Category: Research

A new report on how COVID-19 affected education for the littlest learners, 4K, outlines challenges but also reveals a silver lining: better family-teacher connections. Parents being more directly involved in their child’s education gave them “a deeper appreciation for the work 4K teachers do,” the report from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Research on Early Childhood Education states, and the platforms used gave parents and teachers a closer connection.

Hospital closures have led to fewer vaccinations of all kinds for some communities — not just shots for Covid-19. In the years after Haywood County’s hospital closed, flu vaccinations dropped almost 10 percent in the county, according to data from the University of Wisconsin.

Cited: And a 2019 study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that mandates “significantly reduced” the likelihood of borrowing high-interest payday loans.

A massive spending plan to fund the federal government through September has been passed by Congress, including millions of dollars in investments for the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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.”

Antiviral pills against COVID-19 have shown that they remain effective at treating the Omicron variant, according to a University of Wisconsin Madison study.

With three-dimensional imaging licensed from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, based on work from the lab of UW-Madison biomedical engineering professor Kevin Eliceiri, Elephas Biosciences can analyze live tumor samples to see how well they respond to therapies, CEO Maneesh Arora said.

Journey North is a crowdsourced citizen science program of the University of Wisconsin-Arboretum. It monitors not only Monarchs but hummingbirds, American robins, leaves, pollinator patches and other seasonal events. Estella Romero who lives in Angangueo, Mexico is the Journey North’s program coordinator, local news reporter and coordinator of the Monarch Symbolic Migration Program. She is the link to the Monarch sanctuaries.

Research findings from dozens of undergraduates across the UW System took center stage at the State Capitol Wednesday with the annual Research in the Rotunda event.

A video game where kids don’t use their hands for the controller, they use their breath; that’s what researchers at the University of Wisconsin are creating.

A team of researchers at the UW-Madison developed a process that recycles disposable masks into new plastic goods — not just lesser materials. Given the increased use of disposable masks as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, practices on how to properly dispose of them — such as the research at UW-Madison — have emerged amid concerns about them ending up in landfills or littered, and negatively affecting the environment.

With three-dimensional imaging licensed from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, based on work from the lab of UW-Madison biomedical engineering professor Kevin Eliceiri, Elephas Biosciences can analyze live tumor samples to see how well they respond to therapies, CEO Maneesh Arora said.

The reality isn’t that clean. Fenske’s video hinges on a new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The study, released last month, suggests that in the real world, ethanol provides no discernible reduction in emissions. In fact, corn-based ethanol is up to 24 percent more carbon-intensive than traditional gasoline. That’s because, while growing corn is a carbon sink, every other part of the process of turning corn into fuel creates intense emissions output.

Religious participation seems to promote individual flourishing in a variety of interlocking ways, beginning with the friendships it fosters. In 2010, Chaeyoon Lim (of the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Robert Putnam (of Harvard University) estimated that about half of the effect on satisfaction comes from deep and supportive relationships. The effects are also particularly strong with respect to marriage, with weekly service attenders being about 50 percent less likely to divorce than never-attenders. Religious participation also strongly protects against self-destructive behaviors: One of our studies found that, compared with never-attenders, regular attenders were substantially less likely (68 percent less likely for women, 33 percent less likely for men) to die from alcohol poisoning, drug overdose or suicide.

The analysis by University of Wisconsin and University of Pennsylvania researchers looked at data from 36,000 people who were part of the UK Biobank, a dataset with genetic and medical information from half a million British middle-aged and older adults.

That new playbook, as promising as its goals are, might be a mistake, the chief global economists of Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and Morgan Stanley, as well as economists at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin, said in a recent paper. Looking at inflation and employment for more- and less-advantaged groups, the team found that the balance between maximum employment and stable prices would be hard to achieve without serious risk.

Weight is often a key consideration for scientists pushing the boundaries of bullet-proof materials, imagining armor that keeps the wearer safe while also improving their mobility. Engineers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have now forged a new type of ultralight armor material described as a “nanofiber mat,” which features a unique chemistry that enables it to outperform Kevlar and steel.

That new playbook, as promising as its goals are, might be a mistake, the chief global economists of Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and Morgan Stanley, as well as economists at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin, said in a recent paper. Looking at inflation and employment for more- and less-advantaged groups, the team found that the balance between maximum employment and stable prices would be hard to achieve without serious risk.

Video: While corn-based ethanol may be no better for the climate than fossil fuels, UW-Madison scientists are working on new plant-based fuels that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In a paper published last week in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, Prashant Sharma, a professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his colleagues are challenging the idea that horseshoe crabs are on their own very particular and individual branch on the tree of life.

The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, a federally funded research center led by UW-Madison, would receive an additional $5 million in funding each year through 2026 from legislation that passed the House earlier this month but still faces hurdles to its final passage.

The lead author of the study, Tyler Lark, an assistant scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, told Reuters, “Corn ethanol is not a climate-friendly fuel.”

“Anyone who is in a position where they would benefit from greater than normal cognitive control, top-down attention, peripheral visual processing would benefit from playing action games, which are primarily first- and third-person shooter games,” said Dr. C. Shawn Green, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose work studying the effect of video games on cognitive performance was supported by the Office of Naval Research.

Another research group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has also produced a new atomic clock set-up.

Shimon Kolkowitz and his colleagues used comparisons between six different strontium atomic clocks to measure a second. This comparative model, known as a multiplex clock, means the team can use a less stable laser than the JILA group’s clock, but still achieve a very high level of precision: the clock would lose just 1 second every 300 billion years.

Researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin-Madison conducted the study with 80 overweight adults between ages 21-40 who sleep less than 6.5 hours a night. The clinical trial extended their sleep hours for two weeks.

Zoom in: Philadelphia is ranked the least healthy county in the state, according to the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.

She respectfully declines to identify the crops’ specific varieties to protect the recipient tribal nations and their seeds, citing past scientific and corporate exploitation—like genetic patenting. She first encountered resistance to the technology in 2017 when she embarked on a growing project on former Ho-Chunk land with Claire Luby, a postdoc researcher in plant breeding and seed systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Initially, the duo considered mapping the genomes of each plant, hoping the DNA would reveal advantages that may have helped the ancient corn adapt to the northern climate. They theorized that genetic patterns might suggest whether any varieties were the foundations for some of the present-day corn grown across the Midwest. Or maybe that a cluster of crops from the Great Lakes region are distantly related to Southwestern ones. But it wasn’t meant to be.