“This column avoids politics, but we are equipped to speak about science….Climate change is a serious issue, and policymakers would do well to plan for the challenges it poses to our way of life.
A: The first known scientific use of hurricane naming arose in the Pacific during World War II. It was an easy and effective way to distinguish one tropical cyclone from another on the weather maps, said Steve Ackerman, a UW-Madison professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and director of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies. The system was simple and alphabetical: The name of the first storm of the season would begin with A; the second, B; the third, C; and so on.
MADISON, Wis.-Three businesses in the University Research Park are making changes that reinforce the companies? commitment to Madison, according to the University Research Park director. Epicentre and Aldevron will move operations into the research park?s 80,000-square-foot Accelerator building. Exact Sciences will move into space Aldevron is vacating.
New Legislation has recently been proposed to the UW-Madison student government concerning the creation of a new committee. The Sustainability Committee of the Associated Students of Madison would focus of issues concerning sustainability on campus. There are four areas of focus that this committee plans to address while in existence. These are campus water use, energy use, land use and food sourcing. Solutions to these important issues will come through policy mechanisms in student government and working with UW-Madison faculty and administration.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has lost as much as $14 million in licensing income on a key drug, and stands to lose even more when the drug begins losing patent protection in 2014.
The Wisconsin Science Festival returns for its second year from Sept. 27 to 30. The schedule includes music, art and — hold onto your hats — explosions.
A new survey shows the University of Wisconsin-Madison and its alumni foundation have earned more than $57 million in fiscal 2011 from licensing research innovations.
UW-Madison, thanks to its partnership with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, remained among the national leaders in commercializing its academic research during the 2011 fiscal year, according to an annual survey of the Association of University Technology Managers released earlier in the week. Only one Big Ten Conference institution had more licensing income than UW-Madison?s $57.7 million, with Northwestern University bringing in a whopping $191.5 million -? tops among all colleges and universities.
?The list changes year-to-year, but the thing about WARF is we have remained consistently strong because UW-Madison is a world class university,? says Carl Gulbrandsen, the managing director of WARF. ?We wouldn?t be able to do any of this without a great university.?
When the climate began to warm during the last Ice Age about 23,000 years ago, much of the Northern Hemisphere was covered in ice. University of Wisconsin geologist Anders Carlson studies ice sheet melt from land and ocean sediment cores. His study describes what prehistoric Earth was like in North America and Northern Europe some 140,000 years ago.
Noted: But the results also have some researchers scratching their heads. The results are quite different from a 2009 study of monkeys in a colony in Wisconsin that found a clear survival edge from age-related diseases like diabetes, cancer and heart disease in calorie-restricted animals. That study also saw a trend toward longer life for monkeys on the diet when all causes of death were considered.
Results from a new National Institute of Aging study of monkey diet and longevity contradict those of a 2009 University of Wisconsin?MAdison study, but taken together the two experiments add nuance to our understanding of nutrition and life span.
Study of long-term diets in monkeys finds no difference in lifespan among monkeys fed fewer calories ? contrary to findings from a UW?Madison study published in 2009.
Also unlike previous years, most buildings have air conditioning, which is the most important thing for people to have during a heat wave, according to Richard C. Keller, a medical history and bioethics professor at UW-Madison. Keller is currently compiling an account of the heat wave that spread across France and central Europe in 2003. An estimated 70,000 people in Europe ? 15,000 in France alone ? died in early August from temperatures reaching 104 degrees. There is no death toll for this summer?s heat wave in the United States. ?There wasn?t an epidemic of heat wave deaths this summer,? said Keller. ?There is much more air conditioning in the U.S. and it is more widespread.?
A dairy plant addition and a new meat science and muscle biology laboratory are on the drawing board for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with half the money to build them being raised privately by the dairy and the meat industries, respectively.
If, after all that?s happened, you still can?t understand the appeal of Gov. Scott Walker and his arch-conservative allies, you might consider the roles of race and rural identity in Wisconsin. They seem to be crucial drivers in the anti-government tidal wave that has washed over our political landscape. That is a central finding of a major paper by Katherine Cramer Walsh, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist who has been widely applauded for a research style that relies more on personal interaction and group observation than on polling.
Paying for new academic buildings requires universities to engage in creative financing, and sometimes conduct ambitious fundraising from special interests that could benefit from the research produced there.
Deborah Blum was raised by an entomologist father and a literary mother, she writes on her website, which left her little choice but to grow up and become a science writer. Blum?s 2010 book, ?The Poisoner?s Handbook,? received rave reviews for its melding of science and mystery in the telling of the story of a pair of Jazz Age scientists fighting to catch killers and create the science of forensic detection. Here, Blum chooses three books that speak to the drama science creates.
