Category: Research

Noted: To investigate, Dr Natali and Nigel Golden, from the University of Wisconsin, looked at ground squirrels: small, fluffy rodents that are found across the Arctic.

If you want to start a space farm, head for an asteroid. It seems there’s enough fertiliser zipping around the solar system to grow veg for generations of space colonisers – and researchers are already beginning to grow viable, edible plants in space.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — David Krakauer, an evolutionary theorist and director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been selected as the Santa Fe Institute’s next president.

In the United States—as in all of the world’s wealthier nations—ending poverty is not a matter of resources. Many economists, including Timothy Smeeding of the University of Wisconsin and former director of the Institute for Research on Poverty have argued that every developed nation has the financial wherewithal to eradicate poverty. In large part this is because post-industrial productivity has reached the point where to suggest a deficit in resources is laughably disingenuous. And despite the occasional political grandstanding against welfare, there is no policy, ideology or political party that is on the books as pro-starvation, pro-homelessness, pro-death or anti-dignity.

A battery researcher whos spent time at Rayovac and in academia will lead energy storage research efforts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.Deyang Qu will start in January as the Johnson Controls endowed professor in energy storage research at the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the company and university are announcing Thursday. He also will be affiliated with the Wisconsin Energy Institute at UW-Madison.

University of Wisconsin researchers have developed a new variety of organic corn called “Who Gets Kissed?”

Poor sleep quality may be a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, according to new research.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison asked 98 people aged between 50 and 73 to fill in a questionnaire about their quality of sleep.The volunteers also underwent brain scans.

“Who Gets Kissed?” is the name of a new organic sweet corn developed by the UW-Madison and a nonprofit called the Organic Seed Alliance.

A mega volcano field in Chile has the potential to trigger an eruption 100 times bigger than that seen at Mount St Helens, experts have said.

Lake sturgeon have been on the planet for 150 million years. Despite that long residency, scientists are still learning about these fish, the largest found in North America. An enduring question is what contributes to their survival skills. Answer: Sound. As one factor anyway.

A new computer system is better than scientists at the complex task of extracting data from scientific publications and placing it in a database that catalogues the results of thousands of individual studies.

As men in blue and gray uniforms fell dead and artillery shells whistled overhead, Capt. John Cornelius McMullen noticed a flower growing outside his tent while his unit laid siege to Atlanta.

Evolutionary biologist Sean B. Carroll, executive producer of the doc Mass Extinction: Life At the Brink, on why mankind’s days are numbered.

Noted: Over all, research finds that single-sex education does not show significant academic benefits — or drawbacks. Janet Hyde, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who analyzed 184 studies covering 1.6 million children around the globe, said the studies showing increased academic performance often involved other factors that could not be disentangled from the effects of the single-gender component.

A recent study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison offers one of the most detailed records of the variation in temperature between cities and the surrounding rural areas, known as the urban heat island effect.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison started mapping pollution in the country by following grievances about it on social media.

Most drugs now used to treat the flu have a straightforward strategy: attack the virus. But a new study out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison proposes that it might be possible to take another approach. Researchers there have discovered a way to reduce the cellular material inside a person that influenza cells use to multiply. A news release from the university likens it to “cutting the fuel line on a bank robber’s getaway car.”

In order to better understand how the brain works, one of the areas cognitive neuroscientists are exploring is how it functions while we are dreaming and how we process information while we observe actual events.

China has some of the world’s worst pollution. But tracking it in all but the biggest cities can be impossible since local governments don’t release any data to the public.

A study probing directional flow of information in the brain has revealed that opposite pathways are at work when perceiving reality and daydreaming.

The University of Wisconsin has recently acquired a rare collection of lichen specimens – about 60,000 of them, to be exact. The director of the Wisconsin State Herbatarium talks about the collection, and what we can learn from lichen about the world’s ecosystem.

Levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere shows seasonal changes, dropping during the summer as growing plants inhale, then rising as they exhale and begin decomposing the their growing season, and now researchers say they’ve determined a significant role of agriculture in that phenomenon.

New research released Wednesday shows an increase in crop production has caused levels of carbon dioxide to rise and fall seasonally to a larger degree, with fluctuations growing by 50 percent in the last five decades, according to a UW-Madison news release.

Hector DeLuca is the embodiment of nearly a century of University of Wisconsin research into Vitamin D, and he’s working to extend that reach for at least another generation or two.

Isthmus contributor Bill Lueders reported on the life, death and research of r04040 at UW-Madison in the November 13 issue, and discussed his story with WORT producer Dylan Brogan on that day’s edition of In Our Backyard.

The giant black hole at the centre of the Milky Way may be producing the mysterious high-energy neutrinos, NASA scientists have found.

A coalition of scientists from University of Wisconsin, Florida Atlantic University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have made a discovery: Fat turtles are better swimmers than their thinner counterparts. The findings were so unexpected, researchers thought they made a mistake at first, Warren Porter, a professor of zoology at UW who worked on this project, said.

My monkey died as he lived — in seclusion, for the benefit of others. His name was r04040. He was euthanized on April 28, 2010, two days after his sixth birthday. More than four years would pass before I made the records request that reacquainted me with his reality, and apprised me of his fate.

Twitter is becoming a must for researchers after a US analysis found it can boost their profile by more than 50 per cent. A University of Wisconsin-Madison study has found Twitter is an indispensable outreach tool, amplifying the benefits researchers reap by engaging with traditional media.

When David Baum was an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, he pondered, as students are wont to in the small hours after the bar has closed, one of biology’s most basic questions. It was this: how did eukaryotic cells (the complex sort that make up every plant and animal as well as lots of unicellular creatures like amoebas) evolve from prokaryotic ones (bacteria and their kin) which are much simpler?