Started just 11 years ago by Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery Jo Handelsman, Tiny Earth has since expanded worldwide to over 700 participating instructors teaching the course and over 14,000 students enrolled each year.
UW-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty is partnering with the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania to gather survey data throughout the program.
Dr. Eva Vivian was a teenager when her mother, not yet 40, learned she had a breast tumor.Vivian’s memories aren’t pleasant.
“The only option was a mastectomy. They were mean to women back then. It was a male-dominated profession,” said Vivian, a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Pharmacy. “There wasn’t a lot of empathy toward women who developed breast cancer.”
In a 2016 Wharton and University of Wisconsin-Madison study, two groups of research participants were given the same assignment and the same plan for completing it. One group had a backup plan. That group performed worse, and lost motivation to see their initial goal through.
Alumni, students and staff gathered in the Discovery Building Tuesday evening to learn about robot-human interactions. Computer Sciences Professor Bilge Mutlu gave a talk titled “What Can Robots Tell Us About Our Humanity,” which explored research on human fascination with robotic technology.
JadAllah joined researchers at the University of Houston and the University of Wisconsin-Madison on this project, which examined 10- and 11-year-old children.
In a series of experiments, Harlow, a University of Wisconsin psychologist, separated baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers and placed them in cages. In one study, each monkey was alone with two “surrogate mothers”: one made of wire, which dispensed milk, and the other made of terry cloth, which did not.
UW-Madison will aggressively seek a new College of Engineering building as its top priority in the upcoming state budget cycle as growth stagnates and faculty compete with one another for coveted and increasingly limited lab space.
But the results are hardly new: an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison conducted a similar analysis in 2017, and a team of Swiss researchers published similar results in 2007.
As it turns out, death caps don’t need a mating partner to reproduce. A study led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on A. phalloides in the US has found the mushroom can produce spores using the chromosomes of a single individual.
The center is one of three institutions in the nation participating in the trial, which is testing a vaccine designed to prevent the recurrence of triple-negative breast cancer.
The trial is testing a vaccine that is designed to prevent the recurrence of triple negative breast cancer. This type of breast cancer has fewer treatment options and accounts for the 10% of breast cancers common in minorities and women under 40.
Kaçar is an assistant professor of bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin and the director of NASA’s Interdisciplinary Consortium for Astrobiology Research program. Through her work, Kaçar ties together the cosmos and biology to address several questions regarding past life on earth and possible otherworldly life — where did life evolve from? Are humans alone? Are there other forms of life to exist?
Earlier this week, animal activist group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) put out a statement saying its protests had pushed the Navy to nix the partnership with UW-Madison. But it was lack of funding that prompted the university and the Navy to jointly agree to end the experiments, Michelle Ciucci, UW-Madison Animal Program faculty director said.
“African Americans lead in Alzheimer’s disease. And yet, in terms of being participants in the research, our numbers are very small,” said study recruiter Dr. Fabu Carter. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, Black Americans are twice as likely as white Americans to develop Alzheimer’s. However, they are often severely underrepresented in research.
Virent, founded in 2002 and located on Madison’s North Side, uses what’s known as a “BioForming” process to turn agricultural waste products, like corn cobs and stalks, into a compound called synthesized aromatic kerosene that has the same chemical composition as gasoline and jet fuel. That process has roots in UW-Madison research.
More than $389,000 in taxpayer money was awarded to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the “gruesome decompression experiments,” People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) said in a press release.
To determine what factors were associated with age of cancer diagnosis, Flory and her team at PetDx evaluated previously collected data from 3,452 dogs in three separate groups. Two of those groups of samples came from academic sites within the U.S.: one from the University of California, Davis, and another from a consortium that included Colorado State University, the Ohio State University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison and others.
Noted: A new study led by Matt Hirshberg, a scientist at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, dove into the toll it took on their mental health.
Quoted: Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center are creating carbon-neutral fuels they hope to power the transportation sector through deconstructed, nonfood plant materials.
“We are producing the basic science knowledge on campus to generate the fuels and chemicals that will allow us to have a decarbonized economy and create environmental and economic benefits for the people of Wisconsin and around the United States,” said Tim Donohue, principal investigator and director of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center.
Thirteen-year-old “Ants and Agriculture” exhibit closes, new exhibit to come.
Arugula (Eruca sativa) isn’t only delicious on sandwiches, bagels, and salads, but it’s also super simple to grow in a hydroponic garden, as told by Eden Green. Like other leafy greens, this plant is packed with good things such as vitamin K and iron. When growing arugula in a traditional garden, it is known to become weedy, as per the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so planting it indoors this way offers multiple benefits.
Over the month of January, a three-person team comprised of HVO geophysicist Ashton Flinders, University of Wisconsin at Madison PhD candidate Claire Ruggles, and University of Wisconsin student Sophia Thompson will measure gravity at more than 400 locations around Kīlauea’s summit.
