The progress made in children’s book publishing has been encouraging and certainly necessary. According to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the numbers of children’s books written by Black, Indigenous, Asian and Latino authors have all significantly increased in the past 20 years.
Five months later, Duke and two other academic institutions — the University of Wisconsin and Boston-based Brigham and Women’s Hospital — received a total of roughly $36.3 million to fund the continued development of pan-coronavirus vaccines.
The UW–Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs’ inaugural La Follette Policy Poll was conducted between July and September 2021 among almost 1,600 Wisconsin residents from all but one county. The poll’s margin of error is +/-2.5 percentage points.
Quoted: Last month, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Michigan State University released results of a study revealing that society’s reliance on rock salt is salinating Lake Michigan.
Even small increases can trigger unknown ecosystem changes and secondary effects such as drinking water pipe corrosion, said Hilary Dugan, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Limnology and lead author of the study.
Lake Michigan is still “extremely fresh” water, Dugan said. “There’s no cause for alarm. But I think people should be aware that it is rising and that is fully because of human-derived salts.”
Officials said a study, published Monday, showed that high activity of the gene Nrf2 slowed cognitive and physical decline in mice.
In a study published Tuesday, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of sociology Jenna Nobles found those with irregular periods in states with restrictions may be less likely to access legal abortion.
Quoted: Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explained that “viruses like SARS-CoV-2 evolve as they replicate in a person with infection and as they spread from one person to the next. When that evolutionary process yields a strain that has a genetic make-up which is very different from the original virus, it is considered a ‘variant.’ ”
He added that “a virus is a ‘variant of concern’ if it has the potential to threaten the pandemic response in some way. It may be more infectious than other variants, cause more severe illness, not be detectable by current tests, less affected by current treatments, partially escape immunity provided by current vaccines, or a combination of these.”
His methods quickly attracted the attention of scientists elsewhere who started to make summer trips to Vancouver and his fame as an innovative scientist grew. In 1960, moving to Madison, Wisconsin, Gobind and his colleagues worked hard to solve the problem of the genetic code — how the “language” of DNA and RNA is transformed into proteins in the cell. The Khorana lab was able to show that triplet sequences encode specific amino acids, corroborating the work of Marshall Nirenberg who was to share the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1968 with Gobind.
Their caregivers reported their symptoms went from severe to moderate.
The Transdisciplinary Center for Research in Psychoactive Substances will expand the scope of psychedelic research at UW-Madison, building on clinical studies that have been done on campus since 2014. Several other universities, such as Yale and New York University, have also invested in research on psychedelics as a treatment for headaches, alcohol abuse and depression.
In a meta-analysis of various studies last May, researchers from the University of Wisconsin found that 19% of people who tested positive for Covid simultaneously tested positive for another pathogen (a so-called “co-infection”) — be it viral, bacterial or fungal.
In October, the NIAID announced a $36-plus-million-dollar program to develop pan-coronavirus vaccines, with funding going to three academic programs, located at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Duke University in North Carolina. Recognizing the need for a comprehensive strategy, the funding is going to multidisciplinary groups with expertise in virology and immunology, immunogen design, and innovative vaccine and adjuvant platforms and technologies.
The term “‘disability’ is not a slur,” says Morton Ann Gernsbacher, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies how language is used in relation to disability. But the term “special needs” may be moving in that direction, she says.
A key question for the Delft team and its counterpart at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is how to obscure data on eye movements with privacy filters without sacrificing too much utility. Researchers from both schools said eye-trackers could give companies a wealth of information for targeted advertising at a very granular level.
When states began proposing “heartbeat bills” — legislation that would prohibit abortion as early as six weeks, as soon as a fetus’s heartbeat is detected — Jenna Nobles took notice, employing her skills as a researcher. For the past few years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of sociology has examined how these policies could affect people with irregular or long menstrual cycles.
But even small increases can trigger unknown ecosystem changes and secondary effects such as drinking water pipe corrosion, said Hilary Dugan, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Limnology and lead author of the study.
A study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that small antibody-like proteins called VNAR in the immune system of sharks can avoid COVID, its variants and related coronaviruses from infecting people.
A class of fourth graders from Green Bay public schools recently submitted questions about renewable energy and the environment to WPR’s “The Morning Show.”
Greg Nemet, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, joined the show to answer those questions.
Sohad Murrar and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin at Madison recently applied the same idea to intergroup relations. In recent years, universities and other organizations have invested heavily in training in which instructors extol the benefits of diversity and urge participants to be mindful of their own implicit biases. But those initiatives have a mixed record. Murrar’s team found that drawing people’s attention to social norms could produce much better results.
Despite a federal effort to expand lung cancer screenings to more individuals, research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows Black and Hispanic individuals were still less likely to be eligible for screenings than white counterparts.
Embedded within a four-decade-long endeavor to document the history of cartography is a deceptively simple question: What is a map?
