Noted: A study from the University of Wisconsin tells us that birds genetically retain dental potential. But for the moment at least, in place of teeth is the bill, avian equivalent of a Swiss Army knife.
From Mars missions to moon colonies, the human species has some ambitious travel plans in the works — ones that stretch way beyond our planet.
“Space exploration is the big challenge of this century,” said Elena D’Onghia, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Lisa Naughton is a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is an expert in tropical biodiversity conservation who has also studied wolf recovery in the state.
“We have to work with private landowners. That inevitably involves some compromise, but it’s urgent,” she said. “We need to keep an eye on biodiversity beyond protected areas. We need to keep our eye on agricultural land use and industrial land use that may have cascading effects for biodiversity.
“And with effort, we can push back,” she continued. “We can turn things around for some species.”
In February 2022, Tyler Lark, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published a study analyzing the impact of the RFS. Lark and his colleagues researched the impact that the policy had on crop prices and farm expansion between 2008 and 2016, comparing the real-world situation to a counterfactual one where biofuel production was kept at levels mandated in an earlier version of the RFS.
On Earth Day, students and researchers presented artworks for the Flow Project as part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s spring water symposium.
The survey examines the mental health of undergraduate and graduate students, according to the Healthy Minds website. This is the third year that the survey went out to students on campus, and the first year since 2019.
Researchers looked at data from 143 storms occurring in 10 Wisconsin counties, comparing brine-cleared roads to those nearby cleared with traditional granular rock-salt method, the state Department of Transportation said in a report detailing the UW study.
Noted: The game was produced by PBS Wisconsin Education, Wisconsin Sea Grant, and Field Day Learning Games — an educational game developer within the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Education Research and Wisconsin educators. It complements the PBS Wisconsin Shipwrecks! documentary and virtual reality experience exploring wrecks on the bottom of Wisconsin’s Great Lakes.
Such emergency declarations are rare, but they tend to be accurate. An analysis posted to Twitter by Kaylan Patel, a meteorology student at the University of Wisconsin, found of 195 tornado emergencies declared since 1999, 92 percent contained a tornado. Jacob Feuerstein, a meteorology student at Cornell, tweeted the last tornado emergency false alarm occurred in February 2016.
The use of liquid brine is more effective at keeping highways safe during the winter months, a new report says.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin – Madison’s Traffic Operations and Safety (TOPS) Lab looked at data from 143 storms occurring in 10 counties across Wisconsin. It compared brine-cleared routes to those nearby cleared with a traditional granular rock-salt method. The researchers found use of liquid brine in winter highway maintenance cleared Wisconsin highways faster, provided better friction on roadways, and reduced overall salt usage.
To that score, 24/7 Tempo added each municipality’s average daily PM2.5 (the concentration of particulate matter with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers) per cubic meter of air for each city’s county, drawn from the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps, a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation. Population figures are from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey five-year estimates. (See how the population of every state has changed since 1880.)
From Mars missions to moon colonies, the human species has some ambitious travel plans in the works — ones that stretch way beyond our planet.
“Space exploration is the big challenge of this century,” said Elena D’Onghia, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty found the effect food stamps have in lowering poverty rates are declining. Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Policy Forum released a report in September 2020 showing a 21% rise in FoodShare (SNAP) recipients in the last year, attributed to the pandemic.
When it comes to the climate crisis, Gregory Nemet has some good news and some bad news.
“The climate problem is getting worse,” said Nemet, a professor at UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs. “But the solutions are getting better.”
There is a growing movement of climate change activists on university campuses pressuring their schools to divest from the oil and gas industries. But is fossil fuel divestment effective or a distraction? We talk to the moderator of an upcoming UW-Madison panel discussion of the issue.
“We might have expected uncertainty about the pandemic and its effects on employment, income, healthcare, and safety to have stifled entrepreneurial activity. Entrepreneurship, which is already seen as risky, could have appeared even more so during the global COVID-19 pandemic,” wrote authors Hannah Julian, Ted Callon and Tessa Conroy in a report for UW-Madison Extension’s WIndicators series.
