Category: Research

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

The study from the Water Sustainability and Climate Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison says a 14-year effort to clean up Lake Mendota failed because of changes in farming, land development and climate change.

For 45 minutes, an infant is swaddled and snoozed into a cozy fMRI machine. That’s all it takes for researchers at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds to observe how structures inside the child’s brain communicate with each other.

Veronica Berns lives for biology, chemistry and all those other subjects the rest of us actively avoid – and that’s why she decided to become a scientist.

When Jay Gallagher saw the first fuzzy image, he figured the camera simply needed focusing.

Veronica Berns digs science. She gets it. She speaks its language. Veronica Berns. But not everyone is like that. There are people who don’t know how to talk about quasicrystals in casual conversation. People like … oh I don’t know, the person writing this blog post, for instance. Just one example!

An astronomy project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has made inroads on two questions: how to track neutral hydrogen in the “distant” universe and how to scale up the capacity to maintain and manage the data generated through such work.