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Category: Research

What bird flu means for milk

Mother Jones

There are a handful of variables and factors that shape the financial losses of a dairy hit with an outbreak. Luckily, agriculture economist Charles Nicholson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and some colleagues created a calculator to estimate this financial impact of a bird flu outbreak. Based on Nicholson’s estimates for California, a typical farm of 1500 cattle will lose $120,000 annually. For context, this is about $10,000 more than the median household income of a dairy farmer.

Hibernation scientists studying squirrels could get humans to deep space

Popular Science

Cosmic radiation poses a perennial challenge for astronaut safety, says Hannah Carey, an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied hibernators as a model for stress and trauma protection. Carey has been part of meetings and conferences with ESA and NASA scientists discussing hibernation science. In these dialogues, she recalls that radiation protection has been of particular interest.

Coyotes, red foxes ‘coexist peacefully’ in Madison, researchers say

The Capital Times

David Drake leads the Urban Canid Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 2014, researchers with the project have studied where coyotes and red foxes live in the Madison area, when they are active and how they interact with each other, in addition to humans and pets. University students help Drake set up traps around the city from November to March, so they can put radio collars on animals and track them.

“We’ve gotten some really good data,” said Drake, a professor and Extension wildlife specialist at UW-Madison’s Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology.

Sandhill crane committee supports hunting, and solar farms can accommodate crops

Wisconsin Public Radio

Can large solar farms and cultivated crops coexist? Our guests says “yes.” Agrivoltaics is the convergence of agriculture and solar farms, which is the area of study of UW-Madison hydrologist and professor Steven Loheide and professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences Ankur Desai.

TikTok influencers are driving raw milk sales – Here’s why it’s still a bad idea

Men's Health

What these idealists forget is that while people used to live on more natural products, they were also pretty unhealthy. According to John A. Lucey, PhD, a professor of food science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and director of the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research, it’s estimated that in 1938, pre-pasteurisation, milk-borne outbreaks constituted 25% of all disease outbreaks (related to food and water) in the United States. Now, they make up fewer than 1%.

Wisconsin scientists seek to explain strange headaches at US embassies

The Capital Times

Christian Franck, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, leads PANTHER, an multi-institution research hub based at UW-Madison, focused on understanding, detecting and preventing traumatic brain injuries. The hub brings together experts from different disciplines.

PANTHER has received over $50 million from the U.S. Office of Naval Research since 2017, including an additional $10 million recently to investigate how pulsed microwaves might injure the brain.

The vagus nerve’s mysterious role in mental health untangled

Scientific American

Scientists, including Charles Raison of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Andrew Miller of Emory University, have meanwhile identified mechanisms by which inflammation can cause depression. Inflammatory cytokines circulating in the blood can weaken or even breach the protective barrier between blood vessels and the brain. Once inside the brain, they trigger its immune cells, called microglia, to produce further inflammatory agents.

San Diegans can drink their tap water. Many pay more at the vending machine anyway.

Voice of San Diego

“These are folks who can ill afford to spend that kind of money on what is really not a necessary thing,” said Manny Teodoro, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studied the water vending machine industry in a 2022 book, “The Profits of Distrust.” “Money spent on (vended) water is money that’s not spent on healthier food, on perhaps needed medicine and healthcare.”

As the Christmas Bird Count turns 125, a beloved birding tradition looks to the future

Audubon Magazine

With more people than ever taking part, the annual Audubon event is a growing force for science and nature conservation.

This trove of information has helped usher in entire new areas of research, like climate change ecology, says Benjamin Zuckerberg, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His work in the field utilizes large community science datasets to explore how birds, including common winter denizens such as Red-bellied Woodpeckers, Purple Finches, and Carolina Wrens, are shifting their movements in response to changes in temperatures. The data enable scientists to find answers to questions at an “unprecedented” level, Zuckerberg says.

Raw milk has documented health risks, but if Kennedy leads HHS, its backers expect a boost

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

McAfee’s products have been linked to several outbreaks of E. coli, salmonella and campylobacter, according to the University of Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research. Even with on-farm testing, raw milk isn’t safe for public consumption, said Alex O’Brien, safety and quality coordinator at the Center, which is on the UW-Madison campus.

“The more people who consume it,” he said, “the higher the probability someone’s going to become ill.”

Hold up—does cheese have protein? And what kinds pack the most?

SELF

“Cheesemaking is a process of concentrating the solids originally present in milk,” Ben Ullerup Mathers, a research cheesemaker at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research, tells SELF. “Since protein is one of the main constituents of milk solids, the further you concentrate those solids, the more protein is in the final cheese. Since hard cheeses are the lowest-moisture cheeses, they will also be the higher-protein cheeses.”

The breath of colonialism continues to taint the air in Uganda

Eos

In the parts of the city inhabited by Africans during the period of segregation, levels of fine particulates known as PM2.5 are high enough to reduce life expectancy more than tobacco use or HIV infection, said the study’s lead author, air quality scientist Dorothy Lsoto of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

“When you look at the air quality in these different places, it’s striking,” Lsoto said.

