Cheese makers’ key tool in adjusting the number of these bonds is acidity, says John Lucey, a food scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and director of the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who have studied invasive species in lakes for decades published a summary of key findings in the journal BioScience in August. “These were the ones that we felt challenge conventional views,” said Jake Vander Zanden, director of UW–Madison’s Center for Limnology and lead author of the analysis. “Almost all of these were surprising to me.”
Hybrid breeding will enable breeders to create new varieties faster and more systematically, said Shelley Jansky, a retired plant breeder at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It’s no mystery to what kind of damage feral pigs can create on a landscape. Their incessant rooting for food ultimately disturbs native ecosystems and rips up crops, and they’re often able to outcompete native wildlife species for resources. As if that weren’t bad enough, new research from a team of biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison [Sara Hotchkiss Lab in Botany] offers some insight into just how much damage feral pigs on the Big Island are causing to Hawaii’s already fragile ecosystem.
“There’s a lot of research on immigration and crime, there’s far less on undocumented immigration and crime,” said Michael Light, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and co-author of the study on Texas data.
“Everybody expected a local contamination issue,” said David Gay, coordinator of the National Atmospheric Deposition Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and lead author of the new study. “But I think what most people don’t understand about this fire is how big it was and how wide-ranging the implications are.”
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research, tasting cheese is serious business.
“Everything is prescribed, down to what temperature we taste at, how many chews we do, how forcefully we chew and a lot of other things that standardize how we taste,” said Brandon Prochaska, a sensory coordinator for the center, during a recent appearance on WPR’s “The Morning Show.”
“One of the things that the research is suggesting right now is that young people, in particular, have a tendency to move towards emotions like anxiety and anger, which are activating – you know, they compel you to do something,” said UW–Madison’s Dekila Chungyalpa, director of The Loka Initiative.
“It’s an exciting time for hibernation biology,” said Hannah Carey, UW–Madison professor emerit of Comparative Biosciences. “People from outside of traditional hibernation world are wanting to come in and collaborate.”
At the time, the ancient DNA field was “kind of a joke,” full of incredible claims that would turn out to be incorrect as scientists tried to recover DNA from dinosaurs, said John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “It was Svante who came along and made this into a science,” Hawks said.
“That’s the perfect storm,” said Volker Radeloff, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who helped lead the research. “Millions of houses have been built in places that will sooner or later burn,” he said, even as climate change increases the risks of major wildfires across the West with extreme heat and dryness.
The researchers, led by psychology professor Dr. Nicholas Buttrick of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, hypothesize that this correlation exists because of the Reconstruction period in American history, which occurred immediately after the Civil War — “a moment when a massive upsurge in the availability of firearms co-occurred with a worldview threat from the emancipation and the political empowerment of Black Southerners.”
Wisconsin researchers have turned to sharks to develop new ways to detect and treat cancer. Dr. Aaron LeBeau, an associate professor of pathology and radiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been leading the research.
“These [particles] get deep into the lungs and cause both respiratory and cardiac ailments,” says Jonathan Patz, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the authors of the study. “They are pretty much the worst pollutant when it comes to mortality and hospitalization.”
“Our work provides a sense of the scale of the air quality health benefits that could accompany deep decarbonization of the U.S. energy system,” lead author Nick Mailloux, a graduate student at University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
Eliminating air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels would prevent more than 50,000 premature deaths and provide more than $600 billion in health benefits in the United States every year, according to a new study by University of Wisconsin–Madison researchers.
The lead author of the study, Tyler Lark, an assistant scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, told Reuters, “Corn ethanol is not a climate-friendly fuel.”
“Anyone who is in a position where they would benefit from greater than normal cognitive control, top-down attention, peripheral visual processing would benefit from playing action games, which are primarily first- and third-person shooter games,” said Dr. C. Shawn Green, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose work studying the effect of video games on cognitive performance was supported by the Office of Naval Research.
Christy Remucal, an associate professor with the UW Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and postdoctoral investigator Sarah Balgooyen looked at the water and sediments within 41 of the tributaries that feed water into the bay, and the impact water from tributaries broadly could be having on the Great Lakes.
The term “‘disability’ is not a slur,” says Morton Ann Gernsbacher, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies how language is used in relation to disability. But the term “special needs” may be moving in that direction, she says.
