Category: Research

About half of all young adults are struggling to achieve financial security in their transition from college to adulthood and are continuing to rely on family for financial support, despite being employed full-time, according to the latest report from a longitudinal study.

Noted: O?Brien is an academic, an epidemiologist with a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The South American electric eel and hundreds of other electric fish evolved in six distinct lines over a period of 400 million years, developing an electric organ from what had once been muscle and providing a fascinating laboratory for the study of evolution.

Sociologist Alice Goffman is a 5-foot-2-inch white woman who grew up in privilege in Philadelphia?s historic and affluent neighborhood of Center City.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore will take snap shots of otherwise elusive predator mammals later this summer. 

?This is the first complete genome sequence for an electric fish, in particular a strong electric fish,? said Michael Sussman, a biochemistry professor at UW-Madison who?s also director of the UW Biotechnology Center. Along with graduate students Lindsay Traeger and Jeremy Volkening, Sussman helped lead the 16 researchers from throughout the country who were part of the study.

For the first time, the genome of the electric eel has been sequenced.

The electric eel is one of the many creatures Charles Darwin sliced up and examined in his years aboard the H.M.S. Beagle. When he cut it open, he found that 80 percent of the fish?s body was taken up by three organs made of what looked like muscle tissue, but not quite. This is where the animal makes electricity.

Electric fish evolved the ability to shock by converting a simple muscle into an organ capable of generating an electric field, scientists have discovered.

The electric eel?s powerful ability to deliver deadly shocks ? up to 600 volts ? makes it the most famous electric fish, but hundreds of other species produce weaker electric fields. Now, a new genetic study of electric fish has revealed the surprising way they got electrified.

Using sediment core evidence taken from the sea floor off Greenland?s coast, the team of researchers from Oregon State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison were able to estimate the extent of the Greenland Ice Sheet during an interglacial period 400,000 years ago, when global sea levels were much higher than today.

It may seem as though every new day brings an announcement of a scientific breakthrough of the highest order. Should you freak out about every new record-breaking neutrino? In this week?s “Ask a Physicist,” we?ll find out.

According to Edgar Feige, economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, unreported income totals $2 trillion in the U.S. That includes illegal activities like drug dealing, but it also includes side jobs like nannies and eBay sellers.

Is student loan debt causing young adults to retreat from the housing market en masse? No, but it?s having some impact, and the debt burden appears to be hitting black borrowers harder than whites, says a recent paper from researchers Jason Houle of Dartmouth College and Lawrence Berger of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Chances are that when you think about math?which, for most of us, happens pretty infrequently?you don?t think of it in anything like the way that Jordan Ellenberg does. Ellenberg is a rare scholar who is both a math professor (at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and a novelist.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, will develop the curriculum for a $400m Nestlé dairy training center in China.

Remember the Spanish Flu of 1918? Of course you don?t. That?s the freakishly deadly influenza strain that swept the globe in 1918 and 1919, wiping out 30 million to 50 million people. It infected about one in four Americans and killed about 675,000. It didn?t just kill little kids and the elderly, either, like most flu strains. This one was unusually devastating in young, healthy people?although why the “mother of all pandemics” behaved as it did is not fully understood.

When the U.S. housing market boomed and busted in the past decade, commercial real estate was comparatively placid.

Students have been taught that math is about right and wrong, rather than trial and error. Over the three years Jordan Ellenberg was writing his book, he repeatedly encountered the same reaction to its subject. ?I?d be at a party, and I?d tell someone what my book was about, and then I?d be like ? ?Hey, where?d you go??? What topic was so awful and off-putting as to make people flee at its mere mention? Math.

Waisman Center experts discuss the cost and treatment of autism in this Wisconsin Public Radio talk show segment.

Students who graduated college in the throes of the recession are still struggling to make it on their own.

On the surface, Gen Y, those ebullient 20-somethings smiling into their phones as they snap selfies, can seem glowingly optimistic about their futures. Despite the major recession they?ve already faced and seen their parents struggle with, they often tell researchers that they think they will eventually find their footing and establish a standard of living at least as good as the one they enjoyed growing up with their parents.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say they have found a group of agents that can seek out and find dozens of kinds of solid tumors, a finding that may lead to new treatments.

Flu viruses currently circulating in birds closely resemble the one that caused the 1918 pandemic that killed about 50 million people worldwide, researchers say.

Over the three years Jordan Ellenberg was writing his book, he repeatedly encountered the same reaction to its subject. ?I?d be at a party, and I?d tell someone what my book was about, and then I?d be like??Hey, where?d you go??? What topic was so awful and off-putting as to make people flee at its mere mention? Math.

Noted: Researchers are just beginning to recruit volunteers. One of the locations is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; others are at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and Northwestern University and Rush University Medical Center, both in Chicago.