Author: barncard

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

“Earthworms are the kind of organisms we call ecosystem engineers. They change the physical and chemical properties of the ecosystem as they dig and feed,” University of Wisconsin-Madison zoologist Monica Turner said in a statement. “But nobody really understood if these Asian worms would have the same effect as the European worms we have had here for many years.”

Jaime Martindale, librarian at UW–Madison’s Arthur H. Robinson Map Library, helped find the exact site in northern Wisconsin of the 1966 crash of an Air Force B-52 bomber.

In one study at University of Wisconsin-Madison, 90 people with knee osteoarthritis received either dextrose jabs, saline jabs or exercise therapy.

UW-Madison plans to study the academic effects of concussions in 200 Madison-area high school athletes.

Smokers may worry that trying to quit will alienate them from other smokers, said coauthor Megan E. Piper of the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But in practice, people who quit actually gain nonsmoking friends, she told Reuters Health by phone.

Toddlers who spend a lot of time in a noisy environment may have a harder time learning to speak, a small study suggests. That’s because background noise – especially the kind that comes from voices on the television or radio – can make it tough for young children to learn new words, said study co-author Brianna McMillan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Rhesus macaque monkeys make a good model for studying how Zika infects people, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison concluded Tuesday in Nature Communications.

“A sustained [Zika] infection during pregnancy is completely different from a normal infection,” study senior author David O’Connor of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told BuzzFeed News. The monkey results make sense, he said, given that other research has shown that the virus prefers the fetal brain and placenta over other tissue types.

In another advance, researchers at the University of Wisconsin reported on Tuesday that they have successfully infected rhesus macaques with an Asian strain of the Zika virus that is currently circulating in the Americas. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, shows that monkeys – which have immune responses similar to humans – can be used to study Zika.

Monkeys infected with Zika virus are protected from future infection, and pregnancy dramatically prolongs infection in monkeys, findings that could help in fighting the virus in people, UW-Madison researchers said Tuesday.

Scientists have developed a nonhuman primate model of Zika virus infection to better understand its course in humans, especially in pregnant women. David O’Connor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues injected eight rhesus macaques—two of them pregnant—with the Asian strain of the virus currently circulating in South and Central America.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Duke University found the virus persisted in the blood of pregnant monkeys for much longer — up to 70 days — compared to the 10 days it lasted in males and non-pregnant female monkeys.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers say this is good news for vaccine developers. Lead researcher Prof David O’Connor said: “It suggests the sort of immunity that occurs naturally is sufficient. If you can mimic that in a vaccine, you’ll likely have a very successful vaccine.”

A collaboration of NASA, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Snapshot Wisconsin aims to provide one of the richest and most comprehensive caches of wildlife data for any spot on our planet.

But what if you could effectively enlarge antenna size by using the vehicle itself as an antenna? That’s what University of Wisconsin–Madison engineers are seeking to do as part of a project supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR).

One of the biggest mysteries: H. naledi’s age. Efforts are under way to date the fossils and sediment from which they were excavated with a variety of techniques, said paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.