A: On a day with high ice clouds, you are likely to see shiny, colored regions at either side of the sun. These are sundogs, an optical effect caused by refraction and dispersion of the Sun?s light through ice crystals. When the light rays strike the boundary between the air and water, like an ice crystal, several things can happen. Some rays are turned back in the direction from which they came, the familiar process of reflection. Other rays are transmitted into the crystal. Some of the transmitted rays change direction, a process known as refraction.
A. You probably don?t, according to Yaohui ?Gloria? Xu, dermatology professor at UW?Madison. ?You may get a few new freckles, but it?s more likely the ones you have already are just getting darker,? Xu said. Exposure to the sun triggers the release of a brown skin pigment called melanin, the reason people with darker skin have fewer sun-related skin problems. ?It?s a defense mechanism,? Xu said. ?Melanin is a natural photo-protector. It does what the chemicals in sunscreen do, and even better. It disperses the high energy of the sun?s rays.?
Paying for new academic buildings requires universities to engage in creative financing, and sometimes conduct ambitious fundraising from special interests that could benefit from the research produced there.
A proposed $75-million remodeling project for the University of Wisconsin-Madison?s Babcock Hall has receiving the blessing of the UW Board of Regents. Last week, the panel gave its approval to a plan that would provide half of the funding for remodeling and expanding the dairy research and teaching space and ice-cream and cheese-making facilities in Babcock Hall. The project also includes building a new livestock and poultry products laboratory.
Dr. Richard Weindruch is a professor of gerontology and geriatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who can tell you off the top of his head that a French woman by the name of Jeanne Calment lived the longest life of any known human, 122 years.
Researcher Jefferey W. Paller, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has carried out a one-year field work on slums in the Greater Accra Region, specifically in Old Fadama, Ga Mashie and Ashaiman, and observed that it required a strong political commitment to fight slums in the country, especially in the Greater Accra Region.
Carissa Philippi, who earned her doctorate in neuroscience at the UI in 2011, conducted a detailed self-awareness interview with Patient R and found he had a deep capacity for introspection, one of humans? most evolved features of self-awareness.
?During the interview, I asked him how he would describe himself to somebody,? says Philippi, now a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ?He said, ?I am just a normal person with a bad memory.??
Scratch the surface of just about any branch of science and you?ll find chemistry. Yet it remains in some ways the invisible science as its practitioners toil away ? too often unnoticed and underappreciated ? figuring out the chemical underpinnings of the natural world and chemical solutions to some of our thorniest problems.
On the UW-Madison campus, for example, chemistry is showing us a way to better understand and fight one of the most dangerous of the many bacteria that have become resistant to antibiotics. The bacterium is called Acinetobacter baumanni, or A. baumanni, and it proved a terror in front-line hospitals in Iraq, earning the nickname “Iraquibacter.” But in her laboratory at UW-Madison, chemist Helen Blackwell and her colleagues have spent a decade unlocking some of the chemical secrets of A. baumanni and may be on the verge of finding a new weapon against the stubborn pathogen. Chemistry, it turns out, underlies that bacterium’s ability to become deadly.
Experts are calling the recent outbreak of West Nile virus one of the largest in more than a decade. “It?s an epidemic,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison epidemiology professor and West Nile virus researcher Tony Goldberg.
The official state bird of Wisconsin is being called the primary culprit in spreading a deadly virus across the Northeast and Midwest. The American robin is being called the West Nile “super spreader,” based on research conducted by a team headed by UW-Madison infectious disease expert Tony Goldberg. “Robins are in the sweet spot,” Goldberg said in a news release from UW-Madison. “They are abundant, mosquitoes like to feed on them and they happen to support virus infection better than other species.”
Scientists in the United States and Europe have long been concerned with how well the public understands science, writes Dietram A. Scheufele, Life Sciences Communication professor, but debates about how to best communicate science with lay populations are driven by intuitive assumptions on the part of scientists rather than the growing body of social science research on the topic that has developed over the past 2 decades.
Freshmen entering college this fall have never seen an airplane ?ticket? and they probably have a tough time picturing people carrying luggage through airports rather than rolling it. To these first-year students, there have always been blue M&M?s, but no tan ones, while Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Richard Nixon have always been dead. And to these young adults, the Green Bay Packers have always celebrated with the Lambeau Leap. These factoids and many others are part of this year?s Beloit College Mindset List, which is designed to provide a glance at the cultural touchstones that help shape the lives of students entering college this fall.
