Category: Research

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.

Wisconsin Congressman Mark Pocan hopes a new bill will improve opportunities for young scientists.

Noted: As the applications and their value multiplies, efforts have increased to develop alternative tests, rather than rely on harvesting the crabs. One approach uses an electronic chip that provides an alert when in contact with contaminants. Another system using liquid crystals, developed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, could offer similar detection ability at lower cost.

America is at risk of losing an entire generation of scientists according to the National Institutes of Health. They say current U.S. policies are putting the brakes on research.

There?s a good chance that many of the suddenly trendy vegetables that foodies latch on to in the next decade will benefit from research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Doug Reinemann, Professor, Biological Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin?Madison, suggests the following ten do?s and don?ts when planning a milking parlor?especially for ?retrofit? and ?low-cost? alternatives.

Three-quarters of the phosphorus run-off that enters Lake Mendota arrives during 29 days each year, on average, according to a study published recently by UW-Madison researchers. The finding could have major implications in area efforts to clean up Madison-area lakes.

When a 15-year-old boy drowned in a rip current off a Port Washington beach two years ago, University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Chin Wu happened to be doing erosion research on a nearby bluff.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been awarded $3 million for nuclear power research projects from the U.S. Energy Department.

Noted: For while the open door of online mapmaking has produced a lot of maps, it?s also brought about a standardization of aesthetics. ?To make it easy for people to make a map,? says Daniel Huffman, a cartographer at the University of Wisconsin, ?you need to simplify the process down and make things very uniform.? Riffs on Google Maps look for the most part like Google Maps, with its top-down view, muted color scheme, choice of line weights, and approach to terrain. Even original maps created on Mapbox or other, more powerful geographic information system-based software can lead, at the very least, to design that is ?sterile,? according to cartographer Kenneth Field. Certainly, the style is ubiquitous.

A new Wisconsin study has modeled what the effects of climate change and evolving land use will mean for various species in the future.

Noted: The NIH will also study reviewers? work in finer detail, by analysing successful applications for R01 grants, the NIH?s largest funding programme for individual investigators. The goal is to see whether researchers can spot trends in the language used by reviewers to describe proposals put forward by applicants of different races. There is precedent for detectable differences: in a paper to be published in Academic Medicine, a team led by Molly Carnes, a physician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, used automated text analysis to show that reviewers? critiques of R01 grant applications by women tended to include more words denoting praise, as though the writer is surprised at the quality of the work. And numerous other studies show that different standards exist for men and women in a variety of fields. ?Women do, indeed, have to be twice as good to get the same competence rating as a man,? says Carnes.

Ebola is not the virus that keeps Marc Lipsitch up at night.

An interactive map posted online last week by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms what you probably already knew about Wisconsin?s economy: Manufacturing and the jobs it produces are vital to the state.

Climate scientists have long been building models and analyzing available data to determine the effect of human activity on the global environment, but what about the time before humans? Was Earth in a warming or cooling period before human activity became a factor?