Mary Kay Baum, former Madison School Board member, former mayoral candidate and steady campaigner across the decades for economic and social justice, always has a cause. And she always has something to teach us. Now, she?s teaching us new ways to think about and respond to Alzheimer?s.
A new grant will help researchers at UW-Madison test a new class of diesel biofuels for nautical use. The Engine Research Center in UW?s College of Engineering received a $2 million grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research to help develop a method of testing hydro-treated vegetable oil for ship and submarine engines. Rolf Reitz, director of the Engine Research Center, said the center?s six professors and a group of graduate students will work to develop a computer model that can accurately predict how certain blends of these fuels will perform in maritime engines.
On May 20, a 10-year-old girl in rural Cambodia got a fever. Five days later, she was admitted to a hospital, and after two days of intensive care she was dead.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have created cells with the qualities of those that form the protective barrier between the blood and brain.
UW?Madison paleoanthropologist John Hawks says we definitely evolved to eat meat, but ? in context with our modern diets and lifestyles ? that doesn’t mean it’s entirely good for us.
A. Limestone is abundant in Wisconsin, and it?s the material of choice for the surface of gravel roads, and the base for roads paved with asphalt or concrete. Limestone contains calcium carbonate, often with a mixture of magnesium carbonate. When chunks of limestone abrade against each other, small particles called “fines” are created, said Craig Benson, chair of the departments of civil and environmental engineering and of geological engineering at UW-Madison.
A. A flood occurs when water flows into a region faster than it can be absorbed into the soil, stored in a lake or reservoir or removed in runoff or a waterway into a drainage basin. A flash flood is a sudden local flood characterized by a great volume of water and a short duration. It occurs within minutes or hours of heavy rainfall or because of a sudden release of water from the breakup of an ice dam or constructed dam.
There is a private island for sale off the west coast of Florida between Sarasota and Naples ? yes, the asking price is $29.5 million ? that was originally inhabited by an Oshkosh native who made his fortune in Madison….The scientist referenced by the (Wall Street) Journal was Charles Burgess, who graduated from UW-Madison in 1895 and taught chemical engineering there from graduation to 1913, when he resigned to devote his energies to a private laboratory he’d started in Madison in 1910. Early on, Burgess’ lab produced batteries for Madison’s French Battery Co., soon to be renamed Rayovac.
Some said Ron Fouchier?s work would help fend off a pandemic. Others called it a terrorist?s cookbook. Authorities on either side of the Atlantic spent months examining the research. Now the rest of the world can read it, too. In a paper just published in Science, Dr Fouchier explains how bird flu might adapt to spread easily from person to person. The publication caps a long fight over whether the paper?s benefits outweighed its risks. But this controversy will not be the last.
Five genetic tweaks made a deadly strain of bird flu that can infect humans spread more easily, according to a study that the U.S. government had first sought to censor on concerns it could be used by bioterrorists.
The world has yet to see a form of the deadly bird flu virus that could spread easily between people and cause a global outbreak – but that doesn?t mean it won?t happen, scientists said on Thursday.
The more controversial of two papers describing how the lethal H5N1 bird flu could be made easier to spread was published Thursday, six months after a scientific advisory board suggested that the papers? most potentially dangerous data be censored.
Sleep apnea ? repeated pauses in breathing during sleep ? is much more common than previously thought. The condition increases the risk of high blood pressure, depression, heart disease, cancer and death. Losing weight and exercising can offset it. People who sleep too little or too much, regardless of whether they have sleep apnea, are more likely to be overweight. Those and other findings about sleep are common knowledge among scientists today thanks to Don Chisholm, Mary Ellen Havel-Lang, Paul Minkus and more than 1,540 other participants in the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study.
In “The Emotional Life of Your Brain,” psychologist, psychiatrist and brain researcher Dr. Richard Davidson looks at how our brains emotionally respond to events in our lives. He and science writer Sharon Begley explain how your brain chemistry controls your emotions and, ultimately, your personality.
Noted: More recently, University of Wisconsin-Madison, communications scholars have warned that Google?s search recommendations (the list of suggested searches that pop up when you start typing a word using the popular search engine) actually bend people?s perception. Looking at nanotechnology, for example, the study showed that top search suggestions over a few years turned away from business to health concerns. The search recommendations were actually steering more people to look into less-reliable nanotechnology health-issue websites, they found. “Google is shaping the reality we experience in the suggestions it makes, pointing us away from the most accurate information and towards the most popular,” study lead author Dietram Scheufele told USA TODAY in 2010.
A: The summer solstice (in Latin, sol, ?sun,? and stice, ?come to a stop?) is the day of the year with the most daylight. The first day of the astronomical Northern Hemisphere summer is the day of the year when the sun is farthest north (on June 20 or 21). In 2012, this occurs on June 20 at 6:09 pm CDT. As Earth orbits the sun, its axis of rotation is tilted at an angle of 23.5 degrees from its orbital plane. Because Earth?s axis of spin always points in the same direction ? toward the North Star ? the orientation of Earth?s axis to the sun is always changing.