Cleerly has established a number of partnerships, including American College of Cardiology, Canon Medical, Heartbeat Health and several others. Cleerly works with a number of universities for its studies and clinical trials, including Mass General Brigham, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin, Oregon Health Sciences University, George Washington University, Houston Methodist Hospital, UCLA and Scripps Clinic.
See the counties with above-average life expectancy in Wisconsin using data from the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.
Noted: Wisconsin’s wolf population fell around 14 percent to 972 wolves after the 2021 wolf hunt, according to the Wisconsin DNR. Even so, state wildlife managers say data indicates the state’s wolf population is stable. However, some researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say the agency is overestimating the state’s wolf population.
“Particularly, we are interested in the new products and the new technologies,” Masatoshi Suzuki, researcher and professor at UW-Madison, said.
The other NIH-funded centers are run by the University of California-Davis, the University of Washington, Tulane University, the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Emory University.
In an unassuming building off of West Johnson Street, sits the remains of around 750,000 animal specimens for scientific research in the UW Zoological Museum. One of five museum collections on the UW Madison campus, the collection provides hands-on research material for universities across the country.
Noted: In a study published in the journal Ecosphere in December, Alex Latzka, a fisheries biologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, and Bryan Maitland, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Aquatic Sciences Center, compared annual brook and brown trout population numbers over nearly three decades with climate and weather data from the streams the trout swam in.
“The next decade is crucial because the amount of deployment required in the second half of the century will only be feasible if we see substantial new deployment in the next 10 years,” Gregory Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a coauthor of the report, said during a press call.
They’ve spent the last few months working with the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s veterinary medicine school to coordinate a “clean break” among their dogs, housing exposed dogs in a separate area from others.
Irwin Goldman has spent much of his career de-beeting the beet. A horticulture professor at UW-Madison, Goldwin is a plant breeder focusing on onions, carrots and beets in his lab. And while carrots and onions are just fine, beets take priority for him, since he’s the only person in the nation who’s working on breeding the plant.
A University of Wisconsin–Madison research team was able to detect cancer in the bloodstream in most of the samples tested, it said. Muhammed Murtaza, professor of surgery at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health based in Madison, Wisconsin, led the study, which was published recently in Science Translational Medicine, a medical journal from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, according to the study’s press release.
In 2019 the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison – a library that allows teachers, librarians and researchers to view books before deciding which ones to buy – found that only 3.4% of books it received from publishers included a character with a disability.
“Carbon removal looks a lot like renewables did like 25 years ago,” said Gregory Nemet, an environmental policy expert at the University of Wisconsin and one of the report’s co-authors. “Interesting technology: [It] could be really helpful for climate change, but [it’s] still small and not taken very seriously — in part because there wasn’t a lot of data about how much these technologies cost, how much we would need or how much there even was.”
Research done by the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that sleeping less than five hours a day affects the efficiency of leptin, the hormone that regulates your food intake, increasing your appetite.
Snapshot Wisconsin has collected more than 2 million images caught on motion-sensor trail cameras. Researchers have looked at many of the photos and found further evidence of animals changing their behavior due to the presence of humans and loss of habitat.
Interview with associate professor Benjamin Zuckerberg, and Jonathan Pauli, a professor of wildlife ecology, both in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology.
This change in the urbanization of the valley is the focus of a new study published on Jan. 6 in The Journal of Hydrometeorology, from the Desert Research Institute (DRI), the Clark County Regional Flood Control District, the University of Wisconsin- Madison, and Guangdong University of Technology. The study shows that flood intensity in the valley took an “abrupt shift” in the mid-1990s.
Through two new clinical trials, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison hope to better understand how opioid and methamphetamine addictions can be treated using a different drug: psilocybin.
For more than 100 years, engineers at UW-Madison have been conducting an experiment pitting ordinary concrete against the test of time. The project, initiated by faculty member Morton O. Withey, began in 1910 as a 10-year test of the strength of concrete in the form of 6-by-12-inch cylinders. Dozens more cylinders were added in 1923, with a third batch in 1937.
Quoted: Dr. Daniel Jackson, a professor of pediatrics and medicine in the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, helped conduct the study and he noted “pollution exposures” were the culprits in 30% of the asthmatic children tested.
“Ultimately, we’ve known for a long time that children in urban environments are more likely to have asthma attacks,” he said. “Clearly, the exposures there are quite different. (When) compared to other places in the country, there’s far more pollution associated with diesel and auto traffic.”
The idea: In 2011, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced that they’d managed to coax stem cells into growing into three-dimensional structures, called “organoids,” which resembled retinas in early stages of development.
