Category: Research

We often treat paternity leave like a company perk—something HR lists next to the gym stipend and the 401k match. The research says we are wrong about that categorization. Paternity leave should be part of routine medical care during this stage of life: interventions we already agree are worth investing in because the return on investment continues years later in a child’s brain.

A byproduct produced by certain gut bacteria may directly accelerate the brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Elevated blood levels of this molecule, known as imidazole propionate, correlate with worse cognitive decline in humans and actively drive neurodegeneration in animal models. The findings were published in Nature Communications.

“Receiving this award feels really humbling, and also special, maybe particularly so during times that are challenging for work in environmental issues and conservation,” Burivalova told Mongabay by email. “I see getting an award like this to also mean taking the responsibility for doing as much as I can for biodiversity conservation in the years to come.”

An associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, U.S., and the principal investigator of the Sound Forest Lab, Burivalova has worked in forests across the world, including Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Peru, Madagascar, and Ecuador.

Their findings, recently published in Metabolic Engineering, lay the groundwork for a more environmentally friendly way to produce plastic, textiles, pharmaceuticals and more.

“In order to build a sustainable society, we need to move away from fossil fuels. But what many people don’t realize is that there’s a significant portion of fossil fuels that are not extracted for energy usage, but for chemical manufacturing,” said Anne Lalande, a graduate student in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at UBC and first author of the study. “We’re interested in using lignin, or wood waste, to make valuable chemicals in order to displace the fossil fuel industry.”

A University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering team has developed a hybrid fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite “blanket” designed to reduce lightning strike damage and improve protective coverage on aircraft and other high-flying vehicles. The research was published in the June 2026 issue of Composites, Part B: Engineering.

The lake is Peter Lake, a long-serving subject of one of ecology’s most patient experiments, and the person tipping pigment over the gunwale was Danny Szydlowski, a PhD candidate and CASC graduate fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Center for Limnology, working with a colleague, Dat Ha. Their account of the season, published on the Midwest Climate Adaptation Science Center blog on 22 January 2025, reads less like a triumph than a puzzle: the dye went in, the fertiliser followed, and the water still bloomed.

esearchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that Michigan’s EV policies place significant emphasis on expanding charging infrastructure and increasing EV adoption, but pay less attention to whether low-income residents can afford to participate in this transition.

“Access to an electric vehicle is not just the ability to buy a vehicle. It is access to the entire system that makes using that technology possible,” said Chelsea Schelly, a co-author of the study and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“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.