In a 2020 study, UW-Madison researchers found that a wide range of community outreach programs can help people socialize and give them something to look forward to, which can boost a sense of connection.
For the first time in a decade, the Wisconsin State Climatology Office is receiving government funding. A USDA grant will focus the office on rural needs, particularly those of farmers. We talk to Steve Vavrus, the Wisconsin State Climatologist and a senior scientist for the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies Center for Climatic Research at UW-Madison, about this and funding for a statewide network of weather stations.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison and Alliant Energy are partnering to build a solar park that will also serve as a research center to explore mixing solar and agriculture, soil impacts, water issues and more.
According to Newsweek, the UW Carbone Cancer Center is listed as the top cancer hospital in Wisconsin for 2023. We learn about the hospital’s latest work, including prostate MRI’s and proton therapy. Interview with Dr. Joshua Lang, associate director of translational research, and Dr. Nataliya Uboha, an oncologist and faculty leader for Cancer Therapy Discovery & Development, both at the UW Carbone Cancer Center.
It might help to achieve that progress if the new Demography study, co-authored by sociologists Michael Massoglia and Michael T. Light, both of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, had provided an account of exactly why incarceration generally, and Black male incarceration in particular, has declined, but such explanations lie beyond the scope of their research.
Wisconsin schools that had a longer period of virtual or hybrid learning during the pandemic saw graduation rates rise among wealthier students and fall among those at an economic disadvantage, a new study found.
The study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published in the journal Educational Researcher, analyzed data from 429 public high schools in the state during the 2020-21 school year and two years before then.
While demand for child care is high, supply is limited and likely to decrease further. A March report from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty showed that more than 60% of providers planned to increase tuition, while 32% were considering leaving their jobs or closing their centers if Child Care Counts did not continue.
Astrophysicists have long predicted that the Milky Way is a source of ghostly particles called neutrinos, but haven’t been able to detect them. Until now.
In a new study led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a massive detector at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory finally caught a glimpse of high-energy neutrinos being emitted from within the Milky Way.
A surprisingly wide range of medical conditions are being shown to be linked to sexual violence. Many may not appear until years after the events. Cancer is one such condition. “A history of abuse may increase a woman’s risk of and susceptibility to cancer,” a review article by researchers at the University of Wisconsin concludes. Cervical cancer is the most prevalent type linked to abuse, and some studies find more breast cancer in survivors (other research does not support this finding). One possible mechanism: heightened immune and inflammatory factors brought on by chronic stress that have been tied to cancer growth, the researchers note.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and a Green Bay company are working together to upscale a new recycling technique that could help keep flexible plastics out of landfills.
New data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s IceCube neutrino detector has led to the first ever image of our Milky Way galaxy using the subatomic “ghost particles.” An international team of researchers also found the Milky way is a neutrino desert compared to others.
The median home price in Wisconsin has more than doubled over the last decade, as supply has failed to keep up with demand after homebuilding slowed during the Great Recession. That’s according to new data from the Wisconsin Realtors Association, or WRA, and a new report from the University of Wisconsin-Extension.
Steven Deller, professor of agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison, authored the report. He said many were hoping to see downward pressure on prices in response to the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, but that hasn’t happened yet. Deller said high mortgage rates have had a modest effect on demand for homes, but a greater influence on those who currently own a home to postpone older couples from downsizing or young families upsizing, keeping some homes off the market.
“The normal churn in the housing market, the new supply of housing or the increase of existing homes going on the market is actually dropping a little bit more than the decline in demand,” he said.
“Only cosmic rays make neutrinos, so if you see neutrinos, you see cosmic ray sources,” Francis Halzen, a member of the IceCube team and physicist at the University of Wisconsin, tells Popular Science. “The goal of neutrino physics, the prime goal, is to solve the 100-year-old cosmic ray problem.”
UW-Madison researchers have successfully developed an electric motor using 3D printing technology, paving the way for future electric motors to more efficiently use electricity without sacrificing power.
In 2013, IceCube detected the first cosmic neutrinos. In the years since, they’ve been able to narrow neutrino sources down to individual galaxies. “We have been detecting extragalactic neutrinos for 10 years now,” says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the IceCube collaboration.
“We now hope to have established the multi-messenger techniques that will allow us to pinpoint the cosmic ray sources in the galaxy which, arguably, represents one of the oldest problems in astronomy,” Francis Halzen, IceCube principal investigator and physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, tells Inverse.
“It took us 10 years to find the galactic plane in neutrinos,” says IceCube head Francis Halzen at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s totally counterintuitive. It’s like if you went outside at night and saw a sky bright in active, distant galaxies but no Milky Way.”
IceCube had already definitively detected neutrinos streaming in from outside the Milky Way, but it couldn’t be said with certainty that any of them came from within the galaxy, says Francis Halzen, lead investigator of the project and a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. This was rather strange, considering the proximity of the Milky Way’s disk (in fact, our solar system is embedded in it) and the high likelihood that neutrinos form there.
