Category: Research

A new study shows poverty rose slightly in Wisconsin from 2012 to 2013, despite some job gains. The report released Tuesday by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers said the Wisconsin Poverty Measure rose to 10.9 percent in 2013, up from 10.2 percent in 2012. That measure was roughly 2.5 percentage points lower than the official Wisconsin poverty rate from the federal government.

The current outbreak of bird flu is a different strain from the one that caused an uproar in the scientific community in 2012, but a University of Wisconsin researcher at the center of a debate over biosecurity said it underscores the need for more experiments that some critics consider risky.

Researchers led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found people who live in countries that have benefited from migrants from a wide range of countries over time, are more emotionally expressive.

MADISON, Wis. AP – Late last spring, a doctoral student worked late into the night. As she doodled, her chemistry thesis took on a life of its own, transforming into a comic book.

About 100 university scientists and their advocates gathered here on Tuesday as part of an annual ritual to convince lawmakers of the value of federal spending on medical research.

Two researchers at UW-Madison, Christina Hull and Luis Populin, have been named winners of biomedical research awards, one for brain disease research and the other for work in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD. Each will get $100,000 a year for three years from the Hartwell Foundation, a Memphis-based foundation that grants awards to individuals for innovative, applied biomedical research to benefit children in the U.S.

Noted: To test the music, Teie partnered with Charles Snowdon from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Snowdon and his team visited 47 cats at 23 different homes and played the music to observe the results.

A new University of Wisconsin study, which shows farmers have recently converted millions of acres of grassland to plant crops like corn, highlights a not-so-obvious downside: converting grassland to cropland has a large carbon footprint.

Corn and soybean cultivation soared in the late 2000s, as U.S. agribusiness rushed to respond to federal legislation rewarding biofuels production. Debate since the institution of the program has centered on the question of whether biofuel crop expansions have come at the expense of plowed-under biodiverse grasslands and prairie ecosystems. A new study largely settles that argument.

MINNEAPOLIS – Minnesota converted more wetlands into farmland than any other state when crop prices spiked between 2008 and 2012.

The Final Four schools represented in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament are powerhouses not only on the court, but also in the research lab.

Kate McCoy was out with her 4-year-old son when she got a call from her husband. Their 5-month-old son, Neil, had started having trouble breathing, and they were both now at American Family Children’s Hospital.

Timothy Van Deelen, an assistant professor of forestry and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the practice is associated with putting the deer at risk of contracting CWD. He said baiting and feeding puts deer in close contact with one another, allowing the disease to spread.

One week of extreme temperatures in Antarctica isn’t something to worry about by itself, but it’s something to watch closely in the coming months and years, says a meteorological expert at the the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

You may not even think twice about turning on the radio in your home to start or end your day, but your cat may have noticed it for completely different reasons.

While it may seem worrying that the latest U.S. Census Bureau numbers show declining populations in almost half of all Wisconsin counties last year, one demographer says it’s important to look at the bigger picture.

UW-Madison agronomy professor Bill Tracy and his graduate students created a new variety of sweet corn — a non-hybrid with ears that don’t all look the same, as most farmers and gardeners these days have come to expect.

In the same issue of Science, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison reported positive results from clinical trials of a new “whole virus” Ebola vaccine.

What cat owner hasn’t wondered what their pet was thinking?

Noted: Spencer Black, a Democrat who chaired the House Natural Resources Committee for 26 years and is currently an adjunct professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says there has been in Congress ‘a general attack on the integrity of science, and an unwillingness to listen’. ‘It is not new, but because there are people now who are in power who wish to stifle independent scientific inquiry, it’s a lot worse than it once was,’ Black continues.

Noted: A number of natural factors can affect a jet stream’s speed and course, such as mountain ranges and changes in sea-surface temperature patterns. But Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, believes global warming is the main culprit causing recent changes. In 2012, Francis – with Steven Vavrus, a climate modeller from the University of Wisconsin – proposed Arctic warming contributes to the polar jet stream swinging further north and south.