Category: Research

A: They are broomcorn, a plant still used to make straw brooms, says Mohammad Fayyaz, head of the botany garden at UW-Madison. The plant was reportedly imported to the American colonies by Benjamin Franklin after 1700. Scientifically known as Sorghum vulgaris var technicum, broomcorn is closely related to sorghum, a grain crop grown in drier parts of the Midwest. Sorghum and corn are closely related.

A: A degree day is a measure of heating or cooling. A degree day is defined as a departure of the mean daily temperature from a given standard: one degree day for each degree of departure above (or below) the base temperature during one day. The degree day is related to the outside temperature and is not related to time.

A: They are broomcorn, a plant still used to make straw brooms, says Mohammad Fayyaz, head of the botany garden at UW-Madison. The plant was reportedly imported to the American colonies by Benjamin Franklin after 1700. Scientifically known as Sorghum vulgaris var technicum, broomcorn is closely related to sorghum, a grain crop grown in drier parts of the Midwest.

University of Wisconsin-Madison hydrogeologist and professor of geology Jean Bahr was recently appointed to the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board by President Obama. Bahr was sworn in Sept. 27 along with seven other new members of the board. She will serve a four-year term with the possibility of a single-term renewal. Bahr was nominated by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences and was approved by the president.

The National Science Foundation awarded a grant to a University of Wisconsin sustainability project through the Sustainable Energy Pathways program.

A. Currently, the ozone hole is not as large as it was in 2011, but it is larger than it was in 2010. The ozone hole refers to the rapid depletion of stratospheric ozone over Antarctica. This ozone is located in a layer about 15 miles above the surface. Human activity has contributed to the deterioration of the ozone layer by adding chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, to the atmosphere.

A. It?s simple: No rocks formed during the dinosaur epoch still remain, said Phil Brown, professor of geoscience at the UW-Madison. “If you could fire-hose off all the glacial deposits, the rocks beneath would be between 2,800 and 350 million years old, and the dinosaurs only arose about 230 million years ago and went extinct 65 million years ago.”

Whenever a new building opens on a college campus these days, it?s common for the institution to trumpet the facility?s many ?green? or ?sustainable? attributes. It?s not uncommon to read about new projects that take advantage of natural sources of light, use geothermal heating and cooling systems, implement high-tech, energy-efficiency controls and so on.

And while such ideas and technological advances are no doubt important, an interdisciplinary team of UW-Madison researchers earlier this month was awarded a federal grant to, in part, examine an oftentimes overlooked aspect of operating a green building — the folks who occupy the facility.

A principal adviser to President Barack Obama joined a roundtable discussion on national energy policy Wednesday on the University of Wisconsin campus to speak on the policies, technologies and incentives influencing the future of energy.

The number of women faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has steadily risen over the past few decades, due in part to efforts by the university to reduce biases in hiring, according to a university news release. Women accounted for only 18 percent of the faculty at UW-Madison in 1990, but constituted 31 percent of professors and instructors last year.

Researchers say new findings could be the start of a new way to study and treat diseases.

If you told people you wanted to talk with them for 50 minutes about the crystallization of polymorphs, you probably wouldn?t get too many takers. Good thing professor Richard Hartel has found a sweeter way to sneak that message into his demonstration at the Wisconsin Science Festival: Chocolate.

A University of Wisconsin research center will receive one million dollars over the next two years in funding from the U.S. Department of Commerce for their proposed projects.

A. Though it isn?t unprecedented to get another day above 90 degrees this late in the year (the all-time latest such day in Madison?s history is Oct. 14, 1975), it is very likely our run at the record of 90-degree days in a season will end at 39 ? agonizingly one day shy of the record 40 set in 1955.

– So popular is the discovery of the “God particle”, that an extra lecture by one of the researchers has been added at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Physics professor Sau Lan Wu — who heads up a UW-Madison research team based at the Large Hadron Collider and who has spent more than two decades searching for experimental evidence of the Higgs boson — is giving a second free public talk on Friday that?ll provide an inside look at the Higgs search and the excitement surrounding the discovery.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison welcomed one of its own professors to campus Thursday to speak about her role in the discovery of the Higgs boson, also referred to as ?the God particle.? Sau Lan Wu, a physics professor at UW-Madison since 1977, told a crowd of over 100 people how researchers detected the particle and how the university played a star role in the discovery.

Bring up the subject of pacifiers among new parents, and you?ll probably spark a spirited conversation that will wake up every sleeping baby within a block or so. Now, a UW-Madison study is likely to fuel even more debate about the trusty old nuk. Or nuki. Or binky. Or na-na. Or whatever you have chosen to call the device that serves as a remarkably effective volume control for most babies. Paula Niedenthal, a psychology professor and lead author of the study, found that boys who used pacifiers as babies scored lower on tests that measured their emotional development.

She helped discover the “God particle” and she?s going to talk about it this week. UW-Madison physics professor Sau Lan Wu will give a free public lecture Thursday about the two decades she spent searching for the Higgs boson particle, which scientists believe they found in July. It was hailed as one of the most important scientific discoveries in a century and had a team of UW-Madison researchers, led by Wu, playing leading roles figuring out the physics of, and building and operating, the $10 billion machine used to discover the particle.