A new solar farm is being developed on land owned by the University of Wisconsin southwest of Madison with the aim of finding a better balance between green energy and agriculture.
Melinda Soares-Furtado, a NASA Hubble fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies planetary engulfment, called the study an “exciting” example of the “unexpected properties” revealed in star-planet interactions. She suggested that future research about the system involve experts on blue stragglers, a class of luminous stars that are thought to be formed by stellar mergers.
‘We have the potential to make some really clear policy recommendations around this,’ Dr. Kate Walsh says.
Data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Collaborative for Reproductive Equity (CORE) shows an estimate of 7,000 fewer abortions took place in Wisconsin in the year after the Dobbs decision than the year before.
The two main viruses that cause the flu — influenza A and B — have existed for centuries and, although some antiviral advances have been made, these bugs have proven extremely difficult to eradicate. Now, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) have identified at least one secret to the success of influenza A, a finding that might arm researchers with another way to combat it.
From 1990 to 2018, the overall amount of pollen increased by up to 21%; meaning pollen coronas could become a more common occurrence. Texas and the Midwest experienced the largest increases, according to a study by the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
As part of a $9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Wisconsin’s state climatology office will get $1.25 million over four years to reinvent itself. The goal is to raise the profile of the office and make it the go-to spot when people want weather and climate information, said Steve Vavrus, who became the state climatologist this year and heads up the office. Vavrus, also a senior scientist at UW’s Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research, had worked with the office frequently in past years.
As part of the study, lead author Heather Inzalaco, a post-doctoral researcher at UW-Madison, gave blood with CWD-positive material to ticks in a lab. She found that the ticks both ingested and excreted CWD prions.
“They were taking it up, simultaneously eliminating some of it in their frass, which is just a fancy word for tick poo,” Inzalaco said. “So it was in both places.”
This might be the most Wisconsin-y job yet — sorry, Culver’s and Kwik Trip employees.
The Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is looking to hire people “passionate about all types of foods, but especially cheese, pizza and other dairy products,” according to the job posting.
Like others 80 and older who have superior memories for their age, Frantz is in a study of super agers at UW-Madison. Through cognitive tests, blood tests and MRI scans, the participants could help researchers identify biologic, behavioral, environmental and socioeconomic clues to keeping memories intact — and avoiding Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia — well into advanced age.
These creatures had some traits in common with modern humans, like legs made for walking upright and hands that could work with objects, said University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks, a member of the research team.
These creatures had some traits in common with modern humans, like legs made for walking upright and hands that could work with objects, said University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks, a member of the research team. But other features looked more ancient, including their small brains.
Andrew H. Miller at Emory University and Charles L. Raison at the University of Wisconsin, among others, have demonstrated a relationship between inflammatory processes and clinical depression. Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis is characterized by multiple neurologic and psychiatric symptoms and is thought to be caused by an overactive autoimmune response attacking a specific neuronal receptor site.
The Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin—Madison is currently providing a map based on satellite data that projects what smoke patterns will look like in the near future.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are part of an international team working to understand the discovery of an ancient burial site created by early human ancestors.
UW-Madison anthropology professor John Hawks was part of the group that first found the bones in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa in 2013. The team, led by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger from Johannesburg, first published the discovery in 2015. They released three new scientific papers this week detailing what they’ve discovered about the two locations of remains within the narrow passages of the caves.
UW-Madison researchers are part of a five-year, $29 million National Institutes of Health grant using gene editing to develop drugs for two rare diseases that cause blindness.
Homo naledi’s shoulders — which were oriented for better climbing — and teeth shared similarities with earlier hominins like Australopithecus, said Dr. John Hawks, professor of anthropology and paleoanthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
There is a direct link between self-compassion and happiness well-being and success. The more self-compassion you have, the greater your emotional arsenal. Studies from the University of Wisconsin show that meditation cultivates compassion and kindness, affecting brain regions that make you more empathetic to other people.
Noted: Twenty years of research has standardized the dosage of the drugs used in clinical trials, but the therapy part has not received similar scrutiny. Instead, therapists’ work is often based on tradition rather than empirical evidence, said Dr. Charles Raison, the director of clinical and translational research at the Usona Institute in Wisconsin and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin.
Excerpt from “Cave of Bones” by Lee Berger and John Hawks, paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
What started in a lab in the 1990s has evolved into a mass volunteer effort to track the monarch butterfly. Karen Oberhauser was a professor at the University of Minnesota when she and her students started collecting data on the monarch butterfly population in 1996. The next year, they started recruiting volunteers to help what became the international Monarch Larva Monitoring Project.
Toxic blue-green algae is blooming on lakes months earlier than in previous years. UW-Madison scientists studying Lake Mendota think that’s a lingering result of infestations of tiny invasive species, zebra mussels and spiny water fleas. Interview with Trina McMahon, a professor of bacteriology, and civil and environmental engineering at UW-Madison.
