Category: Research

Noted: The Institute for Personalized Learning, housed at Cooperative Educational Service Agency #1, has received the grant from the Joyce Foundation to partner with University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers for the study, according to an announcement Monday.

Buried deep in the Antarctic ice, an observatory has spotted ghostly, nearly massless particles coming from inside our galaxy and points beyond the Milky Way.

“We’re not sure that the roads have become safer,” the study’s lead author, UW professor Jason Vargo, told Bloomberg News. “We may be just putting people out on the same roads that are as dangerous as they were before.”

Near the end of Alice Goffman’s acclaimed 2014 book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, she interviews George Taylor, father of Linda, who is one of the central characters, and grandfather of Linda’s three sons, whose lives dominate the narrative. (George and Linda, like most of the names in the book, are pseudonyms.) Taylor’s parents had been Georgia sharecroppers, and like so many African-Americans of their generation, they had headed north in search of a better life. They settled in Philadelphia when George was 5.

Kayakers drawn to the legendary sea caves along the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore can explore them without being caught off-guard by potentially deadly waves, thanks to a real-time wave observation system developed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The recent controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood has long been burdened with a serious flaw: the group is donating fetal tissue to scientists for medical research, which is perfectly legal. Indeed, the practice was specifically authorized by Congress, with broad and bipartisan support, decades ago.

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.