“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.”
UW–Madison bioethicist Alta Charo featured in a national radio program’s show on gene editing.
The N.I.H. and the F.B.I. have begun a vast effort to root out scientists who they say are stealing biomedical research for other countries from institutions across the United States.
With smartwatch heart trackers, “if you’re trying to determine if someone’s heart rate is exactly 80 beats versus 90 beats per minute, that’s a really hard thing,” says kinesiology professor Lisa Cadmus-Bertram. “If you’re trying to determine if a heartbeat has ended, in my experience with these devices, they should be able to do that quite easily.”
“Those who frequently attend a house of worship may have more people they can rely on for information and help during both good and bad times,” the report said, citing scholars Chaeyoon Lim of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Robert Putnam of Harvard University.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison may have discovered a new way to tackle worldwide obesity, a major risk factor for a plethora of chronic diseases, including diabetes, cancer and heart disease.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin Madison have made a small device that would attach to the lining of a person’s stomach and use electricity to stimulate the nerves that tell your brain it’s full when you eat. As a stomach moves it sends that signal and ideally makes you feel full with eating far less.
New research (from UW–Madison’s Josh Pultorak and Catherine Marler) published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution shows that when these monogamous mice are separated from their mate and then reunited, the animals sometimes don’t handle it well—revealing a new side to their social lives and behavior.
“If you accept the arguments about water and life on Mars, then why shouldn’t we include Venus in that?” Sanjay Limaye, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, told Eos. “Venus had liquid water. It could have had the chance to evolve or sustain life that could be living in the habitable clouds.”
At a meeting here this week, convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM’s) Institute for Laboratory Animal Research, neuroscientist Jon Levine, who directs the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, likened the surge in demand to “a 10-alarm fire that’s about to be set.”
Primitive life might linger miles above, in murky Venusian clouds that drift through an orange sky. “A colony of microorganisms could survive and evolve in those clouds,” says Sanjay Limaye, senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
There’s a stigma linking violent crime with illegal immigrants and part of that has to do with the spotlight on MS-13 gang arrests across the country and specifically in Lake Worth. But, a state-by-state study says an increase in undocumented immigration actually makes communities safer. The study was conducted by sociologists Michael Light of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Ty Miller of Purdue University.
Paul Hutson, professor of pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin who has conducted psilocybin research, says he is wary of the drive for decriminalization. Psilocybin isn’t safe for some people — particularly those with paranoia or psychosis, he said.
It took biologist James Thomson, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison 14 years to achieve it in monkeys. Three years later, using donated embryos that had gone unused in fertility treatments, Thomson struck again, creating the world’s first human ES-cell line.
The Wisconsin Idea is a concept that university research can help stakeholders solve real world problems. The theory is more than a century old. UW–Madison biochemistry professor Mike Sussman says now is the time to rejuvenate the Idea and use innovation, collaboration, and passion to achieve Wisconsin’s full potential.
Five healthy chimpanzees in Uganda that died following a mysterious respiratory disease outbreak in 2013 were actually killed by a common human cold virus, scientists now say. The deaths in the small chimpanzee community followed an “explosive outbreak of severe coughing and sneezing,” according to study author Dr. Tony Goldberg, a professor with the University of Wisconsin’s School of Veterinary Medicine.
“This cropland expansion, driven in part by the ethanol mandate, has far-reaching impacts on the climate through its effects on the land and the carbon that it stores,” says Seth Spawn—lead author of the University of Wisconsin land use study and a graduate research assistant student at the Center for Sustainability and Global Environment at UW-Madison—adding that, “These impacts are significant and should be taken seriously.”
The 21st century has so far been a golden age of hominin discovery. New species like the 7-million-year-old Sahelanthropus tchadensis and the 300,000-year-old Homo naledi have added to our understanding of humanity’s past. And the finds will keep coming.“It doesn’t look like [we’re] sampling something that is running out,” says John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I think in part there’s a greater intensity of exploration right now.”
John Valley, a UW–Madison geoscientist, and UCLA paleobiologist William Schopf have analyzed 3.5-billion-year-old microscopic fossils encased in Australian rocks and found they do indeed represent ancient microbes — ones potentially so complex that life on our planet must have originated some 500 million years earlier.
