Category: Research

Out of almost 4,000 books geared toward children and teens that were published in 2019, 232 were written by Black authors, and only 471 featured Black characters, according to data from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

’Innovations like these are what help move health care forward,’ UW chief clinical research officer says.

Independent scientific analysis conducted by George Kraft, a University of Wisconsin scientist working with the Environmental Working Group (EWG), confirms that RDO’s latest proposed irrigated potato site would increase local groundwater and drinking water contamination to double or quadruple the legal limit under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

In a 2019 paper, Cyber Risk and Security Implications in Smart Agriculture and Food Systems (PDF), experts from Jahn Research Group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Agriculture and Life Sciences argue that that the growing interconnectedness of the U.S. agriculture sector and the “increasing application of smart technology and devices” mean the risk of U.S. agriculture being “negatively impacted by a service interruption caused by a cyber attack or accidents…is rapidly growing

The kind of work being done at a Wisconsin lab could be a shot in the arm, so to speak in the fight against the shifting terrain of COVID-19. As the number of variant coronavirus cases increases, lawmakers are hopeful funds from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 can fuel research labs like the AIDS Vaccine Research Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The $1.75 billion package signed into law in March funds COVID-related research focused on detecting variants of the virus.

Tens of millions of dollars in federal pandemic aid is proving to be a shot in the arm, so to speak, for Wisconsin’s contributions to the fight against the shifting terrain of COVID-19. As the number of variant coronavirus cases increases, $60 million dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, a  $1.75 billion package signed into law in March, will fund COVID-related research by the AIDS Vaccine Research Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A 2020 report by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that just 5.3 percent of the roughly 3,700 books the Center received from U.S. publishers had at least one primary character who was Latino.

Students developing mobile application provides ease for patients, medical professionals.

The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health is expanding its COVID-19 prevention study to all essential workers. The study is investigating whether common oral and nasal antiseptics, in addition to masks and hygiene, can help prevent COVID-19 infections.

Health officials are interested in first responders, daycare and grocery store workers, and retail employees, among other workers, joining the study.

University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health researchers are encouraging essential workers Tuesday who cannot work remotely to take part in a study that will look into practices to prevent COVID-19 infections.

If you find a tick—attached or not—and are curious about what kind it is, several free services can help you identify the species from a photograph. Mather at the University of Rhode Island runs one of these services, called TickSpotters. The University of Wisconsin at Madison also runs the photograph-based Tick Identification Service for residents of Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

Chief UW Health experts says the vaccine is safe and effective — it is just a matter of figuring out how effective it is.

Women who are underweight, with a BMI less than 18, might not be getting regular periods or could stop ovulating, which also hinders their ability to become pregnant, according to the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics Authority.

A new report from a think tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison finds that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would help three out of 10 Wisconsin workers, and work to close racial and gender pay gaps in the state.

The report, from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS), finds that 843,000 workers — or 21 percent of workers in the state — currently make less than $15 an hour and would be directly impacted by a boost to the minimum wage.

A newly published study done on Lake Mendota says climate change is linked to longer lasting dead zones. In the summer, lakes can settle into having two layers of water, a phenomena known at stratification. Warm water is lighter and sits on the top of the lake, while colder water sits at the bottom of the lake.

A new study at the University Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine is combining canines, cancer and the military.

Kids are seeing more of these possibilities in the books they read as authors make a bigger push to reflect the diversity around them. Racial diversity in children’s books has been picking up since 2014, reversing a 25-year plateau, according to Kathleen T. Horning, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center.

In a 2015 study, Leticia Bode and Emily K. Vraga, both then at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, found that this kind of corrective juxtapositioning can reduce users’ misperceptions.

“It really concerns me that that’s the case even within midwifery which does offer a really beautiful model but again is hampered by these exclusions still being perpetuated even with this potentially transformative model of care,” UW professor says.

Diversity and representation in children’s literature has always been skewed. According to a 2018 study by the librarians at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education Cooperative Children’s Book Center, only 10% of children’s books depict the main characters as Black, and just 4% of executive-level publishing professionals and literary agents are Black.

The recent controversy surrounding Dr. Seuss allows us an opportunity to reflect broadly on the need for more positive representation in children’s books. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison determined that in 2019, books depicting either white main characters or animals and nonhuman objects—such as trucks—made up 71 percent of all books published, leaving little room (29 percent) for books depicting any main characters of color (11.9 percent Black, for instance, and 5.3 percent Latinx).

In the last decade, Act 10 has hurt Wisconsin. A report by the School for Workers at the University of Wisconsin found a 70% decline in public-sector union membership from 2010 to 2017.

“Those drugs work well for many patients, but the effect does not last,” says Prof. Marina Emborg, who researches Parkinson’s at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, part of the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW–Madison).

Fragile X syndrome usually arises from mutations that silence the FMR1 gene, curbing production of a protein called FMRP and leading to runaway synthesis of other proteins. SARS-CoV-2, which contains a single long stretch of RNA, hijacks the same protein production machinery to crank out more virus, making people sick in the process. Could drugs designed to thwart protein synthesis help with both? “The idea kept me awake at night for a week,” says Westmark, assistant professor of neurology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison