Category: Research

A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor won top honors in a national science image contest hosted by the National Science Foundation and Science, a renowned journal, for her picture of magnified sea urchin teeth.

Textile artist Lia Cook?s artistic interests shuttle between the lab and the loom. Cook, who teaches at California College of the Arts, starts with a photograph, often a self-portrait or a picture of herself as a child. She then translates that image onto a fabric piece using a digital Jacquard loom.

Could there be other laughing-related modes of behaviour? Perhaps suggesting the necessity for a broader definition? Researchers professor Cecilia E. Ford, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, and professor Barbara A. Fox, from the University of Colorado-Boulder, US, hint that there may be in their essay ?Multiple practices for constructing laughables?

Humans often have access to blood donors in cases of emergency, and now animals have the same luxury because of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Veterinary Teaching Animal Blood Bank.

Lawrence Berger, a University of Wisconsin at Madison associate professor of social work, has found that when the dollar amount of a person?s debt increases by 10 percent, depressive symptoms ? like not being able to shake the blues, feeling lonely, or having trouble eating or sleeping ? increase by 14 percent.

The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has reprimanded Rao M. Adibhatla, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for falsifying experimental results in two published papers and three unfunded grant applications, according to a notice in the Federal Register published last week (January 25).

You know the standard model for a university administrator: polite, unflappable, professionally groomed, able to recite policy in long or short form, kind of boring, skilled at disguising true feelings and, of course, intent on keeping a lid on things.

In his book, ?A Short History of Nearly Everything,? author Bill Bryson sheds interesting light on the remarkable nature of human cells.

MADISON, Wisc. ? A satellite image of Michigan taken by NASA is showing the state in its purest winter form.NASA?s photograph was taken on Tuesday, and comes via the CIMSS at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  It?s an aerial view of Michigan that you may not have seen before.

Bird flu researchers said Wednesday that they would end a self-imposed moratorium on controversial experiments to determine how the deadly H5N1 virus might mutate and gain the ability to spread easily among humans.

A year after bird flu scientists agreed to stop research into how only a few mutations in a deadly H5N1 virus could enable it to spread among mammals, they announced Wednesday that research should resume because it?s vital to preparing for a possible pandemic, should such a virus emerge in nature and threaten humans.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents Tuesday urging the board to end a UW-Madison animal research project, presenting new allegations the university practiced animal cruelty in the experiments that began in 2008.

A year after bird flu scientists agreed to halt sensitive research, they said Wednesday that the work should resume ? except in the U.S. and other places that haven?t specified conditions under which the studies can be done.

Research on lab-engineered strains of the H5N1 bird flu virus is set to restart a year after the scientists voluntarily paused it to allow for an international public debate on the safest way to proceed.

Controversial research into making bird flu easier to spread in people is to resume after a year-long pause.

Scientists last night ended a voluntary ban on creating mutant forms of bird flu, despite warnings that an accidental release could kill millions of people.

International scientists who last year halted controversial research with the deadly bird flu say they are resuming their work as countries adopt new rules to ensure safety.

Veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are being invited to participate in a Wisconsin study designed to help soldiers adjust to life after combat.

Experiments with a deadly flu virus, suspended last year after a fierce global debate over safety, will start up again in some laboratories, probably within the next few weeks, scientists say.

Q: What is the difference between a nova and a supernova? A: Through history, sky watchers occasionally ? every few centuries or so ? observe the sudden appearance of a new star, which is visible for a few weeks or months and then disappears. In Latin, these were called “stella nova” or new star.

Experiments done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are angering animal rights advocates. The experiments in question are being preformed on Rhesus monkeys because of their similarities to humans.  In these experiments, baby monkeys are separated from their mothers right after birth and later subjected to scary tests to provoke fear and anxiety. The monkeys are then killed and dissected and their brains are studied.

The Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology, based at the University of Wisconsin – Madison will try to identify those environmental risks. Professors from six Midwestern universities and a U.S. Department of Energy scientist will collaborate on the research.

How do scientists know spring flowers are blooming much earlier than they did years ago? By looking at meticulous records kept by American naturalists Henry David Thoreau and Wisconsin?s own Aldo Leopold.

It was not research but the love of nature that led Wisconsin ecologist Aldo Leopold to pen his journals more than half a century ago, meticulously documenting the times of the year that plants bloom, mammals emerge from hibernation and frogs begin to sing.

Many of these words have more than five different definitions, in addition to five different spellings, depending on the region ? or even the region within the region ? from whence they came. To find out more about the Dictionary of American Regional English, the University of Wisconsin-Madison created a great website about the project.

For the second year in a row, the UW-Madison online graduate engineering programs rank in the top 10 among U.S. colleges offering degrees in the field.

Video: Oral drops for dog allergies pass another hurdle.

Q: Why does a stream of water break into individual droplets as it falls? A: The spheres form through a force called surface tension, the same force that forms soap bubbles into spheres, said Michael Graham, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ?Surface tension exerts a force that minimizes the liquid?s surface area, and a long cylinder of fluid has more surface area than a string of droplets of fluid.?

Online trolls may not just be offensive — they may be making you dumber, a new study found. The comments section of science news may be coloring the way readers think on the most unbiased science stories, can dumb down the discussion and impact what news is more easily available, two University of Wisconsin Madison researchers said.

Breakthroughs in flexible semiconductors may lead to better and easier night vision for the military and law enforcement, thanks to the University of Wisconsin.

A year after a University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist?s bird flu research pulled him into the fray of a global controversy over the safety and wisdom of experimenting in a lab with a potentially deadly virus, the research is still at a voluntary standstill, awaiting new guidelines from the U.S. government.

A new study has worked out the effect online comments have on readers – and it?s surprisingly large.The study hails from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and concentrates on layman reports of science stories (appearing in regular newspapers and magazines). It found that content in the reports were very easily undermined by the comments below – even when it was a simply a matter of tone.

Thirty years ago, Bonnie Svarstad and Chester Bond of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered an interesting pattern in the use of sedatives at nursing homes in the south of the state.

This process is called transcranial magnet stimulation, or TMS. It is the key to a device that Giulio Tononi, one of the most-talked-about figures in anesthesiology since Nassib Chamoun, hopes will provide a truly comprehensive assessment of consciousness. If successful, Tononi?s device could reliably prevent anesthesia awareness. But his ambitions are much grander than that. Tononi is unraveling the mystery of consciousness: how it works, how to measure it, how to control it, and, possibly, how to create it.

A: Hundreds of millions of years ago, a mutation in an ancestor of snakes caused a gene to start making toxic molecules, says Noah Dowell, a postdoctoral fellow with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in UW-Madison?s department of cellular and molecular biology.

No. Sound is a sequence of pressure waves that propagate through a compressible medium, such as air or water. Sound has to move molecules in order to travel. Sound is transmitted from a source to the surrounding molecules, which vibrate or collide and pass the sound energy along until it eventually reaches our ears. The closer the molecules are to each other, the farther the sound can travel. This is why sound travels farther through water than it does through air and why it is impossible for sound to move through space.

Ohio State University researchers, in a joint project with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Wisconsin, used numerical analysis to fill gaps in weather data taken at Byrd Station, 700 miles from the South Pole.

The University of Wisconsin Medical School is looking for up to 800 smokers to participate in a new study, after the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention was recently given $10 million in federal funds for research from the National Institutes of Health. The grant is intended to help advance the understanding of the most effective ways to help people quit smoking and the benefits that quitting has on the body over time.

When Richard Davidson first began his doctoral work more than 30 years ago, the disciplines of neuroscience and  psychology didn?t play well together.  The idea that emotions were brain activity that could actually be measured and quantified in a laboratory setting was dismissed by most researchers.  But Davidson persevered and is today the foremost expert on the science of emotions.  

Global warming is essentially giving the insects a huge advantage, as the trees, with their long lifespans, have no chance to develop biological resistance, according to researchers from the the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who report a rising threat to the whitebark pine forests of the northern Rocky Mountains.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel gathers what it believes are the most interesting breakthroughs and developments at state universities, including UW-Madison.

With temperatures climbing from climate change, the mountain pine beetle is now moving to higher elevations on mountain slopes and is a “rising threat” to the whitebark pine, which is found mainly in the Rocky Mountains, coast range of B.C. and the northern U.S., says a new study.The report was published Monday by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Noted: They retrieved one of the sensors and recalibrated it at the University of Wisconsin. They discovered a software error that had introduced mistakes into the record and then used computerized analyses of the atmosphere to fill the gaps.

If it wasn?t for finding the God particle, work by UW-Madison researchers and others on why the universe has virtually no anti-matter would have been the biggest scientific breakthrough of the year, according to Science Magazine.

Mentions that in 1998, the Forest Service began providing fire safety forecasts based on theories developed by meteorologist Donald Haines from the University of Wisconsin. The Haines Index is a mathematical formula calculating the potential for large wildfires to experience extreme fire behavior.

The study published Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience, was conducted by scientists at Ohio State University (OSU), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with funding coming from the National Science Foundation, which is NCAR?s sponsor.

ARLINGTON ? A $3 million renovation project to dairy facilities on the UW-Madison campus is nearing completion and should be ready for students by early 2013.

On Tuesday, the National Institutes of Health in Maryland is holding a second day of talks about whether and how to continue funding some controversial scientific experiments.

Early-commitment scholarships — in which a donor offers to pay the way for a class of students to attend college, for example — have been an occasional hallmark of philanthropy. A new study examines making a similar effort with the Pell Grant: telling low-income students as early as the eighth grade that they will receive federal help to attend college, in the hopes that it would encourage them to prepare for and pursue a postsecondary education.