Category: Research

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.

At the University of Wisconsin, a breakthrough on the common cold front. Researchers construct a model of rhinovirus C and show how it differs from rhinoviruses A and B. ?We previously assumed all rhinoviruses would be the same as each other, and it turns out that they?re not,? said biochemistry professor Ann Palmenberg. That discovery goes a long way towards explaining why drug trials targeting rhinoviruses haven?t been very successful. ?We now understand why the rhinovirus C is different than the A and B, and why the previous drug trials did?t work.?

The first time Demar Garrison was in the Racine County Jail he was about 8 or 9. He was there visiting his mom.

Two acclaimed authors discuss how the language we use shapes the planet we live on. A conversation between William Cronon and Michael Pollan.

Squats can safeguard your sniffer: Regular exercise protects your sense of smell as you age, according to new research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: The University of Wisconsin-Madison study that Popular Science cited, for instance, was focussed on whether comments themselves, anonymous or otherwise, made people less civil. The authors found that the nastier the comments, the more polarized readers became about the contents of the article, a phenomenon they dubbed the ?nasty effect.?

A new study of the full genetic code of a common human virus by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison dramatically confirms of the ?out-of-Africa? pattern of human migration previously documented by anthropologists, and studies of the human genome.

In a humid room at the University of Wisconsin?Madison (UW), large Tupperware boxes hold thick beds of gray fungi, pockmarked with holes and crawling with leafcutter ants. The boxes are home to colonies of two leafcutter species, Atta cephalotes and Acromyrmex echinatior, brought back from the tropical forests of Panama and Costa Rica by bacteriologist Cameron Currie and his colleagues, who study these insect agriculturalists and the fungus gardens they tend.  

A new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin used a genomic analysis of strains of the Herpes Simplex Virus type-1 (generally associated with cold sores) from around the world to see if they tracked with general theories of human migration. HSV-1 works particularly well for this kind of study because it is easily spread by physical contact as well as easy to collect.

To confirm the theory that humans spread out from Africa tens of thousands of years ago, all you have to do is follow the cold sores. Or, to be more precise, follow the mutation patterns encoded in the genome of the virus that causes those cold sores.

After examining Herpes virus? genome, scientists confirmed that early humans first emerged on the African continent before spreading out in disparate groups across the globe.

The ice and snow of early spring in northern Wisconsin had come and gone. Also departing with the frigid weather were the adult northern pike our team had been tracking as the fish migrated inland from Green Bay to spawn. Now we were looking for evidence of the next generation to find out if they could successfully navigate the many challenges on their migration to the safer waters of Green Bay.

You might think you don?t have much in common with a fruit fly. But studying them could tell us more about human conditions such as traumatic brain injury (TBI) ? from, for example, a motorbike accident or a blunt hit on the head ? which can in some lead many years later to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, an Alzheimer?s-like form of neurodegeneration.

Using a robo-call and a video, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals condemned experiments on cats that are done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in an effort to improve hearing in humans.

This week, leaders from around the world will gather in Des Moines, Iowa, to honor the recipients of the World Food Prize. University of Minnesota alumnus Norman E. Borlaug, the celebrated crop breeder and Nobel Prize Laureate for Peace in 1970, envisioned the prize as a way to recognize creative individuals who have advanced the availability of safe and nutritious food for the world?s people. Since 1987, the prize has paid tribute to scientists, humanitarians, and leaders in politics, business and nongovernmental organizations.

Epidemiologist Tony Goldberg was working with primates in Kibale National Park in Uganda. But, when he returned to his lab at the University of Wisconsin, he began feeling some pain in his nose.

Popular Science magazine?s decision to kill online commenting should be the start of a wider discussion, says the social media researcher whose findings were one of the reasons for the magazine?s move

How rare was that early blizzard in South Dakota?

Could a spring-loaded fly swatter save NFL football players and Iraq war veterans from the effects of concussions and traumatic brain injuries?

Patricia McConnell, an expert on animal behavior, is not against hunting and even raises lamb for food. But the University of Wisconsin-Madison zoologist and author is appalled by what she regards as blatant cruelty to animals sanctioned and abetted by the state.