“The compression of species niches will likely lead to new interactions among species with unknown consequences,” Benjamin Zuckerberg, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an author of the study, said in an email.
“You can think of the Midwest as the Middle East of agricultural residues,” said Tim Donohue, because his team at UW’s Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center dreams of black gold from a more straw-colored source.
Staghorn ferns (Platycerium bifurcatum) make wonderful houseplants. As told by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, younger and smaller plants can be grown in containers, however, the staghorn fern grows on trees in its natural environment. Because of this, some home gardeners mount theirs on wooden boards or bark slabs, which allow for perfect drainage and make the plants easier to manage.
Quoted: For roughly a decade, professionals at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been researching the impacts certain psychedelics, including psilocybin, can have on the human brain.
“There are some really encouraging trends that have been noted and encouraging study results that have been published across the country,” said Dr. Chantelle Thomas, a researcher at UW’s Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. “A lot of people are not aware that this research has been happening for quite some time at the UW.”
There might be a new way to think of one particular species of invasive snail being found in Wisconsin’s water: as a part of a gourmet meal.
At least that’s the approach Minneapolis chef Yia Vang and Titus Sielheimer, a fisheries outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant, made this summer, when they filmed themselves harvesting and cooking up Chinese mystery snails in northern Wisconsin.
Scientists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the US have coaxed light-sensitive eye cells grown in a lab to reconnect after separation, an important step for transplantation into patients to treat various eye diseases.
The newly crowned Miss America, Grace Stanke, said she wants to spend her term promoting nuclear power as a cleaner way to reduce fossil fuel emissions.
“It doesn’t use a lot of land,” said Stanke, a Wausau native and University of Wisconsin-Madison senior studying nuclear engineering. “As our population continues to grow, we can continue to use that land for farming and agricultural purposes, and we can use that clean, zero-carbon energy coming from nuclear energy to power our cities.”
ea.“There’s no one number out there for the 300 million Americans to consume,” said Dale Schoeller, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus.
UW-Madison researchers have traced movement of the chemicals in nearby groundwater and streams. In a report published last week, they said a plume had made its way into Green Bay, which extends 120 miles along northeastern Wisconsin and the south coast of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
University of Wisconsin researchers have traced movement of the chemicals in nearby groundwater and streams. In a report published last week, they said a plume had made its way into Green Bay, which extends 120 miles (193 kilometers) along northeastern Wisconsin and the south coast of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers have developed a new shock-absorbing foam made from carbon nanotubes aimed at reducing traumatic brain injuries in U.S. soldiers. The material has been shown to absorb shock 18 times better than existing military helmet liners and could also offer athletes better protection against concussions.
In order to tackle big issues like brain injuries on the battlefront, UW-Madison associate professor of engineering and physics Ramathasan Thevamaran thinks small — as in micrometers. He and fellow engineers at the university have developed a way to make flexible carbon tubes, around a thousand times smaller than a human hair, into a new type of ultra-shock-absorbing foam.
When a heart stops, survival rates fall with every passing minute. A University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher thinks minutes and lives can be saved in rural areas with fleets of autonomous drones equipped with defibrillators.
And saving lives is in UW-Madison assistant professor and researcher Justin Boutilier’s blood. When he was growing up in Canada, his mother was a nurse and his father was a paramedic and firefighter.
A group of researchers from the University of Kentucky, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Ohio State University actually set out to study how consumers reacted to the beer brand after its name became inadvertently associated with the coronavirus.
UW doctoral student Erin Gill and assistant professor Mollie McQuillan, who authored the study, said finding solutions is particularly important as anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric increases, especially surrounding youth and schools — from lawsuits over school districts’ gender identity policies and discourse in the 2022 gubernatorial race to efforts to repeal sex education curriculum and challenges to children’s Pride displays in libraries.
“Caretakers of Wonder” will be grounded in expert research from UW-Madison, including work by Richard Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds, and Jonathan Patz, professor of environmental studies and medicine and public health at the Global Health Institute and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. David Sobel, professor emeritus at Antioch University New England, is also a key player.
It depends on what food and other beverages you consume, along with factors such as your age, sex, size, physical activity and climate, a study involving UW-Madison researchers says.
The study analyzed 5,600 people in 26 counties, looking at their water turnover, or the amount they took in and lost each day. Subjects drank water labeled with hydrogen and oxygen isotopes, a method first used in people at UW-Madison in the 1980s, allowing scientists to track water replacement and calories burned.
In 2021, over 107,000 people lost their lives to opioid addiction across the country. Public officials across the country have been working to address the issue for years, but a new nation-wide harm reduction research network is looking to find new ways to address the problem.
Today, UW Madison announced that they are joining a new nationwide network to research and evaluate harm reduction services.
Dr. Ryan Westergaard is a professor of medicine at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and is leading UW Madison’s research wing of the initiative.