In a world where most people interact with maps almost daily, pulling them up on their smartphone to effortlessly chart a path through the lattice of streets that lie between Point A and Point B, the map, at first glance, is a tool.
But ask a generations-spanning team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison what a map is, and they’ll give you a more complex answer. Maps are more than a flattened rendering of the land around us, said Matthew Edney, a senior scientist at UW and a professor of geography at the University of Southern Maine.
“They’re cultural documents,” he said. “They’re social instruments.”
Pioneered by UW-Madison scientists, microgrids can use solar panels, diesel generators, batteries or some combination of resources to supply electricity when operating as islands. Microgrids are seen as a way to bring power to people in regions without access to electricity as well as a way to increase reliability and resiliency in developed countries while making better use of intermittent clean energy sources. They also offer a more manageable platform for utilities to test out things like battery storage, said Dominic Gross, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at UW-Madison.
UW-Madison scientists have discovered a new way to capture energy from an everyday product that could be a key step to a carbon-free economy. Researchers in professor John Berry’s chemistry lab found that ammonia combined with a catalyst containing the metal ruthenium spontaneously produces nitrogen, releasing electrons that can be siphoned off.
We Are Here: Local Mapmakers Explore the World That Connects Us is an exhibit that was developed by the UW Madison Cartography Lab and currently showing at the Overture Center until January 16th. The exhibit features work from both current students and alumni from their current places of employment and aims to let people know that Madison is a hub and important place of cartography training.
Dudley Lamming, an associate professor of medicine at UW-Madison, and graduate student Heidi Pak were in the midst of a calorie restriction study using mice when Pak noticed the mice ate the food they were given within two hours, going another 22 hours before eating again.
SHAPIRO: Cancian is at Georgetown University now, but she examined this while at the University of Wisconsin.
UW-Madison retained its top-10 rank in research spending among hundreds of institutions, according to the latest figures released Monday by the National Science Foundation.
In 1874, Rasmus B. Anderson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, published a book with an exceedingly blunt title: “America Not Discovered by Columbus.”
In an aquatic lab in Madison, four juvenile nurse sharks are living up to their name. They’re providing treatment for COVID-19.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that antibody-like proteins from sharks are highly effective at neutralizing coronaviruses, according to a new study published this month.
Nurse sharks (Ginglymostomatidae) are slow-moving, bottom-dwelling predators that stalk prey in warm shallow waters of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In a new study published in Nature Communications, scientists suggest the sharks could lend a fin in a new, more effective treatment for Covid-19.
Quoted: “If you’re a virus and you turn off the innate immune system, it’s like a thief cutting off the alarms in a bank in order to sneak in,” said Thomas Friedrich, a professor in the department of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine.
Although some may fear sharks when swimming in open waters, these often misunderstood creatures may hold a way to help protect us from the coronavirus, new research suggests. As one of the ocean’s top predators, sharks have antibody-like proteins that can stop the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a study published Dec. 16.
The UW Carbone Cancer Center reflected on some of the lifesaving innovations and research done since that day, including a procedure called Mohs Surgery to treat patients with skin cancer and one of the most widely-used chemotherapy drugs in the world known as 5-FU.
Books designed for children may be perpetuating gender stereotypes, a new study warns.
More than 240 books written for children five years old and younger were analysed by a team from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
They found that books with a male main character were more often about professions, whereas those with a female protagonist were about affection.
More than 1 million metric tons of salt is flowing into Lake Michigan each year, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The findings come as the state has been making significant strides to reduce salt use on roads to curb pollution.
Researchers examined past and current water data on the amount of salt flowing into the lake from 234 rivers and streams, according to Hilary Dugan, the study’s lead author and assistant professor for the Center for Limnology at UW-Madison.
“There’s a tremendous amount of salt going into the lake each year,” said Dugan. “But because of the volume of Lake Michigan, that concentration is still pretty low.”
Quoted: In Wisconsin, there were more deaths than births for the first time since the state began keeping vital records, said demographer David Egan-Robertson of the Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.
“It’s just been a complete sea change in terms of how we view the population,” Egan-Robertson said.
Now scientists at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are testing a combination of targeted radiation, given by injection, with immunotherapy.
“We’re just delivering a very low dose to stimulate the immune system, not necessarily kill cancer cells,” explained Dr. Patel.
The researchers tested the therapy in mice and found that even when the mice were given a low dose of radiotherapy their immune systems revved up and wiped out the cancer.
Scientists say they plan to apply for FDA approval to conduct human clinical trials on the combination therapy.
According to a new research, peptides could be more effective to treat diabetes if they were more flexible and could move back and forth between different shapes.
The study has been published in the ‘Nature Chemical Biology Journal’.
The findings could help improve drug design for these diabetes drugs and possibly other therapeutic peptides.
Interview with Andrew Nine, a graduate student in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Astronomy
We hear from a graduate student working to learn, and tell, stories of indigenous people who attended and worked at UW-Madison — stories that have so far been missing from the university archives.