MADISON (WKOW) — Some health experts are concerned about a study released Monday on binge drinking in college. Researchers from Colgate University say college students who binge drink report being happier than those who don?t. “Oh, the drinkers were happier? Wow,” says Tyler Mitchell, a former UW-Madison student. “Everything is so glamorized,” says Lee Stovall, another former UW-Madison student. “It?s hard to take a step back and say, ?Maybe I could be happier bowling for a night or something random.?”
“When we look at alcohol use, there is a lot about the institution, public or private, small or large, urban or rural, that really affects alcohol use patterns. This is one study at one university,” says Sarah Van Orman, UHS executive director.
College costs keep rising. More students pile on student loan debt to get through. It?s a much-chronicled story in higher education. But a new study by UW-Madison professor Jason Houle reveals surprising findings about who gets soaked the most by these trends. It?s not the poor. Or the rich. It?s the middle class. On average, students from middle-income families leave college with $6,000 more in loan debt than their peers from poor families. Compared with higher income peers, the difference is even greater: middle-class students rack up $12,000 more.
The National Institutes of Health provides over $400 million in support for biomedical research in Wisconsin (over $260 million at the University of Wisconsin), resulting in jobs, intellectual property and the formation of more new companies and medical advances. Take a break from partisan politics and publicly endorse support of our nation?s investment in scientific research. Let our politicians know that research needs to be supported, regardless of who wins the election.
— Brad Schwartz, Stoughton, UW-Madison professor of medicine
A: As we head into the second half of August a subtle transition in our weather begins to occur ? a transition that is probably hard to detect at first but that eventually becomes very obvious and then lasts for approximately eight months. We are not talking about the gradual reduction in daytime high temperatures or the increasingly cooler to cold nights, though these are also beginning to invade. Instead, we are talking about the nature of the storms that deliver our precipitation.
One of the working research papers being presented at the 107th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Denver this weekend deals with the disproportionate share of student debt that falls on students from families earning between $40,000 and $59,000. Here is the official release on the paper by Jason N. Houle of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I?m looking at Mendota now,” lake expert Steve Carpenter said Thursday from his UW-Madison office. “It?s windy and wavy, and it?s looking pretty good.” But we?re not going to have ? nor would we want ? a drought every year, Carpenter stressed. The extremely dry weather damaged crops, lawns and the economy. “So what we want to do is find a way to improve the quality of the lakes without having a drought,” said Carpenter, the director of the university?s Center for Limnology.
It?s hard to prevent bullying if you don?t know it?s happening. That?s why researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a program that they say is capable of detecting evidence of bullying from among the hundreds of millions of tweets sent each day.
The University of Wisconsin Marshfield Agricultural Research Station celebrated its 100th anniversary Thursday with an all-day open house along with a re-dedication program that featured speakers from all levels of government.
Rich Low dreamed of Iraq long after he returned home from the war.
The memories haunted him when he was awake, too. About six months after his deployment, he was driving at night when a sudden burst of lightning snapped him back to Baghdad and the bomb that exploded near him during a thunderstorm. Low?s pulse raced as adrenaline surged through his body even though he was driving on a road far from any war zone.He didn?t know post-traumatic stress was affecting him.
Not until he took part in a University of Wisconsin-Madison study that taught Iraq and Afghanistan veterans yoga, meditation and breathing techniques to cope with PTSD.
Scientists like Shelley Jansky need access to genetic diversity to develop varieties that are resistant to pests and extreme weather. She?s working on solving the problem of verticillium wilt, a common fungus in the soil.Through the potato gene bank, Jansky has found a wild species of potato from South America that?s mostly immune to verticillium wilt.”It?s a tremendous resource that?s right at my fingertips. I call them and say, ?Can you send me this, this and this?? and they send me seeds in the mail,” said Jansky, a U.S. Department of Agriculture research scientist and associate professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
(CNN) – The organization that grants academic accreditation to Penn State has warned the school that it is in danger of losing that crucial status in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal, the university announced this week. The move by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education is the latest blow for the beleaguered university, which has seen its reputation clobbered and its football program hobbled after investigators found school leaders did too little stop the abuse.
“It?s going to take a really unique year if we?re going to see it here, and we?re having that unique year,” said Joe Lauer, an agronomy professor at UW-Madison. Lauer said farmers also need to be on the lookout at harvest time for toxins from another genus of fungi called Fusarium. Those toxins can cause milking cows to become less productive and can induce farm animal miscarriages if ingested in high enough concentrations.
“About Seeing,” created in partnership with UW-Madison?s McPherson Eye Research Institute, will include a series of talks exploring how art and science intersect as we visually interpret the world.