Noted: Matthew Fuxjager and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison let male mice chalk up three rigged “wins” against other mice and then after a fourth win, studied how many “androgen receptors” there were in key parts of their brains. Androgen receptors are receiving stations for testosterone, and the more there are of them, the more powerfully any single spurt of testosterone will affect the brain.
By sticking to one big “Idea”, project leaders for the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery were able to make a number of new laboratory design concepts work.
At coffee shops, truck stops and around backyard grills, many people are asking the same question: As the climate changes, can we expect more of this? The answer: Yes. There is a strong probability that climate change is influencing certain extreme weather events. Along with other leading scientists at Big Ten universities, that?s what we know. We?re not alone. Insurance industry leaders think so, too, and they have been meeting with U.S. senators to call for action.
Donald J. Wuebbles is a professor of atmospheric sciences as well as electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois. Jack Williams is director of the Center for Climatic Research Geography at UW-Madison.
A: It happens all the time, but almost all the time it?s on purpose. “It really depends on the type of animal,” said Keith Poulsen, a large animal veterinarian at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. “It?s very rare for birds to be obese, because they couldn?t fly anymore. “But plenty of animals end swimsuit season by gorging on anything they can find.
A UW-Madison event geared toward promoting science in the Latino community is moving to Warner Park this year. Explorando las Ciencias is an annual event that features hands-on, bilingual scientific exhibits geared toward children and parents who may be Spanish speakers, according to UW-Madison News. This year?s event is scheduled for 2-10 p.m. June 22 at the Warner Park Community Recreation Center on the city?s North Side.
If there is one place any scientist would wish to be, chances are it would look a lot like the place where UW-Madison physicists Wesley Smith and Sau Lan Wu find themselves right now ? on the verge of discovery.
In “The Emotional Life of Your Brain,” psychologist, psychiatrist and brain researcher Dr. Richard Davidson looks at how our brains emotionally respond to events in our lives. He and science writer Sharon Begley explain how your brain chemistry controls your emotions and, ultimately, your personality.
MADISON – An agriculture professor in the University of Wisconsin says that farmers are experiencing some level of anxiety over the lack of rain so far this spring and summer.
Jack Williams admits to being a bit uneasy with some of the headlines generated by a report he contributed to that was published last week in the journal Nature. ?Earth could reach devastating ecological tipping point by 2025,? blared a Slate.com post about the report.
?Some of the media reporting has fallen squarely into the angle of,’We’re going to die’– which is not my perspective and the point of the article,? says Williams, UW-Madison?s Bryson professor of climate, people and environment in the department of geography and the Nelson Institute?s Center for Climate Research. ?But there is a real but difficult-to-quantify risk of reaching and passing tipping points in the global ecosphere, and we are calling attention to that risk.?
Need a strong example of Wisconsin working together to boost its economy and jobs? Look to China. While most of Wisconsin is still talking about Tuesday?s divisive recall elections, a delegation of state, university and business people are presenting a united front overseas.
Noted: “Small wonder that after the Valdez, a company representative quietly called a University of Wisconsin professor to offer money if he would write an article for a ?respectable academic journal,? arguing against punitive damages. This man spoke up, but we don?t know how many other scholars received and may have acted on the same offer and said nothing.”
With his Texas drawl, his TV title of ?Dr. Deer? and his disdain for some long-standing tenets of professional deer management, James Kroll was sure to stir things up when he was hired by Gov. Scott Walker to evaluate the state?s deer hunt strategy. Strangely, the controversy that surfaced was over comments Kroll made a decade ago in an interview with a Texas magazine. Kroll was quoted as equating public hunting grounds with socialism and calling national parks ?wildlife ghettos.? Overshadowed by that sideshow was a sobering, scientific look at Kroll?s preliminary findings by Tim Van Deelen, a respected associate professor in UW-Madison?s Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology.
On May 17, 2012, we learned that Canada?s Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), a world-renowned freshwater and fisheries research facility, will be terminated in March, 2013.
Quoted: ?People who are homeless are under a lot of stress, and stress causes higher cortisol levels. Higher cortisol levels lead to weight gain,? said nutritionist Sherry Tanumihardjo of the University of Wisconsin, who has studied the hunger-obesity paradox but was not involved in this research.
In a 15-story building, in the middle of land-locked Wisconsin, a team of scientists waits for hurricane season. That?s when a multi-million dollar, unmanned aircraft will start flying from Wallops Island, Va., loaded up with a UW-Madison-engineered instrument to gather data from tropical storms off the Atlantic coast. “It’s sort of a mystery right now in our science community as to why hurricanes intensify or de-intensify,” said Chris Velden, a UW-Madison scientist working on the project. “We hope to get some information from this aircraft to be able to answer those questions.”
As two of many faculty and staff long engaged in preparing UW-Madison graduate students to be both excellent researchers and excellent teachers, we were disappointed with the headline in the May 27 newspaper: “Interest in research wanes among UW-Madison Ph.D.s.” The headline missed the point and an important sea change in graduate education: Interest in teaching is increasing among UW-Madison Ph.Ds.
