A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor has launched the Farmers Market Metric Project to help communities measure the impacts local farmers’ markets have on economic growth and community building.
Two UW-Madison professors serving as interim associate vice chancellors in the Office of Research and Graduate Education have been named to the post. Norman Drinkwater and Jan Greenberg were selected as the permanent associate vice chancellors following the university’s search process.
Adena Rissman is on the faculty in UW Madison, studying relationships between people and natural resources.
A study by University of Wisconsin researchers suggests that poor sleep in middle age could be one of the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Senior author Dr. Ruth Benca said in a release that despite correlation, the study doesn’t show whether poor sleep causes amyloid plaques to develop in the brain or whether amyloid plagues prevent quality sleep.
Noted: Cows on one side of the Square came from several farms in Jefferson County, while cows on the other side were provided by the UW-Madison Department of Dairy Science.
Technically, Nicholas Smith’s title is simply “associate outreach specialist” in the Department of Food Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Steve Ackerman and Jonathan Martin, professors in the UW-Madison department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, are guests on WHA radio (970 AM) at 11:45 a.m. the last Monday of each month.
Noted: Stanley Temple is the Beers-Bascom Professor Emeritus in Conservation at UW-Madison and former chairman of the Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development Program at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and in the case of the University of Wisconsin’s Cool Science Image Contest, some of those words are going to be a bit lengthier than usual.
Prof. Alice Goffman’s “On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City” has drawn a great deal of attention, mostly very positive (though some critical). But recently Prof. Steven Lubet has called attention to a particular passage from Prof. Goffman’s book that, on its own terms, sounds troubling.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers will spend the summer and fall studying the damage that frac sand can do to ballast after sand particles leak out of rail cars and onto railroad tracks.
A Madison startup whose device is aimed at helping women struggling with infertility took the grand prize in the Wisconsin Governor’s Business Plan contest.
An assistant professor of sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison is under siege amid allegations of illegality and dishonesty in her acclaimed book about the lives of young black men in urban Philadelphia.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering research and development team thinks a computer chip made mostly of wood could be the answer to potentially toxic, non-biodegradable electronics filling up landfills.
UW sociology professor Alice Goffman has gained rare acclaim for her scholarly work, “On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City.” But with the success comes criticism.
The room rotates. You stand there, shelves, walls, furniture slowly circling before your eyes. A bed decorated with throw pillows passes. The kitchen approaches. A microwave juts out from a shelf close enough to touch, a refrigerator at your back.
Great Lakes Bioenergy is a DOE, Office of Science-funded Bioenergy Research Center. Its mission is to develop ways to produce ethanol, advanced biofuels and chemicals from the non-edible, lignocellulosic part of plant biomass. The Center includes researchers at UW-Madison & Michigan State University, plus partners in a DOE-national.
Vials of bioterror bacteria have gone missing. Lab mice infected with deadly viruses have escaped, and wild rodents have been found making nests with research waste. Cattle infected in a university’s vaccine experiments were repeatedly sent to slaughter and their meat sold for human consumption. Gear meant to protect lab workers from lethal viruses such as Ebola and bird flu has failed, repeatedly.
High-profile biological lab accidents last year and this week with deadly pathogens like anthrax and Ebola put secretive bioterror labs under the microscope nationwide. The “high-containment” labs operate largely out of the public view in Wisconsin, even as mistakes happen.
Today’s cast-off gadgets are far more likely to end up in a landfill than they are being responsibly disposed of. In fact, 41.8 million tons of e-waste were scrapped last year alone. To combat this, a team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has invented a radically new kind of ecologically-friendly semiconductor chip made from wood. No, seriously.
Tim Smeeding, a professor of public affairs and economics at Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, has a few ideas on how to solve income inequality in the US.
We’re one step closer to biodegradable gadgets. These computer chips are made almost entirely out of wood.
If blaze orange is not your color, a proposal at the Wisconsin Capitol would could give you another option. The legislation would add blaze pink to the list of approved colors that must make up half of the outerwear worn by hunters who head out into the woods in Wisconsin throughout the year.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Real men — and women — could wear pink in Wisconsin’s woods if a group of lawmakers get their way.