That research isn’t conclusive yet, said Paul Hutson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies psilocybin and leads the school’s center for psychedelics research. But he anticipates there will soon be enough evidence for the Food and Drug Administration to approve psilocybin capsules to treat at least some of these disorders — most likely in the next five years or so.
But even small increases can trigger unknown ecosystem changes and secondary effects such as drinking water pipe corrosion, said Hilary Dugan, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Limnology and lead author of the study.
Dudley Lamming, an associate professor of medicine at UW-Madison, and graduate student Heidi Pak were in the midst of a calorie restriction study using mice when Pak noticed the mice ate the food they were given within two hours, going another 22 hours before eating again.
Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison, said the record warmth is a byproduct of a warming climate. “We always expect an event like this to be rare, but climate change loads the dice so that these freakishly warm days, like we had today, become more likely,” he said.
Jonathan Martin, an atmospheric and oceanic sciences professor at UW-Madison, joins Live at Four to talk about Wednesday’s record-breaking heat and climate change.
This fall, Henningsen is one of 13 finalists for the William V. Campbell Trophy, known in college football circles as the academic Heisman Trophy. The award annually recognizes the best in the country for combined academic success, football performance and exemplary leadership.
“Our reaction to death, our love for other individuals, our social ties to them—how much do they depend on being human?” wonders says John Hawks, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“This makes this the richest site for fossil hominins on the continent of Africa and makes naledi one of the best-known ancient hominin species ever discovered,” said John Hawks, Vilas-Borghesi Distinguished Achievement Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of a previous study on the Neo fossil skeleton, in a statement.
“If deer can transmit the virus to humans, it’s a game changer,” said Tony Goldberg, a veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the evolution of infectious diseases as they jump between animals and people. “To have a wildlife species become a reservoir after transmission from humans is very rare and unlucky, as if we needed more bad luck.”
“But what if America’s attendance crisis is about much more than students missing class?” write Eric Grodsky, sociology professor, and education researcher Elizabeth Vaade. “What if, instead, it is a reflection of family and community crises these students face – such as being evicted from the family apartment, fearing for their safety in their neighborhood or suffering an illness?”
Nicholas Smith, instructor of wine science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, also said he is not aware of anyone else in this state who is making low-intervention wines on the scale that Rasmussen is.
“I’m happy to see what Erin is doing, drawing customers into the local industry, while being introspective into how we produce products and being transparent about it,” Smith said. “It’s a benefit to everybody.”
“The idea psychedelics liberate some of these powerfully valent, deeper emotional areas of the brain—the limbic areas involved in memory and emotion—to have their say is consistent with what people are reporting,” says [Charles Raison, a psychiatrist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison], who also serves as director of clinical and translational research for Usona Institute, a nonprofit that is leading a clinical trial of psilocybin. “They are often overcome by these really, really powerful emotions that are surprising, as if they’re coming from the outside but yet seem completely credible and utterly believable. These areas are liberated and get their day in court.”
The reinstallations come as a task force works to erect a statue of Vel Phillips on the Capitol grounds. Phillips was the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law School, the first female judge in Milwaukee County and the first Black judge in Wisconsin.
In mathematical terms, as in common parlance, a signal is something that conveys information. Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who first met Daubechies in 1998 when they were colleagues at Princeton, points out that signal processing “makes up a huge proportion of applied math now, since so much of applied math is about the geometry of information as opposed to the geometry of motion and force” — that is, it’s more about the warp and weft of information than physical problems in, say, fluid dynamics or celestial mechanics.
The University of Wisconsin reported that 90% of its campus community had been vaccinated despite not having a mandate in place.
“[Madison Addiction Recovery Initiative] works or at least is doing what it is intended to do,” said Veronica White, a University of Wisconsin-Madison doctoral student and research assistant for the program. “MARI needs more support to make it more effective to help more people stay engaged.”
Scientists and public health officials are using genomic sequencing to plan for future pandemics and to detect variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, such as the more contagious Delta variant. UW-Madison virology professors and researchers Tom Friedrich and Dave O’Connor explain.
Not everyone in the field is convinced of the timeline, though: Caitlin Pepperell, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison not involved with the study, told NS that when organisms recombine their DNA—like adenovirus C often does, ’the signal gets scrambled.’