A: Wash your car on any given day and the chances of rain always seem to be pretty good. Raindrops typically leave a mosaic of grime that requires another trip to the neighborhood car wash. Rain makes cars dirty, according to UW-Madison atmospheric scientist Steve Ackerman, because “the air near the ground has all kinds of particles floating in it: pollen, pollutants, dust, smoke, etc.”
Some college students struggle with the dreaded weight gain known as the ?freshman 15.? These students had to deal with the opposite problem: weightlessness. Six UW-Madison students spent a week in late April conducting experiments on a gravity-defying aircraft at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, according to UW-Madison.
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.
Talk of Wisconsin?s rich deer-hunting tradition being overhauled by a Texas wildlife biologist hired by the Walker administration to manage the state?s deer population has led to mounting fear that Wisconsin?s public hunting land will go the way of Texas. If that scenario played out, public land would be snatched up by private owners, preventing the state?s roughly 600,000 deer hunters from roaming free of charge to hunt…Besides raising concerns among some Assembly Democrats, (James) Kroll?s preliminary report also has drawn criticism from Tim Van Deelen, a UW-Madison associate professor of forest and wildlife ecology.
Two common sites in Wisconsin, toxic algae blooms on lake water and cows standing in a field, could become the next big things in the biofuel industry. UW-Madison researchers have been awarded federal grants to investigate using the bacteria in toxic algae and cow stomachs in the development of biofuels, according to a release from the UW-Madison news service. Jennifer Reed, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, and Garret Suen, an assistant professor of bacteriology, each received five-year, $750,000 early career awards from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Biological and Environmental Research.
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.
In what you could call a lab-coat love story, University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Lance Lian is hoping to find a way to your heart.
Since 2007, top-selling opioids dispensed to people 60 years and older have increased 32%, according to a Journal Sentinel/MedPage Today analysis of prescription data from IMS Health, a health care information company. That?s double the growth for prescriptions dispensed in the 40-to-59 age group. A brief mention of UW-Madison is included in previous coverage of the issue.
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.
Despite $1 billion in annual research spending, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has struggled to turn its discoveries into licensing deals and start-up companies, a new report shows.
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.
Despite $1 billion of annual research spending, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has struggled to turn its discoveries into licensing deals and start-up companies, a new report shows.
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.
Ruth Nell Robbins, age 88, passed away on Monday, May 21, 2012.
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.
A hunting season for wolves proposed by the state Department of Natural Resources is likely to face a court challenge and could land the animal back on the endangered species list, according to a UW-Madison expert in predator-prey ecology who has spent 12 years studying wolf management in Wisconsin. The DNR?s wolf hunting plan “increases the risk that wolves will be returned to federally endangered status because it proposes untested methods in a very long season in too broad an area of the state,” warned Adrian Treves, an associate professor of environmental studies who has surveyed thousands of state residents on the issue.
John Lyons, a longtime DNR fisheries researcher and fish identification expert, had been hearing about the battle between the walleye and the bass for years. Depending upon who was doing the telling, the bass fishing was either very good and those anglers weren?t talking much. Or the fans of the walleye complained about their species looking anything like the top game fish champ. ?There were a number of initiatives going on,? Lyons said of the state?s researchers dedicated to fisheries. There was field work under way at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point?s College of Natural Resources, more at the University of Wisconsin-Madison?s Center for Limnology and, of course, the DNR. ?We pulled everyone together into a team and each group has their own specialty.? Not so fast. First, there was the inevitable first hurdle — funding.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving two UW-Madison researchers a $1.39 million grant to develop two video games to help teach eighth-graders compassion, empathy, cooperation, mental focus, self-regulation, kindness and altruism. I can?t help but wonder, wouldn?t a puppy work just as well, and be a heck of a lot cheaper? Besides, if your kid is going to be a mass murderer, derivatives trader or some other empathy-less sociopath, isn?t that mold pretty much cast by the time he?s 13 or 14?
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.
People with sleep apnea, a common disorder that causes snoring, fatigue and dangerous pauses in breathing at night, have a higher risk of cancer, two new studies have found, marking the first time that apnea has been linked to cancer in humans.
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.
UW-Madison may have a reputation as a party school, but its students are some of the most studious in the country, according to a story in the Washington Post. Freshman at UW-Madison study on average 20 hours a week, while seniors study 18 hours a week. That compares to a weekly average of 15 hours nationally, according to the story. The author, Daniel de Vise, notes that?s more than any other public university in the country that he found.
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.
How do you teach middle-schoolers about compassion? Create a video game about it, of course. That?s the thinking, anyway, behind a new study at UW-Madison. With a $1.39 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, UW-Madison researchers will develop and test two educational games to help eighth-graders develop empathy, cooperation, mental focus and self-regulation.
Sleep apnea has already been linked to a host of adverse health problems, such as high blood pressure and heart disease. Now, new research suggests that in people who already have cancer, the sleep disorder may raise their risk of dying from cancer.
Sleep-disordered breathing — which includes obstructive sleep apnea — is linked with an increased risk of dying from cancer, a new study suggests.