But most simulations of our climate’s future may be overly sensitive to Arctic ice melt as a cause of abrupt changes in ocean circulation, according to new research led by scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Quoted: The big mammals — mammoths, mastodons and giant beavers — came later. They were Ice Age creatures, living in Wisconsin from between 2.5 million and 11,500 years ago.
“It’s a little bit like yesterday for a geologist,” Brooke Norstead, assistant director of the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum, said.
And just like yesterday, there was a big animal roaming that huge ice sheet — so vast you could walk to the North Pole on it without touching land — that may sound familiar.
“There was an animal called a stag moose,” Norstead said. “Imagine a supersize moose, with even more interesting antlers.”
Warren Porter is a professor emeritus of biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies animal shape and size.
“One of the evolutionary benefits of being a large or very large animal is … that you don’t have to deal with as much threat of predation and may be able to better defend your young,” Porter said.
A team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has created a material that is tougher than Kevlar, which is found in bulletproof vests.
It’s a project they hope can help save lives.
The material in small scale is almost comparable to the look of electrical tape. However, it’s much different and much stronger. So what’s inside that makes it so strong? Engineering and physics assistant professor Ramathasan Thevamaran has the answer.
“It’s a nano fiber mat made out of carbon nanotubes and Kevlar nano fibers,” Thevamaran said.
One of the more important steps backyard gardeners can take to help disappearing native bees is to grow native plants that provide continuous blooms throughout the season, according to Susan Carpenter, plant curator at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum.
Quoted: Native plant curator Susan Carpenter with the University of Wisconsin Arboretum in Madison said they detected the rusty patched at the Arboretum about 10 years ago. “That started us on this voyage of discovery,” she said. When the rusty patched was declared endangered, she said, “people just went crazy on that.”
As highly pathogenic avian influenza, or bird flu, continues to spread across Wisconsin, researchers and students at UW-Madison are trying to make a difference by developing a bird flu vaccine.
Wisconsin doctors are seeing a steady increase in the number of children diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes — a disease that primarily affects adults — which may be linked to COVID-19.
Data released last week by UW Health Kids shows a nearly 200 percent increase in the number of cases of Type 2 diabetes over the past four years.
While this is a trend medical experts have noticed for years, Dr. Elizabeth Mann, a pediatric endocrinologist and director of the Type 2 Diabetes Program at UW Health Kids, said it’s taken a worrisome turn recently.
When people think about geology, most people will think of well… rocks. But the geology museum on the UW-Madison campus shows that geology is much more than rocks, it’s rocks from space, bones, and fossilized dino-droppings.
Last month, WORT reporter Andie Barrow went to the Museum of Geology to learn what makes the museum special.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison study finds many cannabidiol, or CBD, products sold in southwestern Wisconsin don’t deliver what they promise on the label. One of the study’s authors says a lack of regulation and oversight is to blame.
Using data from 2000 to 2008, the Center for the Demography of Health and Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison researched the implications of parental divorce on estranged fathers and their relationships with adult children—particularly when there has been a new relationship since the divorce.
A Harvard study last year showed the use and production of ethanol emits up to 46% fewer greenhouse gasses than gasoline. A University of Wisconsin study has challenged that finding, saying ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline, based on changes in how land is used to grow the corn used to produce it. But the Argonne National Laboratory disagreed with the Wisconsin study last month, saying the group overestimated carbon loss from soil and double-counted some emissions, among other concerns.
Har Gobind Khorana emerged from this background to receive a Nobel Prize in 1968 at UW-Madison for deciphering the genetic code that translates DNA sequences into the protein molecules that carry out the functions of living cells.
UW-Madison researchers in partnership with the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative interviewed teachers, staff, including leadership staff, and families between January 2021 and September; observed preschool and elementary classrooms; sent surveys to staff, teachers and families; and analyzed documents from One City Schools including reports, newsletters and administrative documents to compile the first phase of the report.