“The difference in the survival rate among ICU patients was much higher than I expected,” said William Hartman, an assistant professor of anesthesiology at University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. Hartman was not one of the study authors.
While it may seem there are more of the pesky biters this year, it’s not clear if the number of ticks is higher this year than other years, said PJ Leisch, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison insect diagnostic lab.
“The question we are asking is ’How does gravity make cotton roots grow?’ and the experiment is to remove gravity and the only place you’ll get to do that is on the space station,” [UW–Madison botany professor] Simon Gilroy said.
Evolutionary biologist David Baum was thrilled to flick through a preprint in August 2019 and come face-to-face — well, face-to-cell — with a distant cousin. Baum, who works at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was looking at an archaeon: a type of microorganism best known for living in extreme environments, such as deep-ocean vents and acid lakes.
“I’m tired of seeing sick kids. I want to see them protected,” says James Conway, a paediatric infectious-disease specialist and vaccine researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
“This paper will drive people to look at the importance of butterflies as pollinators,” says Karen Oberhauser, a butterfly biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the research. If the results hold up in other crops, butterflies might be added to a short list of commercially important pollinators including honey bees, bumble bees, hoverflies, and beetles.
The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health is expanding its enrollment for a study on COVID-19 prevention to essential workers. Dr. Nasia Safdar describes the study and talks about new FDA recommendations on the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine.
“It’s a nice, clean demonstration” of movement’s benefits, says Martha Alibali, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who studies gesture in education and was not involved in the study. A model, she says, is “a super important concept, a really foundational statistical concept.”
Letter to the editor: “The WNPRC does not provide room for their monkeys to exercise, nor access to the outdoors, and they never see the sunlight.”
“They counted every rocket in the Soviet Union,” said Volker Radeloff, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose lab has used the images in its studies. “These images kept the Cold War cold.”
Working in tandem with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), the volunteers with the University of Wisconsin Missing in Action Recovery and Identification Project (UW MIA RIP) work to locate and repatriate the remains of American military members unaccounted for.
“There’ve been more than 20 studies, which have looked at smoking status and COVID-19 complications,” said AMA member Michael Fiore, MD, MPH, MBA, Hilldale Professor of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin and director of the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison. “Whether you measure the outcomes as death or using a severity index, like going to the ICU or being intubated, in more than 80% of those studies, smoking resulted in a statistically significant increase of adverse outcomes.”
In a cool video posted online this week, UW–Madison mechanical engineering professor Scott Sanders uses a mannequin to illustrate how droplets escape or stay contained inside a variety of masks now being worn.
“Opening the economy is not the problem,” writes Laura Albert, Industrial and Systems Engineering professor. “Opening the economy without a plan to control the risk is the problem.”
“There will be positive cases and there will be transmission between players,” says Laura Albert, an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose research includes the optimization of emergency and public health systems. “And I anticipate it happening on airplanes and buses, in the locker rooms or bathrooms. It’s not totally clear how we can change those spaces to be safe if there’s a bunch of people using them.”
“It’s not always going to be monkeys,” says Dave O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin. He works with the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, which, like Tulane, is part of a network of primate research centers jointly supported by the NIH and university hosts around the country. The centers are now diverting most of their focus to coronavirus research.
Vicki Bier, director of the Center for Human Performance and Risk Analysis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said such scenarios are common, not just in government, but in virtually all industries and organizations.
Early last week, Lennon Rodgers, director of the Engineering Design Innovation Lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison, got an urgent email from the university’s hospital. Could his lab make 1,000 face shields to protect staff testing and treating Covid-19 patients? The hospital’s usual suppliers were out of stock, due to the spike in demand prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.
“There’s going to be a need not just for one animal model, but multiple,” says David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
That, Jo Handelsman of the University of Wisconsin–Madison told the meeting, is where they have gone wrong. Soil microbes interact. And mixtures of species can do things individual bugs cannot manage. As an example, she gave an ecological triangle that her laboratory has been working on.
Doug Erickson, a university relations specialist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has been in a co-ed seven-person book group for 12 years.
“Our dunes here is a glacial till,” said (UW–Madison professor of civil and environmental emgineering) Dr. Chin Wu. “Once it is eroded, it will not come back. … Based on my estimation, there will be no Kenosha Dunes in five years if nothing is done.”
