Category: Research

A group of University of Wisconsin researchers have constructed a way to create sugar chains that can be used as a reliable biofuel source.

One bottle in professor Jim Dumesic?s chemical engineering lab stands out from the rest these days.

Attention, Kristen Bell: a researcher at the University of Wisconsin has finally solved why three-toed sloths climb all the way to the forest floor to poop, once every three weeks. (We?ve been lying awake at night trying to figure that one out, so surely the question?s been plaguing everyone?s favorite sloth fan.)

Biofuel production focuses on taking the carbon that?s already present in plants and converting it into burnable carbon-based fuels. Most of the carbon in a plant comes in the form of sugars, which can be readily converted into ethanol and less readily modified into other fuels.

The future of energy could be drastically changed by some research going on at UW-Madison. A team of more than eight researchers has discovered a possible breakthrough in biomass fuel.

?Wisconsin has the regrettable distinction of ranking among the worst states in the nation in terms of racial equality,? begins the report by COWS, a nonprofit think tank based at UW-Madison.

Researchers have been under fire since People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals PETA submitted an open records request to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009. The request led to two investigations by the United States Department of Agriculture and a probe by the National Institutes of Health?s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare. (Audio.)

Right now, as you are reading these very words, trillions of particles called neutrinos are streaming through your body. Hardly a single atom in your body feels their passage. Hardly one of the trillion neutrinos feels your presence. They are ghosts to you as you are to them. But that doesn?t mean these tiny flecks of matter don?t matter.

New research from scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has linked a protein to the spread of breast cancer to the brain.

Cows stand patiently in a tent-like chamber at a research farm in western Wisconsin, waiting for their breath to be tested. Outside, corrals have been set up with equipment to measure gas wafting from the ground. A nearby corn field contains tools that allow researchers to assess the effects of manure spread as fertiliser.

President Obama on Monday named 102 researchers — including two from the University of Wisconsion-Madison — as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on promising science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

The human brain may function like a computer, but humans can get caught up in contextual information, even when the rules are as clear-cut as separating even numbers from odd numbers, according to research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

President Obama on Monday named 102 researchers — including two from the University of Wisconsin-Madison — as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on promising science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

President Obama on Monday named 102 researchers — including two from the University of Wisconsion-Madison — as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on promising science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

The psychologists who did this research were interested in the question of how babies learn about ?nonsolid? objects. ?We had noticed in our lab work before that children are much better at learning names for new solid objects that they didn?t know before,? said Lynn Perry, now a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and lead author of the study.

The tick in your nose could be a new species. ?When you first realize you have a tick up your nose, it takes a lot of willpower not to claw your face off,” veterinary epidemiologist Tony Goldberg said in a statement.

Noted: #6. The First Neutrinos from Outside the Solar System. For the first time this year astronomers caught neutrinos originating in distant galaxies, an advance that heralds the start of a new era in astronomy?the era of seeing with particles, not just light.

From cheerful red handbags to festive green belts, colored accessories are often mandatory for the style-conscious during the holiday season. But what many fashionistas don?t know is that many of these products may be tainted with high levels of lead ? and the brighter and shinier they are, the greater the risk.

To Ken Cameron, vanilla is a lot sexier than its name implies.The worlds leading expert on the biology of vanilla orchids sees the popular spice, not as plain or ordinary, but as a beautifully complex and valuable commodity produced from the worlds largest family of plants.

Scientists have extracted the entire genome of a 130,000-year-old Neanderthal from a single toe bone in a Siberian cave, an accomplishment that far outstrips any previous work on Neanderthal genes.

News of research at UW-Madison showing that living in poverty may slow early brain development is the latest piece in a growing body of evidence that poverty is linked to lower school performance.

The UW-Madison?s A.C. Nielsen Center for Marketing Research conduct(ed) the study in September and October.

Noted: Three centers were launched in 2007 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and through a partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Michigan State University. Housed at the Wisconsin Energy Institute in Madison, the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center was the only one of the three not to be tied to an existing federal laboratory.

Poverty may have direct implications for important, early steps in the development of the brain, according to newly published research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Michael Alkire, associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of California, Irvine, was one of the first people involved in the search for neural correlates of consciousness, back in the 1990s. He?s particularly excited now about a study published in August by an international team of researchers based at the University of São Paulo and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Noted: There?s more on this imagery, generated with data collected by NASA satellites on Wednesday, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Space Science and Engineering Center. Visit the center?s Web site to see animated views of the cloud bands.