Category: Research

There was a surprise celebration in St. Louis Wednesday night as University of Wisconsin Alumni welcomed a new graduate as he and a friend arrived after a very long bike ride.

Nearly 20 years ago, the Dalai Lama asked a biologist why the tools of neuroscience couldn?t be used to investigate kindness, compassion and well being. The answer is that neurobiologists rarely choose to investigate these areas. Even though, then as now, they had tools capable of probing the connections. Most everyday experiences change the brain, often for the better. And it?s impossible to learn any new information without changes occurring in the brain. The Dalai Lama?s question made a deep impression on neuroscientist Richard Davidson, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, who went on to found the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds in 2008. He?s also co-author of a recently published review article detailing the progress investigators worldwide have made in understanding the factors that help and harm the mind?s development.

WE ALL remember dozing off during a boring class at school. A robotic teacher that monitors students attention levels and mimics the techniques human teachers use to hold their pupils attention promises to end the snoozing, especially for students who have their lessons online. Tests indicate the robot can boost how much students remember from their lessons.

You?d have thought that replacing a human teacher with a swanky robot would be enough to keep the kids interested, but apparently not. The University of Wisconsin-Madison found that supplying a robot teacher didn?t in itself max out concentration.

Well now researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are working on a robotic teacher that will detect when pupils are snoozing and employ a range of methods to ensure that they stay alert. Initial tests have suggested that the robot can?t shake students that refuse to pay attention, but it does boost how much they remember of their lessons afterwards.

A recent report from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) says Wisconsin lost more jobs in April, ending the month 5,900 jobs short.

Without sleep, humans become irritable, inefficient and accident prone – but HOW sleep heals us still isn?t fully understood.

Compared with the hustle and bustle of waking life, sleep looks dull and unworkmanlike. Except for in its dreams, a sleeping brain doesn?t misbehave or find a job. It also doesn?t love, scheme, aspire or really do much we would be proud to take credit for. Yet during those quiet hours when our mind is on hold, our brain does the essential labor at the heart of all creative acts. It edits itself. And it may throw out a lot.

The packages that started arriving by FedEx on 12 October last year came with strict instructions: protect the information within and destroy it after review. Inside were two manuscripts showing how the deadly H5N1 avian influenza virus could be made to transmit between mammals. The recipients of these packages ? eight members of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) ? faced the unenviable task of deciding whether the research was safe to publish.

We know that oats are good for us. Thanks to the work of University of Wisconsin-Madison plant breeders, they soon could be even healthier.

Two University of Wisconsin-Madison professors have received a $1.39 million grant to develop video games that emphasize kindness and compassion instead of violence and aggression.

Being a heavy snorer can increase one?s risk of cancer five-fold, according to research.

Saving open-grown oaks, those that were once part of a savanna ecosystem, is one place where urban outdoors residents can be involved in saving a part of outdoors history. Some of these open-grown oaks still remain, even in urban settings, but crowding from our own planting and building are turning them into forest trees, or firewood. These remaining trees, like the huge swamp white oak along Linden Drive on UW-Madison?s west campus, is a beautiful example of an open-grown tree. Its lower limbs survive today, some nearly touching the ground.

Some scientists have studied the two forms of happiness in the lab and found some significant differences. Work at the University of Wisconsin has found that people who are higher in eudaimonic happiness have reduced biomarkers of inflammation, like interleukin-6. These biomarkers, according to researcher Carol Ryff, are linked to a number of health problems like metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, so lower levels of them might offer a protective benefit. Ryff has also found that having a strong social support network – an integral part of long term life satisfaction – is connected with lower levels of the same biomarkers.

The Washburn Observatory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been the school?s scientific centerpiece since its commissioning in 1881. The same year which, coincidentally, was the last time anybody bothered to clean the optics.

The radioisotope molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) is a source for the commonly used radiomarker technetium-99m applicable in cancer diagnostics and life science research, but it?s in short supply and there are no American manufacturers of the material.

UW-Madison is launching a new online master?s degree program in Sustainable Systems Engineering. Classes are scheduled to begin in January, with applications to the new program being accepted through Oct. 15. The university explains this program ?is designed to prepare mid-career engineers with knowledge in sustainable engineering practices to be leaders in managing systems that impact the quality of water, land, air, energy, economics, and society.?

Some ancient plants, although a little smaller, are still around today. Wisconsin Gardner’s Shelley Ryan and botany professor Ken Cameron visit the Mesozoic Garden at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery on the UW-Madison campus to see living fossils that would make great container plants.

A standing wheelchair. It?s not the first of its kind, but it will go where no others have. It?s a project five University of Wisconsin at Madison students embraced — more than a thousand hours in the making and a chance to change the life of a surgeon no longer physically able to do his job.

A live feed camera capturing real time views of a red-tailed hawk?s nest on a ledge of Weeks Hall by members of the Space Science and Engineering Center has gained viral popularity over the past weeks.

Three baby red-tailed hawks are resting in their nest on a ledge below the roof of the four-story Geosciences building on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

The U.S. Department of Energy awarded UW-Madison grants Tuesday totaling more than a $22 million for the Morgridge Institute for Research and for nuclear engineering research.

UW-Madison is reaping the benefits of President Barack Obama?s commitment to restart the country?s nuclear industry. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced in a news release Tuesday that UW-Madison will receive $2.7 million in graduate fellowships and research grants to train and educate the next generation of leaders in America?s nuclear industry.

At the anthropology meeting in Portland, I sat down with John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, who chaired the open lab session, to learn more about how it came to be. Hawks explained that the impetus came in 2011, when Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, donated casts of the recently discovered remains of A. sediba to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. The move inspired the association?s vice president and program committee chair, Karen Rosenberg of the University of Delaware, to propose inviting other researchers and curators to bring casts of other fossil hominins (humans and their extinct relatives) to the meeting and make an event of it. Rosenberg then asked Hawks to organize the event, which became the plenary session of the meeting.

In the rushing streams and clear cool waters found from Minnesota to the Hudson Bay, the prized smallmouth bass feeds on crayfish, insects and the occasional bait launched into the water by a hopeful angler. They can be greedy, as freshwater scientist Gretchen Anderson Hansen found while collecting crayfish in a lake in Vilas County, Wis., when she found herself being observed by a handful of hungry smallmouth bass. Anderson Hansen, who does her research work with the UW-Madison Center for Limnology, was able to protect her samples this time around, but she?s not always so lucky. She says “opportunistic” bass “often grab her ?samples? before she gets a handle on them.”