One of the most pressing — and downright frightening — public-policy questions of our time received a healthy but under-the-radar airing this week at an elite scientific gathering in New York City.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently reviewed dozens of studies of the money saved by improvements in air quality. The average benefit was about $46 for every tonne of carbon dioxide avoided. This makes Australia?s starting carbon price of $23 a tonne look a bargain.
If you?ve ever thought about starting a company ? especially if there?s technology involved ? the next week or two should get those juices flowing. All sorts of activities are on tap, primarily tied to the Forward Technology Festival, Aug. 15-25. Meanwhile, 16 budding entrepreneurs will get intensive training on how to run a business at VentureLab Wisconsin 2012 at University Research Park.
Deciphering the different dialects of the United States has been the delicate work of Joan Houston Hall 76PhD, chief editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), since she finished graduate school at Emory and joined the project in 1975. Nearly a half-century in the making, DARE published its much-heralded fifth volume early this year, which reached the end of the alphabet?the final word being zydeco, a style of Cajun music common to Louisiana.
A. A drought means different things to different people. Technically, a drought is a period of abnormally dry weather sufficiently long enough in a given area to cause a shortage of water, whether it is for crops, recreation, water supply utilities or other purposes. As you can imagine, a drought for someone who lives in a desert region would be very different than for a person living among Wisconsin?s many lakes.
In today?s fast-moving technological world, some words can quickly lose their meaning. Take the word “nanotechnology,” for example. We see and hear it all the time. But, other than a vague sense that some pretty amazing things are being done with very small things, most of us don?t really have a handle on the promise of this science.
Exact Sciences Corp. wants to raise $50 million to get its test for colon cancer ready to go to market, even though it will be more than a year before that happens, in the best of circumstances.
“Part of the thinking behind that decision has to be a reflection of their concerns about the general stock market overall,” said Brian Hellmer, director of the Hawk Center for Applied Security Analysis at the UW-Madison School of Business.
….I posed that question to a handful of academics around town to get their thoughts. Ed Churchwell, a UW-Madison professor emeritus of astronomy and an expert on topics such as star formation, infrared and radio astronomy, and issues of extraterrestrial life, says ?it depends on what value one puts on new knowledge.? Sanjay Limaye, a senior scientist with UW-Madison?s Space Science and Engineering Center, believes strongly in the value of space exploration but adds it?s worth asking whether NASA has focused too much attention on Mars.
Four UW-Madison professors will receive a $1 million dollar grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to study genome production, according to a release from the university Wednesday. Aseem Ansari, Jennifer Reed, Parmesh Ramanathan and David Schwartz will lead the research into more efficient and less expensive ways to produce genomes, which contain the biological information about an organism encoded as DNA.
Inspired by nature, Hongrui Jiang?s group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have developed a nanocomposite that twists and moves in direct response to the sun?s light and warmth and used that to make a device that significantly increases the output of solar cells.
Four UW-Madison professors will receive a $1 million dollar grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to study genome production, according to a release from the university Wednesday.
Wisconsin is home to many things, but it?s safe to say few know the globe?s largest collection of wild and cultivated potato species are located here.
At first glance, Jerry Zhu seems like one of the last people on the UW-Madison campus you?d expect to be engaged in research on bullying. His website explains that he?s an associate professor in the university?s computer sciences department, and that his area of expertise is in machine learning. But Zhu is one of the leaders of a UW-Madison research team that has programmed a computer to scour millions of Twitter posts each day for cases of bullying in a unique, interdisciplinary project designed to compile vast amounts of information on this hot-button topic.
A. Lightning is a huge electrical discharge that results from the rising and sinking air motions that occur in thunderstorms. Lightning can be either cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-ground and is accompanied by thunder. Lightning also has different appearances.
Posts from the social media service Twitter are providing researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison a new way to study bullying among kids. UW-Madison researchers Amy Bellmore and Jerry Zhu, along with graduate students Junming Sui and Kwang-Sung Jun, have been able to teach a computer to identify tweets about bullying among Twitter?s 250 million daily posts.
Meditation or exercise may lower the rate, length and severity of the flu or common cold, according to preliminary findings of a study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Science deals in data. But cold calculation wasn?t enough for Richard Keller, a UW-Madison professor of medical history and bioethics. Keller has been immersed in a project that he felt required more than numbers to convey the real science story. And the story he?s working on could not be more timely. The story is about heat and its power to kill.
A group of researchers has developed a machine learning model that can detect tweets relating to bullying, and even identify bullies, victims and witnesses. Next, it wants to add sentiment analysis to determine individuals? emotional states. But if they see trouble, how do they intervene?