The Open Source Seed Initiative wants to make carrot seeds more like software. That may seem like an odd project, but consider this: It’s currently possible to patent plants with certain traits, whether they are created through traditional breeding or biotech modification.
Animals go extinct, places too. And stories change.
A group of Madison-based scientists is forming a team to find the remains of long-lost World War II veterans and bring them home for proper burial. If private fundraising goals are met, the Missing In Action Recovery and Identification Project would meld the skills of UW-Madison scholars of history, genetic analysis and archeology.
Engineers at University of Wisconsin-Madison who say frac sand leaking from train cars is harming rail lines in Wisconsin are studying a new, cost-effective fix.
Wisconsin is home to largest number of organic dairy farms in the country and cows on each of those farms get part of their diet from grazing grass and other plants. Now, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers are trying to find ways to improve those pastures.
To honor the centennial of the Boaz mastodon, which went on display in 1915, Carrie Eaton, curator of collections at the museum, began researching the elephant-like creature, looking for more information about one of Wisconsin’s most famous fossils.
In August 2003, hundreds of Parisians returned from their summer holidays to an unholy smell. Ascending the stairs in their apartment buildings, they found the source: dead bodies. Between August 1st and 20th, a heat wave baked Europe, and nearly 15,000 people died in France alone. Richard Keller’s intrepid new book, Fatal Isolation, is a social autopsy of those deaths. (Subscription required.)
Bill Eisch has spent the past two decades scouring Department of Defense reports and other historical documents trying to find answers. A new project at UW-Madison aims to help reunite people like Eisch with the remains of those declared missing in action. The effort is inspired by the case of PFC Lawrence Gordon, a man who fought for the United States, died in France, and never made it back home.
A year after using cutting-edge DNA analysis to identify the remains of an American soldier mistakenly buried with the enemy after World War II, the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced Wednesday it will put its expertise in history, archaeology and forensic and genetic analysis behind the U.S. government’s tedious efforts to identify and recover other missing service members.
It was America’s first metropolis.Cahokia, the largest prehistoric settlement in the Americas north of Mexico, flourished in the 1200s, with a population of 20,000 people at its peak – but was mysterious abandoned by 1400. Now researchers think they know why – a megaflood that raised the Mississippi River by 10m.
Alcohol consumption questions have become commonplace in the repertoire of a doctor’s assessment of a patient in Wisconsin, but the brief dialog isn’t prompting those most in need to seek treatment, a study shows. The study, performed by UW-Madison assistant professor of social work Joseph Glass, said the process known as screening and brief intervention helps people with milder drinking problems but not those who need counseling or treatment.
More than 100 people in Door County spent their Saturday thinking about how exactly the world is going to be affected by climate change during the second annual Door County Climate Change Forum at Stone Harbor. Attendants were first introduced to Professor Molly Jahn of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who leads research in creating modern knowledge systems for sustainability.
Noted: As part of the special event, Professor Sissel Schroeder of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Anthropology will provide a brief presentation at the park shelter at 2 p.m. She will discuss her archaeological field school excavations, which will be under way at the time and focus on the residential homes of the prehistoric people who populated Aztalan.
Researchers have long debated the reasons behind the rapid rise and swift disappearance of Cahokia, a sprawling, ancient city-state near the modern city of St. Louis. Now an analysis of sediment cores reveals that the city’s ups and downs correspond to the timing of Mississippi River megafloods, according to a recent study from University of Wisconsin geographers Sam Munoz and Jack Williams.
People with short-term debt, such as overdue bills or credit card debt, are more likely to be depressed than those who carry long-term debt through mortgages and other big loans, a new study suggests. “A 10 percent increase in short-term debt was associated with a 24 percent increase in depression symptoms,” said the study’s lead author, J. Michael Collins, faculty director of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: The company bought Cellular Dynamics International Inc. in Madison for $307 million this month. Cellular Dynamics International, known as CDI, employs about 150 people and was co-founded in 2004 by James Thomson, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the most influential scientists in stem cell research.
The American Innovation Act co-sponsored by Senator Tammy Baldwin from Wisconsin will provide more money to a variety of research agencies to incentivize innovation across the country. UW–Madison is the fourth largest research institution in the nation, and would be a part of this funding bill.
