Author: jplucas

Social media such as YouTube videos provide a popular and flexible venue for on-line social activism, a new study has found. The study explains how two different social protest movements – Occupy Wall Street and the Proposition 8 same sex marriage initiative – utilised YouTube, and their success in engaging activists.

Last month, Popular Science magazine disabled all online comments on its website.Citing a University of Wisconsin-Madison study on online comments and their impact on a reader?s ability to process scientific fact, Suzanne LaBarre, the magazine?s online content editor, said “comments can be bad for science.”

The following is the second of two guest posts from political scientists John S. Ahlquist (University of Wisconsin) and Margaret Levi (University of Washington) in conjunction with their newly published Princeton University Press book: In the Interest of Others: Organizations and Social Activism.

At the University of Wisconsin, a breakthrough on the common cold front. Researchers construct a model of rhinovirus C and show how it differs from rhinoviruses A and B. ?We previously assumed all rhinoviruses would be the same as each other, and it turns out that they?re not,? said biochemistry professor Ann Palmenberg. That discovery goes a long way towards explaining why drug trials targeting rhinoviruses haven?t been very successful. ?We now understand why the rhinovirus C is different than the A and B, and why the previous drug trials did?t work.?

Two acclaimed authors discuss how the language we use shapes the planet we live on. A conversation between William Cronon and Michael Pollan.

Squats can safeguard your sniffer: Regular exercise protects your sense of smell as you age, according to new research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: The University of Wisconsin-Madison study that Popular Science cited, for instance, was focussed on whether comments themselves, anonymous or otherwise, made people less civil. The authors found that the nastier the comments, the more polarized readers became about the contents of the article, a phenomenon they dubbed the ?nasty effect.?

In a humid room at the University of Wisconsin?Madison (UW), large Tupperware boxes hold thick beds of gray fungi, pockmarked with holes and crawling with leafcutter ants. The boxes are home to colonies of two leafcutter species, Atta cephalotes and Acromyrmex echinatior, brought back from the tropical forests of Panama and Costa Rica by bacteriologist Cameron Currie and his colleagues, who study these insect agriculturalists and the fungus gardens they tend.  

A new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin used a genomic analysis of strains of the Herpes Simplex Virus type-1 (generally associated with cold sores) from around the world to see if they tracked with general theories of human migration. HSV-1 works particularly well for this kind of study because it is easily spread by physical contact as well as easy to collect.

To confirm the theory that humans spread out from Africa tens of thousands of years ago, all you have to do is follow the cold sores. Or, to be more precise, follow the mutation patterns encoded in the genome of the virus that causes those cold sores.

After examining Herpes virus? genome, scientists confirmed that early humans first emerged on the African continent before spreading out in disparate groups across the globe.

The ice and snow of early spring in northern Wisconsin had come and gone. Also departing with the frigid weather were the adult northern pike our team had been tracking as the fish migrated inland from Green Bay to spawn. Now we were looking for evidence of the next generation to find out if they could successfully navigate the many challenges on their migration to the safer waters of Green Bay.

You might think you don?t have much in common with a fruit fly. But studying them could tell us more about human conditions such as traumatic brain injury (TBI) ? from, for example, a motorbike accident or a blunt hit on the head ? which can in some lead many years later to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, an Alzheimer?s-like form of neurodegeneration.

Using a robo-call and a video, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals condemned experiments on cats that are done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in an effort to improve hearing in humans.