Category: Research

The chickens weren’t getting sick like they were supposed to.

A network of mysterious caves spotted on the surface of the Moon could be explored using camera technology that is capable of seeing around corners.

If you don’t know Koko the gorilla… you probably know her friends. She’s great buddies with William Shatner, and the late Robin Williams. Now a UW researcher who spent two years with her says there are things Koko can teach us about ourselves.

Quoted: UW Medical School Dean Robert Golden said that researchers hope that someday they can discontinue the use of fetal tissue altogether. “I hope that we can eventually move away from this, but we are not close to that point yet,” he said during the hearing. UW researchers follow federal law and their own strict ethical standards, he said.

Guinness stout and Bud Lite differ in, to be conservative, several ways, but one is that they’re brewed with very different types of yeast. Lager isn’t just a beer style, it’s a yeast lifestyle. Humans have been brewing with ale yeast—Saccharomyces cerevisiae—for thousands of years. But it was less than 600 years ago that European brewers stumbled on lager yeast, which behaves very differently and produces that distinctive lager flavor.

Koko has been called the “World’s Most Intelligent Gorilla.”

Koko the gorilla is already famous for her ability communicate with her keepers using sign language, but now she is showing signs that she may be able to learn to talk.

An ape, directly socialized with humans, has learned the vocal and breathing control found in human speech, according to new research.

For years, scientists have believed that apes do not have the capacity for speech – but one gorilla might be changing that. Koko – known for her abilities in sign language – has learnt simple sounds, as well as signs, from imitating humans.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about declining bee populations. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, beekeepers are seeing average yearly declines of about 33 percent. One UW-Madison student (Jeremy Hemberger) is taking a unique approach to stopping the trend, by using some tiny technology.

Nothing will quite make crunching into a deep-fried, spiral-cut potato-on-a-stick anything but a decadent treat enjoyed at the State Fair.

Scientists use DNA to figure out a lot of useful stuff: whether a drug will work to fight a certain form of cancer, who committed a crime, the ancient history of a fragment of fossilized bone. Now a team led by biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are putting genetic analysis to work to get to the bottom of a different sort of compelling question: the evolution of lager beer.

Noted: The University of Wisconsin-Madisons Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, or CIMSS, is partnering with the citizen science website Zooniverse and NOAA to categorize nearly 300,000 images collected over 32 years.

Noted: “It was made by a neutrino that came through the Earth somewhere below our detector,” said IceCube’s principal investigator Francis Halzen, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: IceCube is now getting so much data that the team has given up naming individual detections, says detector lead Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: The Clean Lakes Alliance, City of Madison, Dane County, Mio Soft, UW-Madison Center for Limnology, and the Space Science and Engineering Center teamed up to put this together.

A UW-Madison biochemist has been selected by Pres. Barack Obama to chair the committee honoring those making major contributions to the sciences.

GRAND CHUTE – Five local high schools worked with University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers recently to study the impact of advanced courses on graduates’ success after high school.

UW-Madison scientists are trying to find new uses for acid whey — the liquid byproduct in cream and cottage cheeses and Greek yogurt.It’s nothing like sweet whey, the cheese making leftover that’s often converted into protein powder.Dean Sommer of the UW Center for Dairy Research says today’s acid whey is hard to convert to a useful powder.

University of Wisconsin-Madison biochemistry Prof. Judith Kimble has been tapped by President Barack Obama to chair the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science.

The latest research on preventing the spread of White Nose Syndrome among Wisconsin’s bat populations will be presented this weekend.  You can also find out how you can help preserve the populations.

Dean Sommer wants to turn 8 billion pounds of whey from a liability into an asset.

A new faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Marianne Fairbanks, is bringing decades of experience with dyes, fibres and design to the development of a solar textile technology.

Two University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty members — one a textile artist and the other a chemist — have teamed to create fabric solar panels.

In the 58 years since they first responded to the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, thousands of men and women have provided descriptions of their families, incomes, education, aspirations, social lives and health (both physical and mental). Many of the 10,317 who took the first survey have stuck with it, answering five follow-ups over the last half century.

Jeremy Hemberger drives two hours to the cranberry marshes of central Wisconsin to glue radio chips to bumblebees. On a good day.

Lakeforecast.org is the creation of a collaboration of the Clean Lakes Alliance, software company MIOsoft, city and county officials and UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology and the Space Science and Engineering Center.