The center will be designated as a Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for research initiatives to advance new prostate cancer treatments. It comes with more than $11 million in federal funding to support new and existing research efforts.
Realta Fusion, a fusion energy startup founded in the fall of 2022, received $12 million from the federal government and other organizations to design a magnetic bottle device that could help reduce the reliance industries that make common materials like plastic have on fossil fuels, Realta said.
That company was spun out of a two-year project at UW-Madison led by physics professor Cary Forest, who is Realta’s co-founder and chief scientific officer. The money for that project — $10 million — came from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Project’s Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E program.
For example, when a safety breach occurred in 2019 at a University of Wisconsin-Madison lab experimenting with a dangerous and highly controversial lab-created H5N1 avian influenza virus, the university never told the public – or local and state public health officials.
Patients are doing their part. Lee Wilke, an oncologist at University of Wisconsin’s UW Health who is leading a phase 2 study one of Disis’ vaccines, says she has a long list of people who’d like to roll up their sleeve for the trial.
UW-Madison medical entomologist Susan Paskewitz explains how black-legged ticks, also known as deer ticks and transmit Lyme disease to humans, are increasingly found in more areas around the state.
About four years ago, Maichou Lor was living in New York completing a postdoctoral fellowship, when family members back home in Wisconsin kept telling her that her dad’s hearing was getting worse.
“He wasn’t responding to conversations even though he had a hearing aid,” said Lor, now an assistant professor of nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I brought him in to see his doctor through the ENT clinic here at UW-Health.”
Noted: Thanks to more than $3 million in grant funding, the University of Wisconsin-Madison now plans to establish 90 sites to monitor weather and soil conditions throughout the state by fall of 2026. The state currently has 14 weather stations.
Chris Kucharik, a UW-Madison agronomy professor, is overseeing the university’s effort to build the new network. He recently joined Wisconsin Public Radio’s “The Morning Show” to discuss how more weather and soil reports could be used and how researchers will decide where to build the new stations.
“By understanding more about the mechanism of cell entry, we are one step closer to preventing cell entry and preventing botulism,” says Sabine Pellett at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Ultimately, in 40% of cases surgeons find out that it was a benign lesion and should not have been taken out,” said Pallavi Tiwari, the co-director of Imaging and Radiation Science at UW Carbone Cancer Center.
At a typical university, many units can venture into the study of food — starting with, obviously, schools of agriculture. But academic institutes devoted to food have cast a fresh, interdisciplinary spotlight on the subject in recent decades. The University of Wisconsin at Madison has a Food Research Institute focused on food safety.
Recent research from UW-Madison surveyed dozens of fathers and more than 30 community partners to learn what fathers in Wisconsin need. Interview with Margaret Kerr, an assistant professor of human development and Family Studies at UW-Madison.
Noted: If the upper Mississippi River had to shut down for one season because of lock and dam failures, the amount of agricultural goods displaced would equal between 367,000 and 489,000 loads by truck, according to a 2017 study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with the Mid-America Freight Coalition. It could cost up to $283 million to move those loads by truck, and upwards of $300 million if road damage is taken into account, the report said. And those estimates — the most recent available — were from six years ago. Today, according to the Consumer Price Index, the cost likely would be above $350 million.
Between 2018 to 2022, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education found that less than 1% of children’s and young adult books released by US publishers were about Arabs. The only group with less representation was Pacific Islanders.
A team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Montana just added chronic wasting disease (CWD) to the long list of infectious diseases that ticks can carry and possibly transmit.
It’s not certain, however, that when outcomes data is presented in a more-personalized fashion, doing so improves its effectiveness. Deciding on a college and then a major is a complicated and sometimes yearslong process for many students. Bleemer, the Yale professor, cites research done in the 2010s by Matthew Wiswall, a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Basit Zafar, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
You can also prevent burnout by re-framing how you think about stress, Sorensen notes. She points to a study done by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which found that high levels of stress can increase the risk of premature death by 43% — but only among those who believed stress was very harmful. Those who did not see stress as harmful were no more likely to die.
“The idea is that just like physical exercise builds muscle, we can build our mental muscles to become more aware and calm in the faces of challenges and stress,” explains Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry and founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It’s long been called the “Two Georgias” problem — and according to the latest county health data from the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, it’s still raging.
Wilke, for instance, is the principal investigator for a breast cancer vaccine trial she’s running with colleagues from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison. The team is testing whether people who have received treatment for triple-negative breast cancer — a particularly aggressive form of the disease — respond to a DNA-based vaccine that could boost their immune systems and prevent reoccurrence.
To identify the U.S. metro areas with the highest excessive drinking rates, 24/7 Tempo reviewed data on the percentage of adults 18 and older who reported binge or heavy drinking within a 30-day period across all metro areas in the country from the 2023 County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute joint program.