UW–Madison pathobiological science professor Tony Goldberg a team of scientists working with chimps in Kibale National Park in Uganda have found that they can catch the common cold from humans — and don’t have any immunity. Many of the chimps developed respiratory problems, and some died.
The brains of young adults who had stressful childhoods from abuse, neglect or poverty respond poorly to signs of potential risks or rewards, according to a UW-Madison study that could provide a biological clue to harmful behavior.
University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor Seth Pollak worked with over 50 people around the age of 20, and found that those who had experienced extreme stress as kids were hampered in their ability to make good decisions as adults.
FactCheck.org examines claims made by Tennessee Sen. Rend Paul about research by psychology professor Kristin Shutts and a collaborator at Cornell on how children decide which foods are good and safe to eat.
Health care providers can protect babies by testing women of childbearing age for hepatitis C and curing those with the infection, said the research team led by Theresa Watts, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing.
There’s also the issue of false positives, which plague any prediction model aimed at identifying a minority group, said William T.L. Cox, a psychologist who studies stereotypes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As an infectious disease doctor, Nasia Safdar is a detective of sorts at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison.
“It turns out, if you look at all of the things that are associated with blue, they’re mostly positive,” explains Karen Schloss, an assistant professor of psychology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s really hard to think of negative blue things. A lot of things that we kind of think of as blue and bad aren’t really that blue.”
“If passing the virus by casual contact were easy, I think we would see a lot more of what we would call secondary transmission in a place like the United States,” said lead researcher Tom Friedrich, from the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
There are three distinct types of smile, a new study has revealed. People switch between ’reward’, ’affiliation’ and ’dominance’ smiles, using different facial muscle combinations to make them, according to researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In contrast, the University of Wisconsin in Madison offers a website with a long, easy reading list of its animal research highlights. It includes scores of findings with relevance to human or animal health, including the 2012 discovery in a rat model showing that iron deficiency worsens fetal alcohol syndrome, and the use of pigs to learn that Tasers can send the heart into an often-fatal abnormal rhythm.
The DNR began working on the study in 2014 with help from the UW-Madison, and financial support from NASA and the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Program.
[Spontaneous speech] “is too hard to score,” said neuropsychologist Sterling Johnson, of the University of Wisconsin, who studies brain function in Alzheimer’s disease. “But everyday speech is definitely a way of measuring cognitive decline. If people are noticing [a change in Trump’s language agility], that’s meaningful.”
According to two sources within the NIH who were briefed on the issue, the administration may pursue a new strategy in its quest for cuts, by proposing a 10 percent cap on the NIH’s indirect costs—the money it gives to grantees to support administration, equipment, libraries, IT, lighting, heating, electricity, and other overhead.
New research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests not only are Pokémon Go players walking more, they’re happy people.
“Deer are affecting understory communities in many different ways,” explains Autumn Sabo, a University of Wisconsin-Madison plant ecologist and the lead author of a new study that teases out some of the secondary impacts of white-tailed deer on forest ecosystems. “It is only in recent years that scientists have started to look at factors beyond herbivory.”
Researchers could reduce experiments on nonhuman primates by studying data that have already been collected to answer new questions, says David O’Connor, a pathologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Mother-of-pearl is an iridescent material that’s found in mollusk shells. It forms in layers, which allows it to reflect light and shimmer. But these layers could be useful in another way, according to Pupa Gilbert, a professor with the University of Wisconsin, Madison: They provide a good estimation of the temperatures they grow in.
Includes an interactive map—created by three students at the University of Wisconsin– Madison—that explores the maritime world of the colonial era.
The study (by cognitive neuroscientist Nathan Rose and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin in Madison) suggests that information can somehow be held among the synapses that connect neurons, even after conventional working memory has faded.
Now, in a paper published today (December 1) in Science, researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and their colleagues provide evidence for a different theory, in which information can be stored in working memory in an inactive neuronal state.
“The gut microbiome influences the host epigenome on a global scale,” said coauthor John Denu, an epigeneticist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “We discovered key communicators, or key molecules that communicate this information, to the host.”
