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September 13, 2018

Top Stories

Watch Plants Light Up When They Get Attacked

Posted on
New York Times

Plants have no eyes, no ears, no mouth and no hands. They do not have a brain or a nervous system. Muscles? Forget them. They’re stuck where they started, soaking up the sun and sucking up nutrients from the soil. And yet, when something comes around to eat them, they sense it. And they fight back.How is this possible?“You’ve got to think like a vegetable now,” says Simon Gilroy, a botanist who studies how plants sense and respond to their environments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Research

Under attack from caterpillars, plants flash a warning signal

Posted on
Cosmos

When plants are under attack from a very hungry caterpillar, a warning signal flashes through the plant to the other leaves, revealed for the first time in the video above.The video, captured by Masatsugu Toyota at the University of Wisconsin was created using a plant modified to fluoresce in response to calcium signals. The details were published in Science.

Blazes Of Light Show Plant’s Response To Being Eaten

Posted on
Forbes

“[For] the first time, it’s been shown that glutamate leakage at a wound site triggers a system-wide wound response, and the first time we’ve been able to visualize this process happening ,” says Simon Gilroy, professor of botany at the Gilroy Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and senior author on the paper out today in the journal Science.

Higher Education/System

UW campus mergers: 5 things you need to know about the system’s transformation

Posted on
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

College campuses could have been closed, throwing hundreds of University of Wisconsin employees out of jobs across the state. But the University of Wisconsin System threw a Hail Mary instead, merging two-year colleges with four-year universities to shore up two-year campuses that were in a financial tailspin from declining enrollments.

Campus life

State news

Crime and safety

Health

McDonald’s lover? Here are the states with the most stores

Posted on
USA Today

Noetd: Obesity data came from County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Data on the percentage of adults who consume fruit and vegetables less than once a day came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is for 2015. All data is for the most recent period available.

UW Experts in the News

U.S. Recovery Eludes Many Living Below Poverty Level, Census Suggests

Posted on
New York Times

Quoted: “If this is the best we can do, it isn’t good,” said Timothy Smeeding, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies poverty and economic mobility. “Things really tapered off this year, after a serious drop in previous years,” he said. “In terms of the boom, the party has lasted a long time, a lot longer than we thought, but not everybody is getting invited — people who are working several jobs, taking jobs without benefits, kids who are growing up in poverty. The fruits of the recovery are not being spread around evenly.”

UW-Madison Related