Based at the University of Chicago, the CQE is built around the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University. Its members also include more than 130 researchers at universities, laboratories and even in business research sites around the world focused on quantum sensing, communications, computing, materials, optics, nanomechanics as well as topological and device physics.
About half of those students who were lucky enough to snag internships during the pandemic had to complete them remotely, according to a 2021 workforce study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Remote interns reported lower satisfaction in part because managers were less likely to assign them “high-skill supervised work,” according to the study.
Written by Joe Peterangelo, a senior researcher for the Wisconsin Policy Forum and Ned Littlefield, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a research fellow with the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
After three years of work on a report warning that time is running out to head off a climate disaster, Greg Nemet is optimistic about the planet’s chances.Nemet, a professor at UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, was one of the lead authors of a report on ways to slow climate change released Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
After surgery to remove tumors, some cancer cells can be left behind where they can grow back or spread to a new part of the body. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have now developed a hydrogel that can be applied post-surgery to prevent or slow tumor regrowth
Then I read a section in one of the books that featured a long line of photos of a woman making various expressions—transitioning slowly from a sad face to an angry one. A study at the University of Wisconsin showed these pictures to children who had not experienced abuse, then to children who had. The abused kids thought that more of these photos presented an angry threat than the children from normal homes did. They were hyperalert to even the smallest twinges in facial expressions.
Quoted: The report’s findings confirm other research that has shown the link between poverty and COVID-19, says Tiffany Green, a University of Wisconsin economist who researches the impact of race and economics on health.
“This is not about individual behavior,” Green said in an interview. “It’s about what kinds of social conditions place people at risk.”
Early in the Wisconsin pandemic, outbreaks occurred in the meatpacking industry in Brown County. “And because of the way our occupational system is structured, they were disproportionately likely to be Hispanic immigrants,” Green says. “And they were working under conditions that were not properly regulated, that were not safe, when it comes to trying to prevent COVID.”
The report touted Madison as a center for research (the third category), but suggested that in order to keep up with the country’s emergent AI industry, local business leaders should forge more corporate research partnerships with UW-Madison, promoting entrepreneurship and encouraging local job retention and attraction.
Pregnant women with mild high blood pressure and their babies can benefit from treatment, according to a large study co-authored by a researcher at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine Saturday, could change guidelines to make treatment of mild chronic hypertension the standard of care for pregnant women as it is for other people, said the UW doctor who led the local arm of the study. “This is clear evidence that treating women at a lower threshold for their chronic hypertension effectively reduces maternal risk and is safe for the baby,” said Dr. Kara Hoppe, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health are hoping to make strides in preventing eye disease, especially for those with diabetes.
The virus is highly contagious and often fatal to birds. It also costs the poultry industry billions. But a research lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison is working to stop the spread.
Moms may just be one of our most potent weapons against the climate crisis. Dr. Rios-Berrios joined forces with several climate scientists and parents in Science Moms, a nonpartisan group launched by the Potential Energy Coalition in 2021.
“One of the things I love about the Science Moms program is that the website and outreach make it easy for moms to get involved. It takes this complicated topic and breaks it into bite-size pieces,” says Science Mom’s Tracey Holloway, Ph.D., a professor in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and mom to two.
This is an impressive tour de force and a landmark accomplishment,” Lloyd Smith, a biochemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved with the T2T project, told The Daily Beast. “It takes tremendous commitment, perseverance, and deep technical knowledge to decipher these most difficult to access regions of the genome.”
The first known case of the highly pathogenic avian influenza was discovered March 14 at the Jefferson County chicken farm where a few million chickens were euthanized to prevent further spread. The case was discovered by UW-Madison researchers with the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory.
Noted: In a 2011 study, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison compared the impact of enhanced, high-empathy medical care with what they called “standard care.” When patients with colds rated their care “perfect in empathy” they had shorter and less serious illness than peers who rated their care less than perfect, an indication that even the perception of empathy makes a difference.
