Author: jplucas

This week, leaders from around the world will gather in Des Moines, Iowa, to honor the recipients of the World Food Prize. University of Minnesota alumnus Norman E. Borlaug, the celebrated crop breeder and Nobel Prize Laureate for Peace in 1970, envisioned the prize as a way to recognize creative individuals who have advanced the availability of safe and nutritious food for the world?s people. Since 1987, the prize has paid tribute to scientists, humanitarians, and leaders in politics, business and nongovernmental organizations.

Epidemiologist Tony Goldberg was working with primates in Kibale National Park in Uganda. But, when he returned to his lab at the University of Wisconsin, he began feeling some pain in his nose.

Popular Science magazine?s decision to kill online commenting should be the start of a wider discussion, says the social media researcher whose findings were one of the reasons for the magazine?s move

How rare was that early blizzard in South Dakota?

Could a spring-loaded fly swatter save NFL football players and Iraq war veterans from the effects of concussions and traumatic brain injuries?

Patricia McConnell, an expert on animal behavior, is not against hunting and even raises lamb for food. But the University of Wisconsin-Madison zoologist and author is appalled by what she regards as blatant cruelty to animals sanctioned and abetted by the state.

Multiple studies have revealed that the life expectancy of women in the United States has declined in recent decades, leaving experts searching for the cause. Research published in March by University of Wisconsin researchers David Kindig and Erika Cheng found that female mortality rates went up in nearly half of U.S. counties between 1992 and 2006. For men, only 3% of counties witnessed increases in male mortality over the same period.

After returning from an African research expedition, pathobiology professor Tony Goldberg found an unexpected stowaway: a tick hiding up his right nostril. ?When you first realize you have a tick up your nose, it takes a lot of willpower not to claw your face off,” Goldberg, a University of Wisconsin?Madison researcher, says in a statement. But Goldberg managed to retrieve the tick from his nostril and send it off for analysis, leading him to not just discover a potentially new species of tick, but what could also be a new explanation for how diseases spread between chimps and humans.

Most climate projection models show Wisconsin winters becoming warmer and shorter with more rain and less snow, with the exception of some big snowstorms. Michael Notaro, the associate director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, predicts that winter will be warmer by several degrees by mid-century, reducing the severity of the season.

Move over, Lucy: Researchers say Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus may also be in the sky, with diamonds. The atmospheres of these gas-ball planets have the perfect temperature and pressure conditions to host carbon in the form of diamond, say Mona Delitsky of California Specialty Engineering in Pasadena, California, and Kevin Baines of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison have been studying insects that affect cranberries for years, and have found that the flea beetle is becoming more and more problematic.

Just because the government shutdown is pressing on in Washington, doesn?t mean there aren?t other important issues out there to focus on ? like cats.That?s Bill Maher?s focus as the HBO ?Real Time? host is partnering up with PETA to campaign against ?cruel cat experiments.?

Tony Goldberg had been back from Uganda for only about a day when he felt a distressingly familiar itch in his nose. A veterinary epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he had just spent a few weeks in Kibale National Park studying chimpanzees and how the diseases they carry might make the jump to humans. Now, he realized, he might have brought one of their parasites home with him.

Unlike a clinic or hospital setting, school nurses aren?t surrounded by their peers. In addition, some may not have had a lot of course work on kids with chronic health conditions, said Lori S. Anderson, assistant professor at the UW-Madison School of Nursing.

Tony Goldberg, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that he had an unwelcome stowaway from his trip to a national park in Uganda: a tick up his nose. Being a professional, Goldberg extracted the tick, and found that it doesnt match any other kind of tick on record. It looks as though hes found an entirely new species, next to his boogers.

I really don?t want to make a bad joke here about it being right under his nose this whole time!, but the fact remains that Tony Goldberg, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is pretty sure that the tick he picked out of his nostril after a trip to Uganda is an entirely new species.

Noted: To justify its ban, Popular Science turned to science, citing a recent study led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggesting that people?s perceptions of the riskiness of a scientific advance can become more entrenched and polarized after reading comments written in an uncivil tone.

This is the third post in our gender gap symposium (see here and here for the first two.) We are delighted to welcome Daniel Maliniak, a PhD candidate in Political Science at University of California, San Diego, and Ryan Powers, a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Daniel and Ryan are co-authors of the citations paper.

A tick that hitched a ride in the nose of a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher when he returned from Uganda last year may be a disease-carrying species that someday could pose a threat in the U.S.

Well, this stinks: Some scents could screw up your mood, says a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.