There, Jojean Ziegler, the financial assistance supervisor, and other staff members review the person’s income and assets, including life insurance and money in bank accounts. In the case of married couples or a minor, the county also looks at family members’ assets. Funeral businesses can also ask families to contribute a sum of money, capped at $830 for funerals and cremations, and $1,300 for cemeteries.

Ziegler said the rate increase comes as she’s heard from businesses that their costs are rising. The county last increased its rates in 2016.

In recent years, the number of Ramsey County burial assistance cases has gone up and down. Last year, there were 522 approved, at a cost of $616,000. So far this year, there have been more than 420, costing more than $508,000.

Other counties are bracing for an increase in county assistance cases.

Years ago, Hennepin County raised its burial assistance to $3,000, with up to $2,000 in additional family contributions permitted for enhanced services, spokesperson Carolyn Marinan said. “Suffice it to say we are definitely seeing an increase [in requests for burial assistance],” she wrote in an email, citing the opioid epidemic and COVID as factors driving an increase in demand in recent years.

However, the number of people dying of opioid overdoses has declined recently, partly attributed to more widespread availability of overdose-reversal drug naloxone.

Someday soon college students at Winona State University could join researchers from around North America measuring light from stars and galaxies billions of miles away. Those students would work with small-scale, experimental instruments that could change how we observe the universe.

That’s what professor Adam Beardsley at Winona State hopes to accomplish. An astronomer, Beardsley is in the early stages of designing a radio-wave observatory to study space after recently receiving a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

“The main thing that I really want to do is kind of stand up a facility where you can come to test your ideas,” Beardsley said. “I have collaborators at other universities as well, where we have ideas for how you can develop the technology that you need to do very precise measurements, but we can test them out closer to home.”

At the same time, students would get experience working with equipment they normally wouldn’t touch until after they graduate, where they could work at larger observatories or research stations across the globe. That’s part of a larger goal at Winona State according to Nicole Williams, dean of the university’s College of Science and Engineering.

“They do everything they can so that undergraduate students can get that kind of graduate school research experience,” Williams said.

Most people associate radio wave frequencies with songs and other sounds we hear, but radio waves are a part of the light spectrum. Humans can only see certain colors, but there are all kinds of different ways to see light — think ultraviolet, x-ray or infrared, for example.

Radio waves can tell scientists when a star is formed. New stars and galaxies have hydrogen gas that emits radio waves at a very specific frequency, or color. At the Winona Radio Observatory, students and researchers could track those radio waves from natural phenomenon across the universe.

“It’s all about trying to get as much information as we can,” Beardsley said. “Different parts of the light spectrum can tell you different things.”

One defendant, 44-year-old Martin Cudo, of Lakeville, is scheduled to go on trial Jan. 27, a week after Trump is sworn in, on some of the same charges that were filed against several of his fellow Minnesotans: obstructing an official proceeding, entering a restricted area, disorderly or disruptive conduct and parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building.

Prosecutors say Cudo was among the many others who breached police barricades before entering the Capitol. Along with interior video surveillance images of Cudo’s movements, the criminal complaint includes what the prosecution says is a selfie he took while wearing a COVID mask patterned after the American flag and a red, white and blue “Trump 45″ cap. He eventually gave in to police demands and left the Capitol with other rioters shortly before 3 p.m. but remained on the grounds until about 5 p.m., the complaint read.

“I’m intrigued by the possibility of a pardon,” Cudo said in an interview with the Star Tribune one week after Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Cudo explained that he, his mother and her husband traveled to Washington together, but he left them behind at the rally and joined the march to the Capitol on his own.

“There were bad guys there,” he said. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’d take it all back if I could.”

Asked whether he felt any extra weight of consequence when he voted on Nov. 5, given the direct and immense impact the outcome could have on his life, Cudo said, “I don’t see how anyone wouldn’t feel that way.”