Category: Research

Pay attention, managers: Group the Johns with the Jennifers. The quality of a team?s work improves if its members share the same initials, suggests a new study from the University of Wisconsin. 

PETA has taken out over 100 new bus ads in Madison to decry the University of Wisconsin?s use of animals in laboratory research.

Polar bears aren?t the only species threatened by climate change. Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin, has spent the last two decades studying the ways that a warming world will affect human health. In 2007, he shared the Nobel Prize as a lead author for the United Nations? Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Patz, who holds degrees in medicine and public health, crisscrosses the globe to spread the word about the far-reaching impacts of climate change on our health and why better urban planning might be the answer.

Chancellor Rebecca Blank introduced the idea of splitting a Vice Chancellorship into two positions for next year at a University of Wisconsin-Madison Faculty Senate meeting Monday.

Pictures of a lab cat are now being displayed throughout Madison on the sides of city buses. Madison Metro buses rolled out a new Peta ad campaign. The picture shows a cat with a metal bar screwed to its head.

When Ellie Leden was born, her hair was white as snow. Her eyes were blue but transparent.

Joy Zedler carefully planned the three experimental wetlands at the University of Wisconsin?Madisons Arboretum to be identical: parallel marshes 295 feet long and 15 feet wide, carved by engineers into the green landscape. Zedlers contractors planted all three tracts with similar species to see how the vegetation would absorb and clean water runoff during storms.

MADISON (AP) ? University of Wisconsin students and researchers set out in ?word wagons? nearly 50 years ago to record the ways Americans spoke in various parts of the country.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the first adjuvanted vaccine for the prevention of H5N1 influenza, a virus commonly known as avian or bird flu that has been at the center of an international research controversy the past couple years.

A new kind of telescope buried deep beneath the ice of Antarctica has, for the first time, seen a signal from distant, violent events. In doing so, it is beginning to paint a picture of a part of our cosmos that has never been observed before.

UW-Madison researchers dealing with human or animal test subjects will have a new tool for navigating ethical uncertainties.

Why does some blue-green algae found in lakes and streams turn toxic? It?s because of a lack of nitrogen, according to a study by researchers at the UW-Madison Sea Grant Institute.

Most nights after coming home from daycare, 2-year-old Brennan?s favorite toy is a $350 iPad.

A second study, reported by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, also is troubling for the passive strategy. UW-Madison research, yet to be published, found that prions ? the infectious, deformed proteins that cause CWD ? can be taken up by plants. The findings suggest crops and garden plants pose a previously unknown risk for exposure to CWD among deer.

Madison, Wis.Started in 1984, this park hosts more than 126 companies that employ 3,500 people. Graduates include Madison?s Exact Sciences, which is developing a non-invasive DNA test for detecting colon cancer. Exact Sciences trades on the Nasdaq and boasts a recent $160 million market cap.

An increasing number of Wisconsin apple growers have adopted integrated pest management while reducing their pesticide use. Not only is it good for the environment, but it also has sent a positive message to state and federal agencies, according to a news release.

Helping children process their parent?s incarceration is an issue University of Wisconsin Professor Julie Poehlmann has been grappling with for more than 15 years. And for the last few years, she has been developing a unique way of communicating with children about some tough life questions.

Noted: The area of the mirror in the Arizona telescope is 75 times larger than the area in a telescope on the MU campus in Columbia, said Eric Hooper, an astronomy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is the interim director of the WIYN Observatory.

The U.S. Census Bureau tracks how people move from county to county in each decennial report, but a UW-Madison laboratory has taken that to a visual level.

According University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers, lead poisoning in minority children may be a large contributing factor for Wisconsin?s achievement gap, which national scores released Thursday showed were the widest in the country.

The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) is getting updated, and University of Wisconsin researchers are curious about how the language has changed since data was first collected.

Each year, 10 million Americans pack up their lives and move to another part of the country. But where are they going? The University of Wisconsin-Madison has made an awesome map that tracks the net migration to different counties across the U.S.

Jeremy Fiel grew up going to fairly diverse public schools in Lubbock, Texas. “Some schools had a higher black or Hispanic population,” he said. “But there weren?t any all-white schools.” After graduating college in 2006, he spent three years teaching science in Greenwood, Mississippi. What he saw in Greenwood shocked him.

Noted: Brain scans of teenagers revealed weaker connections between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus in both boys and girls who had been maltreated as children, a team from the University of Wisconsin reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Girls who had been maltreated also had relatively weak connections between the prefrontal cortex the amygdala.

A new database that was built to map the inter-migration of Americans has shown how the Midwest, above all over areas, has lost the greatest amount of people since the 1950s.

Social media such as YouTube videos provide a popular and flexible venue for on-line social activism, a new study has found. The study explains how two different social protest movements – Occupy Wall Street and the Proposition 8 same sex marriage initiative – utilised YouTube, and their success in engaging activists.

Last month, Popular Science magazine disabled all online comments on its website.Citing a University of Wisconsin-Madison study on online comments and their impact on a reader?s ability to process scientific fact, Suzanne LaBarre, the magazine?s online content editor, said “comments can be bad for science.”

The following is the second of two guest posts from political scientists John S. Ahlquist (University of Wisconsin) and Margaret Levi (University of Washington) in conjunction with their newly published Princeton University Press book: In the Interest of Others: Organizations and Social Activism.