Category: Research

“It’s the same physical phenomenon as fiber optics,” says Pupa Gilbert at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was not involved in the work. She does, however, study biomineralization (By-oh-min-er-al-ih-ZAY-shun). It’s how living things build structures out of minerals.

Neanderthals lived across Europe and Asia between roughly 400,000 and 40,000 years ago. Before our stocky cousins went extinct, some of them interbred with modern humans, leaving traces of their genetic material in our gene pool. Today, most people of non-African ancestry have inherited between 1 and 4 percent of their genetic makeup from Neanderthals.

A study conducted by Princeton University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison revealed vast amounts of undocumented uranium has been exported from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) over the past 20 years.

Microbes are pioneers of the planet. They evolved over millennia from the primordial precursors of ancient Earth, the starting point for the preponderance of life as we know it.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Princeton in the US have found that between 2000 and 2024, large quantities of uranium were extracted, concentrated and exported from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as part of the country’s cobalt supply chain.

University of Wisconsin–Madison and Princeton University nuclear engineers have identified a major blind spot in nuclear accounting with global nuclear security implications.

“Limited adoption” of uranium-removal processes such as the use of acid “suggests that consistent compliance with this threshold is unlikely”, wrote the authors, Ryan Manzuk of Princeton University and Sébastien Philippe of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Phosphorus remains one of the region’s top concerns for lake health, said Hilary Dugan, an associate professor and researcher at UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology, which studies inland lakes.

Prediction market bettors don’t have prophetic powers: they are a “quantification of conventional wisdom,” said Ross Dahlke, a data science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

“For many years, we’ve had this testing program that basically looks at mice first as a first step to see what happens in an actual live organism, then rabbits, then dogs, then going on to humans,” said Nicole Nelson, UW-Madison associate professor of medical history and bioethics.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used optogenetics, a technique that controls genetically modified brain cells with pulses of light, to recreate the brain rhythm of deep sleep in mice that were fully awake and moving.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison offers a handy tool that uses data from a NOAA satellite and other resources to track the Saharan air layer as it ebbs and flows across the globe.

By inducing specific patterns of activity in small portions of the brain in awake mice, researchers have triggered a recalibration of neural connections that normally only occurs during sleep. This new approach offset the effects of sleep deprivation on memory tasks and revealed features of sleep that are key to its restorative effect.

As more than two billion people worldwide still lack access to safely managed drinking water, new research from the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW–Madison investigates the effects of early-life exposure to citywide water filtration on longevity in the early 20th century.

To understand psychedelics — those powerful and cryptic agents of the mind — scientists are exploring uncharted landscapes. “We don’t yet really know why psilocybin or other psychedelic drugs seem to have the effects that they do,” Professor Paul Hutson, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Transdisciplinary Center for Research in Psychoactive Substances, told the Wisconsin Examiner.