The research that aims to cheese

The Chronicle of Higher Education

On a recent Tuesday at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, sample number 435 lies supine on a lab table where it surrenders to a gauntlet of measurements.

Brandon Prochaska slides a thermometer into the pizza’s abdomen, and the digits tick upward to 205 degrees Fahrenheit. He and a group of other trained professionals jot the number down.

Social intelligence: The other kind of smart

Forbes

In 2013, researchers at University of Wisconsin put people in MRI machines and threatened to shock them at random. The researchers measured fear activity in each person’s brain. And they found something incredible in the third group. Participants’ brains were much less active. They could literally outsource their fear to their loved ones.

Wisconsin abortion providers brace for another Trump presidency

The Capital Times

In October, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Collaborative for Reproductive Equity, known as CORE, released a study on the demand for abortion medications. The report examined how many people in Wisconsin ordered pills from out-of-state providers. The data was collected by the organization #WeCount, a national effort to track how many clinician-provided abortions are performed each month.

Supplementing income off the farm, Social media warning labels, Powwow music

Wisconsin Public Radio

We learn how workers in Wisconsin are looking to bolster family farm income via employment in surrounding communities. Then a pediatrics professor shares research on social media and youth. And two members from the Wisconsin band Bizhiki discuss their new album of Indigenous music.

Paul Smith: Following Aldo Leopold’s teachings, a deer hunt on his old farm

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A question sometimes is raised in the conservation community to help guide decisions: What would Aldo do?

The reference is to Aldo Leopold, former University of Wisconsin professor, pioneer in the field of wildlife management and author of “A Sand County Almanac,” the widely acclaimed collection of essays and inspiration for a “land ethic.”

New UW-Madison study tests how a federally legal form of THC could impact drivers

WMTV - Channel 15

A pilot study at UW-Madison is set to test how THC variants could affect drivers. Researchers decided to use the UW-Madison driving simulator to discover how Delta-8 THC and Delta-9 THC can impair the brain. Researcher and Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences Heather Barkholtz said that the idea for the study came from the rising popularity of Delta-8 THC.

UW mechanical engineer launches study of the brain and the “Havana Syndrome”

WORT FM

A team of University of Wisconsin researchers, led by Professor Christian Franck, have obtained a grant to investigate how pulsed microwave beams might affect the brain.  Christian Franck is the Bjorn Borgen Professor and H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellow at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the director of the UW PANTHER lab, which studies brain trauma.

New Report Reveals Wisconsin Dairy Industry Up 16%, Contributing $52.8 Billion to State’s Economy

Hoard's Dairyman

The overall economic impact of Wisconsin’s dairy industry is bigger than ever, and dairy remains the leading sector of Wisconsin agriculture. This newly released data is from the Contribution of Agriculture to the Wisconsin Economy: An Update for 2022, conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Agriculture and Applied Economics.

UW-Madison’s record-breaking research spending fuels rise in national ranking

Wisconsin State Journal

The university announced the ranking change Monday alongside an announcement that it had spent a record-breaking $1.7 billion on research for fiscal year 2023, a 13.7% increase over the prior year. UW-Madison’s growth outpaced the national increase of 11.2% spent on university research and development, bringing the national amount spent to $108.8 billion.

UW-Madison study will inject people with meth to answer a decades-old question

Wisconsin State Journal

But a pair of researchers at UW-Madison hope to close that decades-old knowledge gap through a study in which they’ll inject 17 people with small doses of both kinds of methamphetamine to see how the “D” isomer present in illicit meth metabolizes in the body and whether that changes when the “L” isomer, the kind in nasal sprays, is present.

String theory is not dead

Knowable Magazine

“Many of the unsolved problems in particle physics and cosmology are deeply intertwined,” write physicists Fernando Marchesano, Gary Shiu and Timo Weigand in the 2024 Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science. String theory may provide the path to solving those problems.

Nanoink and printing technologies could enable electronics repairs, production in space

Phys.org

The flight path to these experiments began when a research team led by Iowa State’s Shan Jiang, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, and Hantang Qin, formerly of Iowa State who’s now an assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wondered if their ink and printer technologies would work in the zero gravity of space.

Report finds Wisconsin agriculture revenue on the rise, up nearly 11 percent from 2017

Wisconsin Public Radio

An economic analysis shows Wisconsin’s agriculture industry is pulling in more revenue in recent years but employing fewer people.

The report, titled “The Contributions of Agriculture to the Wisconsin Economy,” is published every five years. The newest survey found the industry earned $116.3 billion in revenue in 2022, the latest data available. That is a 10.9 percent increase from 2017. However, the numbers are nuanced, Steve Deller and Jeff Hadachek, co-authors of the report out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said on WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.”

What happens under water in winter?

Popular Science

When it comes to determining the role that lakes play in global carbon cycling, those estimates are often drawn from summer data. Just using that small subset of data creates errors in estimates of atmospheric interactions and other downstream effects, said Hilary Dugan, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Department of Limnology.