Category: Research

Over the past decade or so, massive tree-eating armies of mountain pine beetles have chewed through tens of millions of acres of pine forests throughout the West.

It?s no secret that yoga can aid mental well-being. What is more, it can help soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, according to new research.

Noted: Jake Walsh, PhD student at the UW Madison Center for Limnology, says the finding is significant because there aren?t many northern lakes that have the invasive.

An experiment on newborn monkeys at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has ignited a debate, including a national petition drive, a federal review and a proposed local resolution seeking to halt the research.

Noted: Separately, University of Wisconsin-Madison research released this week is projecting that the number of extremely hot days in the Midwest and eastern U.S. cities is likely to grow sharply by the middle of the century.

Climate change isn?t just worrisome for the Earth.It could also be a problem for your health, according to a new 20-year study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Stem cell pioneer Jamie Thomson and others at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Morgridge Institute for Research will receive about $7 million in grant money over the next three years to grow brain tissue that could provide a faster, more affordable way to screen for neural toxins.

Heat stroke, cardiac arrest and other heat-related illnesses are expected to increase as the number of extremely hot days rises, said lead author Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Farmers? markets practically glow with wholesome virtue: Shop here, they promise, and you can help build a sustainable, healthy food system! But without the data to buttress those claims, it?s hard to know whether farmers? markets are actually meeting those goals or how they can adapt to better meet their communities? needs. Alfonso Morales, a professor of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wants to help change that.

Noted: ?It?s getting hotter,? said Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and lead author of the new study. ?And it?s the extremes that matter most to public health.?

Noted: A research team led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison recruited 29 women in their early 20s from France. The participants viewed 24 photos of two infants with happy, sad, angry or neutral expressions. Three photos were taken of each expression, one showing the full face and two with a pacifier or white square obscuring the mouth.

Monarchs have begun their annual migration. “They?ll ultimately end up in part of a mountain range in south-central Mexico, where they end up spending the winter, then head north again in the spring,” explained P.J. Liesch, manager of the UW-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab.

A University of Wisconsin study has found that the number of extremely hot summer days in some cities may triple by mid-century unless more is done to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

There has been increasing awareness and concern about monarch butterflies, but acording to entomologist Phil Pellitteri, there is cause for guarded optimism — at least in Wisconsin.

Noted: What?s particularly striking, says University of Wisconsin climate scientist Galen A. McKinley, is that China is now emitting more on a per capita basis than the European Union, for the first time in history.

Wisconsin?s agriculture industry continues to grow and create more jobs, according to a report released on Friday.

Noted: At least one recent experiment, carried out over 12 weeks, offers hope that lasting change is possible. By alerting a group of psychology students to their prejudice?90 percent of them showed antiblack bias at the beginning of the intervention?and teaching them a range of de-biasing strategies they could employ on their own time, University of Wisconsin-Madison psychologist Patricia Devine and her team showed that prejudicial attitudes could, with sustained effort, go down and stay down for at least two months. In a 2012 paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Devine concluded that unconscious prejudice could be unlearned, like a bad habit, through ?the power of the conscious mind.?

If you have lived in Portage all your life, you are wanted.

Many U.S. scientists had hoped to ride out the steady decline in federal funding for biomedical research, but it?s continuing on a downward trend with no end in sight. So leaders of the science establishment are now trying to figure out how to fix this broken system.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have identified a potential new treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder: a breathing practice commonly used in yoga or meditation.

Noted: A 2013 study by the University of Wisconsin?s Waisman Center found hormones released when girls are abused could trigger early puberty. Rather than triggering the fight-or-flight hormone cortisol ? which is what happened when boys were abused ? researchers found that, after regular abuse, girls released oxytocin, a hormone we associate with post-coital and post-natal bonding. But too much cortisol can be just as damaging. Eventually, a body learns to become inured to the stressful situations that trigger its release.

Yoga could be the best way to tackle stress, say two new studies.

Post-traumatic stress disorder continues to wreak havoc on the lives of veterans, but a new study suggests yoga could provide relief.

Several UW-Madison researchers are studying ALS, including four whose work has been supported by the ALS Association in recent years: pharmacist Jeffrey Johnson, comparative bioscientist Masatoshi Suzuki, microbiologist Randal Tibbetts and neuroscientist Su-Chun Zhang.

In light of new research that indicates kids who spend a lot of time playing video games may have more trouble identifying emotions, we talk with two video games experts about why the games are a positive force. Interviewed: Constance Steinkuehler & Kurt Squire

Scientists are warning wildlife officials that Wisconsin?s Department of Natural Resources produced a flawed wolf population estimate for the 18 months after January 2012 when the animals were removed from a federal endangered species list.

Scientists are warning federal wildlife officials that Wisconsin?s Department of Natural Resources produced a flawed wolf population estimate for the 18 months after January 2012 when the animals were removed from a federal endangered species list.

After nearly two hours of testimony, a Dane County board committee voted unanimously to kill a resolution urging the University of Wisconsin-Madison to cease its maternal deprivation experiments on rhesus monkeys.

Madison Vaccines, meanwhile, will have one of its prostate cancer vaccines involved in a clinical trial at UW-Madison as a result of a $1.5 million grant to Dr. Douglas McNeel, UW associate professor of medicine in hematology/oncology.

Congressman Mark Pocan wants to make sure young researchers get needed funding. The Wisconsin Democrat said the Next Generation Research Act will help address some of the funding losses to National Institutes of Health research at places like the University of Wisconsin.