Category: Research

Steve Ackerman and Jonathan Martin, professors in the UW-Madison department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, are guests on WHA radio (970 AM) at noon the last Monday of each month.

The award is well deserved, says Brian Rebel, a particle physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Finding the Higgs [boson] in 2012 was a once-in-lifetime event, but it was only the first step,” Rebel says. Since then, LHC scientists have been pinning down the mass of the Higgs and its interactions, as well as discovering 72 new particles, investigating antimatter and probing the nature of the ‘quark–gluon plasma’ that existed soon after the Big Bang. “It takes a small army to create the tools to test and validate these results,” says Rebel.

“There are some articulated bones that are nearly absent in other metoposaurid bone beds in North America, and completely unknown for Buettnererpeton,” study co-authors Dave Lovelace and Aaron Kufner, who are both geoscientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tell Popular Science’s Andrew Paul.

“Like other metoposaurids, it probably spent most, if not all, of its life in the water eating fish, other amphibians, or anything unfortunate enough to venture too far into the water,” University of Wisconsin-Madison paleolontologists and study co-authors Dave Lovelace and Aaron Kufner told Popular Science.

Study first author Aaron Kufner, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and colleagues uncovered fossils of Buettnererpeton bakeri in a Wyoming fossil bed called Nobby Knob.

“This assemblage is a snapshot of a single population rather than an accumulation over time,” Kufner said in a statement. The discovery “more than doubles the number of known Buettnererpeton bakeri individuals.” Alongside the B. bakeri fossils, the team also found fossilized plants, bivalves and fossilized poop, called coprolites.

Some researchers, including John Womersley, a former chief executive of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, and Tulika Bose, an LHC physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, want to see higher-energy machines developed as quickly as possible.

Travis Pickering, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who helped discover, identify, and describe the fossil, says he was “ecstatic” when he saw the bones.

“A find like this, in this context — that is, millions of years old and from a cave, which is extremely dynamic in terms of things like the build-up sediment, rockfall from the roof, the activities of prehistoric animals that dwelled in it, including eating and chewing bone — is as rare as finding hen’s teeth,” he says. “I couldn’t be happier.”

The bright evening colors come when small particles in the atmosphere cause light to scatter, explained Steven Ackerman, professor of meteorology at University of Wisconsin–Madison, in an online article.

“If the path is long enough, all of the blue and violet light scatters out of your line of sight,” Ackerman said. “The other colors continue on their way to your eyes.”

Shane Hubbard, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin, explained that the wind gusts were similar to tornado damage.

“Those are like EF0, EF1 tornado winds in terms of… the dynamics are different, but the wind speeds are the same,” Hubbard said.