This holiday weekend, AAA expects over 100 million Americans to travel. But state health leaders urge unvaccinated people to reconsider.
“If they’re not [vaccinated], really, it’s important that folks do not try to gather,” Dr. Jeff Pothof said.
According to the UW Health Chief Quality Officer, only a group of people who are fully vaccinated with a booster shot should get together during Christmas time.
Quoted: “If you’re vaccinated and boosted, holiday celebrations for the most part pose really low risk,” UW Health Chief Quality Officer Dr. Jeff Pothof said.
For unvaccinated people, that’s not the case. If someone gets vaccinated or boosted now, they won’t be fully protected by Christmas Day, but Pothof said some protection is better than none.
“The best day to get your booster shot, if you haven’t gotten it, is today, as soon as possible,” Pothof said.
Quoted: “We’ve entered a convergence of timing here of cases are rising,” said. Dr. Dan Shirley, an infectious disease physician with UW Health. “There’s this kind of variant question, and obviously the holiday season is an important time to get together.”
With older children or adults who have spent years trying to pinpoint the cause of their conditions, speed is not as vital, he said. That’s why genome sequencing for patients at the new Undiagnosed Genetic Disease Clinic is done at UW-Madison’s Biotechnology Center, which can run so-called “long-read” sequencing that can provide even more answers. UW plans to study up to 500 patients at the clinic over five years, with the goal of diagnosing rare disorders and discovering new disease genes.
Noted: Zuckerman dedicates nine pages to Jon Wolff, an mRNA pioneer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison School of Medicine. In 1990, Wolff and several colleagues published an article about “the first successful use of mrna” that could be used as a vaccine, as it ultimately was for Pfizer and Moderna.
Noted: A recent count by Cooperative Children’s Book Center School of Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison found that “books about white children, talking bears, trucks, monsters, potatoes, etc. represent nearly three-quarters of children’s and young adult books published in 2019.” In other words, vegetables, animals, monsters, and aliens had more visibility in books than brown or black characters.
UW-Madison researchers say study of four nurse sharks swimming in a campus lab aquarium holds promise in developing a more effective treatment for COVID-19. The study involved examining the properties of the antibodies of the three-foot long, juvenile sharks after drawing their blood.
Antibody-like proteins found in a shark’s immune system could be a natural COVID killer that not only prevents the virus that causes it, but also different variants – such as Omicron that is currently spreading across the globe.
The proteins, known as VNARs, are one-tenth the size of human antibodies, making them small enough to ‘get into nooks and crannies that human antibodies cannot access,’ Aaron LeBeau, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of pathology who helped lead the study, said in a statement.
Antibody-like proteins developed from the immune systems of nurse sharks can prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 from infecting human cells, a University of Wisconsin researcher reports.
UW-Madison explained that the proteins, known as VNARs, are taken from the immune system of sharks. Researchers found these proteins can prevent the virus that causes COVID-19, its variants and other related coronaviruses from infecting humans.
This is the context in which a new study was released today by University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Noah Williams, founder of the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy (CROWE), finding that Wisconsin taxpayers and the state economy as a whole would benefit if the Badger State were to become the nation’s 10th no-income-tax state, making it the only state in the Midwest without an income tax.
Nurse sharks gliding around a tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison may hold the secret to an unusual, previously unexamined treatment for COVID-19, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications.
With her husband’s drawn-out illness, Boss’s life came to resemble the cases she’d spent her career studying. Nearly 50 years ago, as a doctoral student in child development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she researched families with at least one member who was either physically or psychologically absent.
The theory that the moon might have abundant reserves of helium-3 goes back several decades. In 1986, scientists at the University of Wisconsin estimated that lunar soil could contain a million tons of the isotope, also known as He3.
Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) approved spending more than $600,000 to investigate the state’s 2020 presidential election. State municipal clerks have been subject to subpoenas while a “significant number” have received threatening and hostile messages, a report on the election by the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison concluded. — Stephen Joyce
“I don’t think that many academics and scientific fields acknowledge that retention is also an important factor in increasing diversity in STEM,” said Emily Diaz-Vallejo, a doctoral student in geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and lead author of a poster on the findings, which she will present on 14 December during AGU’s Fall Meeting 2021. “If this is not fixed, then diversity in the geosciences may still continue to be what it is.”
The theory that the moon might have abundant reserves of helium-3 goes back several decades. In 1986, scientists at the University of Wisconsin estimated that lunar soil could contain a million tons of the isotope, also known as He3.
Aproposed Madison ordinance would ban businesses in the city from breeding or selling animals for “the purpose of medical, surgical or chemical experimentation,” but the law would not apply to UW-Madison, which uses animals for research and does some of its own breeding.
Whether it’s an NFL player of someone who’s just getting started in the sport, every time an athlete steps onto the football field they’re taking a risk. While rules and practices have changed some over time, sport-related concussion is still a prominent issue in American football and there’s still a lot to learn about how it happens.
