Category: Research

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?

Two researchers at the University of Wisconsin – Madison have been awarded a five-year, multi-million dollar federal grant to study the brain activity of fruit flies and mice during sleep.

Katie Brenner, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin – Madison who is developing ways to help the early diagnosis of illnesses in premature infants, has been selected for one of five Women in Science Fellowships across the country.

University of Wisconsin-Madison has received a $440,000 federal research grant to study a program designed to make kids more financially literate.

As cases of a worrisome respiratory virus continue to pop up in the Middle East, scientists who study it in the U.S. are struggling to understand how they’ll be affected by a government moratorium on certain kinds of experiments.

A UW Madison researcher says close to forty percent of the state’s lakes could contain invasive species.

The College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has announced it plans to close its Soil and Plant Analysis Laboratory on the west side of Madison and consolidate services at the Soil and Forage Analysis Laboratory located in Marshfield. The move will happen gradually over the next year and is expected to be completed by November 2015, says Richard Straub, CALS senior associate dean.

Noted: Joining the Dalai Lama on the platform was Richard Davidson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the first scientists to work with the Dalai Lama. “I’m reminded how lonely the journey was at the beginning,” said Davidson. “There were fewer than 10 people doing this research on the planet.”

A great deal has been written about the changing face of the traditional family.With these changes in family dynamics, come similar shifts when divorce enters the picture. Dr. Maria Cancian, a professor of Public Affairs and Social Work at The University of Wisconsin Madison, takes a look at the landscape of divorce and custody in modern times.

Justin Vandenbroucke, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Levi Simons, director of citizen science at the LA Makerspace in Los Angeles, lead one group, which for the past four years has been working to build an app that teachers and students can use to create their own cosmic ray experiments. It’s called DECO, Distributed Electronic Cosmic-ray Observatory.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has played a major role in the rise of regenerative medicine, which uses our own cells, tissues and organs to promote healing. The field came of age with the isolation of human embryonic stem cells by James Thomson at UW-Madison in 1998 and the successful reprogramming of mature human cells back to their embryonic origin in 2007 by Thomson and Shinya Yamanaka in Japan.

A group that claims proposed research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will amount to “psychological torment” of young monkeys has sued to obtain a university commmittee’s notes about the project.

Earlier this month, six researchers from around the country issued a letter of concern about the management of Wisconsin’s wolf population.

Students who complete state-mandated financial literacy courses in high school tend to have higher credit scores than those who receive no such education, according to a new study.

A new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin – Madison is documenting the hottest and coldest places in Dane County and is one of the first of its kind.

At a meeting Thursday of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), some researchers said a moratorium imposed by the U.S. government on certain risky virology studies has gone too far.

One of the most prominent laboratories conducting gain-of-function studies is run by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a flu researcher at the University of Wisconsin?Madison.

In order to catch something very small, sometimes you have to build something very big.

Neural activity maps frequently present an incomplete picture of how a brain works; you can measure electrical activity, stimulate it or visualize the anatomy, but you can?t do all three. DARPA and the University of Wisconsin might just pull off that seemingly impossible feat, however. They recently built a hybrid brain sensor that combines both electrical and optical techniques to present a vivid picture of what?s happening inside the mind. The sensor is primarily made of ultra-thin graphene (just four atoms thick) that both conducts electricity and lets light through. By putting this device on top of neural tissue, you can simultaneously create brain activity and monitor virtually every aspect of it. Graphene is safe for your body, too, so you shouldn?t face the same risks you see with metal alloys.

DARPA, known half-jokingly as the Department of Mad Scientists, has again turned its attention to the human brain, this time hoping to expand our insight into it and its structure through the use of incredibly tiny (read: atom-sized) graphene sensors. It detailed its latest effort on Monday, explaining its work in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin at Madison to create a new form of technology for peering into how the brain functions. This is done as part of President Obama?s brain initiative, says the research agency.

A national animal rights group is suing the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, demanding that it release handwritten notes taken during meetings about controversial anxiety research with baby monkeys.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say that learning compassion is like weight training, and people can learn to build up their “compassion muscle” to respond to others? suffering with care and a desire to help.

What do you do if your university is the target of an aggressive publicity campaign that distorts and misrepresents the work of one of your most highly respected scientists? What do you do if hundreds of thousands of people sign a petition calling for a research project to be cancelled, even though the petition contains numerous errors of fact? What do you do if a media campaign, backed by several of the world?s largest animal rights groups threatens to undermine academic freedom and the research evaluation process at your University?

The University of Wisconsin-Madison physicist who was the driving force behind the giant neutrino telescope at the South Pole, known as IceCube, has been named the winner of a prestigious national award conferred by Smithsonian magazine, the university announced Friday.

In 1975, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Howard Temin was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology for discoveries he made in cancer research.

Richard Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the authors of the study, said he hoped that that the study could be extended to more participants with wider demographic representation. If still promising, then doctors could prescribe yoga as treatment for patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder in the future.

Small birds that once fled the snow and cold of winter are more likely to stick around thanks to warmer temperatures in northern climates, two UW-Madison researchers have found.