit over an hour in older adults.) The other group wore pants that were mildly warm, with the water heated near 88 degrees Fahrenheit and skin temperatures just over 90 degrees. Romero said these pants would feel pleasant but wouldn’t make people sweat like in the heat therapy group.

Participants had their blood pressure checked three ways: at the start of the study, during the day while active and after eight weeks. The researchers also used ultrasound before and after the treatment to see how well it helps widen the endothelium, or inner lining, of a blood vessel to let blood flow. Problems with this lining are among the earliest signs of aging in the circulatory system and can appear even without the usual risk factors for heart disease. When the lining stops functioning normally, the risk of clogged arteries, cardiovascular disease and complications such as stroke or death goes up.

The participants kept their normal routines, setting aside an hour a day, four days a week, to wear the pants. After eight weeks, when they returned to the lab for final tests, the results stood out: systolic blood pressure was about 5 points lower for the heat therapy group, and on ultrasound, the inner lining of the blood vessels among those group members seemed much improved, dilating better than before.

Further studies needed

Romero and Ruiz aren’t sure why the heated pants led to these results. One possibility, Romero said, is that the brain adjusts how tense or springy blood vessels are in response to heat. Another is that the vessels change and improve with repeated heat exposure.

“We think that some of those things are actually changing long term,” Romero said. “We didn’t actually measure the mechanisms,” since the study focused on whether the therapy would be effective in this population.

Khera is curious how the results would translate to people with diagnosed hypertension. There’s also a question of the clinical significance of a modest drop in blood pressure when treating patients one on one.

“On a population level, if you treated 100,000 people, 5 points help,” Khera said. “But on an individual level, [blood pressure] pills are much stronger than that. … If your blood pressure is modestly high and you want to start with this as a feasible first step, as they continue to do more studies, this could be a potential treatment.”

Khera added it’s unclear how long the benefits of heat therapy last. Romero and Ruiz acknowledged that’s something they hope to determine as they investigate the underlying biology behind the results.

The researchers’ longer-term goal with at-home heat therapy is to create an accessible way for older adults to acclimate to heat.

“We know that older folks are most at risk for heat-related illnesses, especially in Texas, where we have really hot summers,” Romero said. “Those older folks are the ones who are getting sick and the ones that are dying during heat waves. Our idea is to be proactive about these heat waves and have individuals heat acclimate themselves at home.”

Romero said preliminary data from his lab suggests that at-home heat therapy can help older adults build better resilience to heat stress. That matters because heat-related deaths disproportionately affect older adults, and research from 2024 projects that as many as 246 million more people in this demographic will face dangerous levels of heat by 2050.

Miriam Fauzia is a science reporting fellow at The Dallas Morning News. Her fellowship is supported by the University of Texas at Dallas. The News makes all editorial decisions.

©2025 The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.