Moreover, the body’s own chemistry reflected the difference in care. Patients who perceived their care to be high in empathy showed higher levels of neutrophils ― a type of white blood cell that fights infections ― than those given standard care.
The difference between the standard and the more empathetic care affected the doctors, too.
“When they pulled the card to provide standard care, they felt terrible. When they pulled the enhanced care card, they felt great,” said David Rakel, lead author of the study and chairman of the department of family medicine and community health at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. The study was published in the journal Patient Education and Counseling.
Theo, a Bernese mountain dog, enjoys watching birds on TV. Freya Mowat, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine, can tell this from the way Theo tracks their movements with his eyes and how he lunges toward the screen “as if he’s trying to say hi to the bird.”
A new study by researchers at the UW-Madison School of Pharmacy found inaccurate labels on some non-prescription CBD products sold in the Badger State.
“Not a good sign when you see that sort of thing happen,” said University of Wisconsin meteorologist Matthew Lazzara.
Lazzara monitors temperatures at East Antarctica’s Dome C-ii and logged 14 degrees (-10 degrees Celsius) Friday, where the normal is -45 degrees (-43 degrees Celsius): “That’s a temperature that you should see in January, not March. January is summer there. That’s dramatic.”
In 2020, the University of Wisconsin-Madison opened the new Meat Science and Animal Biologics Discovery building, a $57.1 million facility designed for education, research and outreach. (It’s also home to Bucky’s Varsity Meats.) UW introduced a two-year Master Meat Crafter Training program in 2008, aimed in part at those already in the field.
To infect any living thing, the virus must get into its cells, which isn’t always easy. Virology expert David O’Connor likens the process to opening a “lock” with the virus’ spike protein “key.”
“Different species have different-looking locks, and some of those locks are not going to be pickable by the key,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist said.
A new project from a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison aims to answer the question: What do dogs like to watch on television?
She’s asking dog owners to contribute to her research by sharing their own pups’ preferences.
The survey is part of a larger and more ambitious research project by Freya Mowat, a veterinary ophthalmologist and professor at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, to learn more about how canine vision degrades over time and what factors contribute to it. That research could have implications for the treatment of human eyesight, as well.
A new report is highlighting how much the Great Recession widened racial wealth gaps, particularly on the basis of income and homeownership.
“Racial Disparities in Household Wealth Following the Great Recession,” authored by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Fenaba R. Addo and Duke University Professor William A. Darity Jr., found that Black and Latino households continue to lag behind white households in wealth and income statistics.
The report was published this month through the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty and used Survey on Consumer Finances data to come to its conclusions.
More than 100 life-size orange statues of women are scattered around the National Mall, clustered in the gardens at the Smithsonian Castle and tucked inside the Natural History and Air and Space museums. The women hold globes, notebooks, tools, brains — symbols of their work — and one of them is UW-Madison geneticist Ahna Skop.
To predict our future under climate change, some scientists are looking way into the past — and digging deep into the ocean floor.
UW-Madison School of Pharmacy researchers recently published a study that used high-performance liquid chromatography to analyze the contents of 39 CBD-infused products being sold across Southwest Wisconsin. These products included CBD-infused beverages, oils and other miscellaneous items, including chocolate bars, honey, coconut oil, transdermal patches and more.
UW students collaborate, conduct outreach with MIT professor of astronomy.
After state agriculture officials confirmed the presence of bird flu in Wisconsin, one poultry management expert shared safety tips for poultry farmers and what risk exists to humans.
Ron Kean, a faculty associate and extension specialist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences, also explained what costs farmers can and cannot get covered if the flu hits their farm.
UW-Madison researchers with the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory discovered the case of avian flu. This strain of the virus has not been spreading to humans, but could lead to the euthanizing of millions of birds across the U.S., likely raising prices in the egg and poultry industry, according to the researchers. The lab is working to identify cases and control the spread.
The Commonwealth of Virginia is divided into 95 counties, along with 38 independent cities. Last year, the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute rated Petersburg the least healthy locality in Virginia, 133 out of 133.