Peter Levi, stream ecologist and post-doctoral research associate at the UW Center for Limnology, is playing a role in drawing more neighbors to the changing Kinnickinnic. Last summer, Levi studied six restoration projects on all three of Milwaukee’s rivers – the Milwaukee, Menomonee and this spot on the Kinnickinnic.
Research by University of Wisconsin professor Holly Gibbs found that the Brazilian soy industry’s moratorium significantly decreased deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, but that rates of deforestation in the Cerrado and other eco regions not covered by the moratorium, as well as in the Amazon biome outside of Brazil, increased.
Psychologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Cardiff University have found that people from different countries can be grouped into ’cultures of smiling’.
There’s a significant relationship between depressive symptoms and short-term debt, according to a new study of 8500 consumers
Narrow provider networks are often considered synonymous with a lower quality of health care, but a new study challenges that conventional wisdom.
Enologist Nick Smith and the 2015 vintage are both getting started in Wisconsin.
The people who built and lived among the tall, sculpted mounds now preserved at Cahokia Mounds Historic Site have long presented a mystery to archeologists.
MADISON, WISCONSIN—Sediment cores from Horseshoe Lake, located in the Mississippi floodplain near the center of Cahokia, and Grassy Lake, roughly 120 miles downstream, provide clues to the rise and fall of the ancient city, according to geographers Samuel Munoz and Jack Williams of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
The people who built and lived among the tall, sculpted mounds now preserved at Cahokia Mounds Historic Site have long presented a mystery to archeologists.One of the biggest mysteries: Why did they leave? A team of UW-Madison geographers studying pollen deposits buried in the sediment under Horseshoe Lake may have stumbled upon new evidence that helps explain Cahokia’s decline.
Cahokia was a pretty big deal in the 1100s. Founded by a complex cultural group that built tall mounds and sweeping plazas, the city near present-day St Louis, Missouri, was home to tens of thousands of people. But its population began declining around 1200, and by 1350, Cahokia was a ghost town.
If you come from a country of immigrants, you’re more likely to crack a friendly smile on the street. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which may explain why Americans beam more than their Chinese and Russian counterparts. Scientists have known for decades that societies have their own unwritten rules about when it’s appropriate to smile, frown, or get angry. These rules are part of a country’s “emotion culture,” the norms that influence how and when people express whether they’re pleased or upset. Researchers often study these differences geographically, finding that the United States and the West tend to be more expressive than China and the East. But those geographical studies overlook the important role migration played in shaping emotion culture, says Paula Niedenthal, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
No one truly knows what led the Mississippians of Cahokia to abandon their city in the early 1300s. Ideas range from over-hunting and deforestation to drought and even political strife.
Long before Europeans arrived to settle St. Louis, an impressive human construction stood on the eastern side of the Mississippi River. It was the Native American city of Cahokia. At its height, tens of thousands lived in and around Cahokia, leaving behind great earthen mounds as testament. The largest still stands about a hundred feet tall today, minus what was likely a temple that once adorned its crest.
Credit cards can carry more than high interest rates—they actually might increase your chances of depression.
“Our results suggest that taking on unsecured debt may adversely influence psychological well-being,” said Lawrence Berger, the study’s lead author and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty.
A study involving the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health says students who post more on social media about drinking before college actually did more binge drinking their freshman year.
A study involving the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health says students who post more on social media about drinking before college actually did more binge drinking their freshman year. The study, which was conducted with the University of Washington, involved 338 incoming college freshmen between 18-19 years old, recruited during the summer at both campuses.
Jim Berbee, founder of Madison-based Berbee Information Networks Corp., will receive the 12th annual Ken Hendricks Memorial “Seize the Day” award at the 2015 Wisconsin Entrepreneurs Conference, organizers said Wednesday.
Tom Neeson, a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Limnology and lead author of the study, said important fish, such as walleye and lake sturgeon, migrate back and forth between the Great Lakes and rivers that drain into them. The problem is there are hundreds of thousands of dams and road crossings that disrupt breeding migrations, he said.
Noted: The drug Co-D is developing, called Triolimus, was developed by professor Glen Kwon at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It contains three proven anti-cancer agents in a nontoxic, nanoparticle carrier, the company said. Patients with the blood vessel cancer, called angiosarcoma, have an average survival rate of less than a year.
