Category: Research

In the 1990s, scientists at the University of Wisconsin did some interesting experiments on baby monkeys. One group was separated from their mothers at birth and raised for five months in a “nursery” of other baby monkeys. (We could perhaps call this the “evacuee” group.) The other set got to stay with their mothers, but each mother-baby pair was isolated. This “lockdown” group saw no other monkeys for five months.

Still, “it was a book that was always stocked in gay bookstores and women’s bookstores,” K. T. Horning, who recently retired as the director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me. “A lot of lesbians bought it as gifts for friends who were having children, or even just bought for themselves, because it was the only time they had ever seen themselves reflected in a children’s book.”

Two verbal changes in particular are linked with the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, as explained in a 2018 study published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. “What we’ve discovered here is there are aspects of language that are affected earlier than we thought,” said Sterling Johnson, PhD, one of the study’s authors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Race also matters in proctoring software built to monitor students during remote exams. Proctoring software does not always accurately assess people who have darker skin. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison and in other cases, students have been barred from or have had to pause from taking tests because of software failing to recognize faces of people with darker skin. The technology itself certainly is not racist. Yet, as scholars such as Ruha Benjamin and Safiya Noble have shown, the algorithms and codes structuring such technologies can perpetuate racial biases and stereotypes.

Allan Houston is a Professor of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Tennessee. Disclosure: Research on chronic wasting disease at the Ames station is conducted in cooperation with the University of Tennessee, Mississippi State University, the University of Wisconsin and Colorado State University.

As many students celebrate the start of summer with relaxation, the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is still filled with researchers working to make new discoveries and advances on today’s leading questions.

In a paper published on May 20 in Science Advances, the Center for Healthy Minds team, led by Richard J. Davidson, found that short term mindfulness training has no effect on brain structure and gray matter density. This discovery contradicts several views regarding MBSR as a therapeutic treatment.

Trials will begin in August at five locations: Toronto’s Pearson International airport, the Port of Tampa’s cruise ship terminal, Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards, a major Hindu temple near Atlanta and the University of Wisconsin.

Finally, additional hydrothermal synthesis experiments examining the detailed kinetics of quartz cementation at conditions reflective of the earthquake-producing crust would likely be informative.— Randolph T. Williams (rtwilliams@wisc.edu; 0000-0002-1160-8842), University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA; and Åke Fagereng (0000-0001-6335-8534), Cardiff University, UK

In my survey 1,600 estranged parents that I did through the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, one of the things that we found was about 70 percent of the estranged parents my survey had a divorce in their past from the [other] biological parent.

In years past, interns across industries may have found themselves paying thousands to hold their positions, worsening income inequality. A recent brief from the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at University of Wisconsin-Madison found that it’s likely middle-class and low-income students “self-select out of unpaid work due to their socio-economic status,” and therefore “are kept from these opportunities and their later rewards or take out loans that may be adding to an already considerable debt load.”

Noted: In fact, a 2008 analysis from University of Wisconsin system researchers noted, “effective gender‐responsive care remains elusive in Wisconsin and elsewhere.”

The researchers found that girls who come into the juvenile justice system are more likely than boys to have run away from home, survived sexual abuse, experienced pregnancy, have a psychiatric condition and/or become involved with partners — especially males — who are also committing crimes.

“Adolescent girls are entering the juvenile justice system at higher rates than in the past, requiring that professionals responsible for administering programs respond to their specific needs,” researchers wrote.

The director of UW’s Grainger Engineering Design and Innovation Laboratory, Lennon Rodgers, scanned 3D renderings of the 15-foot fishing boat that was discovered last June and pulled ashore at Spring Harbor Beach five months later.

More than 50,000 premature deaths each year could be prevented if air pollution emissions from energy-related activities in the United States were eliminated, according to a new study from University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.

“Our work provides a sense of the scale of the air quality health benefits that could accompany deep decarbonization of the U.S. energy system,” lead author Nick Mailloux, a graduate student at University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

The fascinating discovery of a massive black hole at the center of our galaxy and the first-ever image of it has a connection to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sebastian Heinz, a UW professor of astronomy, joins Live at Four to talk about it.

Metros were ranked based on the EPI’s annual food cost estimates. The food insecurity rate (the share of the population that lacks adequate access to food) is from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute joint program’s 2021 County Health Rankings & Roadmaps report.