Category: Research

Herrick and Johnston, both researchers at the UW arboretum, want to test one of the few promising weapons against jumping worms: a low-nitrogen fertilizer called Early Bird, commonly used on golf courses. To assess its effectiveness, they’ve been manually removing all the worms from each of 24 high-walled rings before adding back a known number of victims. (When I ask Herrick what they do with the evicted worms, he says, “We gently chuck them.”)

When seeking graduate and professional degrees, African Americans take on over 50% more debt than white students. On the upside, African Americans also see a bigger payoff to earning such degrees. Whether or not that payoff is enough to make up for the additional debt burden is unclear.

Janelle is by no means alone. Of the 1,060 students at five colleges and universities who answered “no” to having taken an internship for our University of Wisconsin–Madison based College Internship Study survey, 676 – or 64% – stated that they had actually hoped to take an internship but could not. The schools were located in Maryland, South Carolina and Wisconsin.

Kashyap and Toi Labs aren’t the only ones thinking about mining stool and urine for health data. At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Joshua Coon and Ian Miller collected more than 100 samples of their own urine over 10 days to see what it could show about their various lifestyle factors, including nutrition, over-the-counter drug metabolism, exercise, and sleep patterns.

It’s a device designed for diabetics by Shawn Michels. He graduated from UW-Madison’s School of Business in 2018.

“Our paper was less about exotic Beyond the Standard Model scenarios as it was investigating one of the few remaining Standard Model explanations of these odd events ANITA detected,” explained Alex Pizzuto, a graduate student in physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the study’s leads, in an email.

When Brett Ranon Nachman, a doctoral student in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis  at the University of Wisconsin, entered graduate school, he noticed the campus’s lack of resources available to students with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

“When I first met this engineering team I said, ‘Google can see my driveway, why can’t I see the cancer?’ said Dr. Lee Wilke, a professor of surgery at UW-Madison and the director of UW Health’s Breast Center.

Between 1990 and 2010, the number of housing units next to or within forested areas grew by 60 per cent in the United States, according to research by Volker Radeloff, a forest and wildlife ecology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Christy Remucal explains: A group of chemicals known as PFAS are prompting increasing attention and concern across Wisconsin, turning up in drinking water in Marinette and rivers in Madison and elsewhere around the state. What are these chemicals and why are they such a big deal?

Other experts embrace the new finding. T. gondii “clearly manipulates the crap out of the host,” says Laura Knoll, a parasitologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and there’s no evolutionary reason this manipulation needs to focus on cats.

The lead author, post doctorate research associate at University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, Emmanuel Senft, says the findings from their research are twofold.

An additional study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Medical College of Wisconsin also found a similar pattern: In nearly 90% of the 115 cities they looked at, the highest-rated neighborhoods on the redlining maps had the most tree cover in the city by 2011.

A new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison finds that parents who take compassion training could help reduce their children’s stress levels. We talk to a researcher about the study and how reducing stress in childhood could have a positive impact for life.

UW-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds partnered with the University of California to create a video game that teaches middle schoolers mindfulness and breathing awareness.

Ryan Denu is a medical student and researcher at the university, as well as the founder of the Wisconsin Radon Coalition. He said his two proposals are similar to laws found in other states.

When we contacted Taylor’s office, legislative aide Michelle Bryant provided links to various articles on the topic, including a 2018 article by the Observatory, a fact-checking website staffed by students and faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and a 2017 Wisconsin Public Radio article titled “Milwaukee’s Lead Problem Is Complex And Could Cost Billions To Fix.”

In July 2019 the IceCube collaboration announced that the US National Science Foundation had granted it $23 million to put toward a $37 million upgrade, with additional financial support coming from Michigan State University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and agencies in Germany and Japan.

People who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods may have smaller centers of learning and memory in their brains, according to a UW-Madison study.

Wisconsin’s snow line is expected to shift about 350 miles to the north by the end of this century, said Stephen Vavrus, a senior scientist with the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research and a contributor to the study.

Soil has been called “that thin layer on the planet that stands between us and starvation.” Phys.org reported on work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that “shows how bacteria can degrade solid bedrock, jump-starting a long process of alteration that creates the mineral portion of soil.”

Zongfu Yu at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Qiaoqiang Gan at the State University of New York at Buffalo found that an aluminium film coated in polydimethylsiloxane could not only stay cool, but also enhance water condensation during the day12. The pair started a company in Buffalo called Sunny Clean Water to commercialize the device.

It is estimated that a staggering 97 percent of adolescents play video games during their spare time. While many often see video games as mere time-killers, a team of researchers from the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, Irvine see them as an opportunity to develop mindfulness in the youth.

New treatment techniques and diagnostic tools have likewise been created. Technology for targeted radiation that avoids damaging tissue near a tumor was developed on pet dogs with sinus tumors at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

On much of the Cheyenne River Reservation, life expectancy is 67.6 years, according to data from a University of Wisconsin research group, more than 10 years less than the U.S. average and lower than in North Korea.

Louie was born without his front legs

Wisconsin received 41.75 inches of precipitation through last month. The amount of rain and snow so far this year beat out the previous record of 40.09 inches set back in 1938, according to Steve Vavrus, senior scientist with the Nelson Institut’s Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison receiving grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) filed more financial conflict of interest disclosures than any other institution, according to data published by the nonprofit news organization ProPublica.

Sitting on a laboratory shelf on the third floor of the state-of-the-art Wisconsin Institute of Discovery building are a collection of small vials, each containing a primordial chemical soup. They are all a part of University of Wisconsin botany professor David Baum’s experiment that may change the way scientists study the origin of life.

A National Institutes of Health database tracking significant financial conflicts of interest involving federally funded researchers has been made public for the first time — and the University of Wisconsin — Madison has reported the most conflicts, by far.

Believe it or not, these numbers actually represent progress. The CCBC, based at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, has been compiling these statistics since 1985, and the numbers have slowly but steadily improved.

Most of the researchers who reported conflicts of interest work in academia. The University of Wisconsin-Madison filed 1,015 conflict disclosures for its researchers since 2012, the most of any institution. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was second with 358 disclosures, and the University of California, Los Angeles, was next with 294.

Bullying and cyberbullying on social media can be a significant risk factor for depression, substance abuse and even suicide.

The city will be working with the UW’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, the Wisconsin Institute on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI) and UW-Extension Dane County on the project.

Trust in science remained high even on controversial issues like climate change.

“The molecules are much larger than an antisense RNA,” says Krishanu Saha, PhD, associate professor of biomedical engineering, University of Wisconsin–Madison. “The Cas9 enzyme is a pretty large protein, and then it’s complexed with a guide RNA.”

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin are developing a variety of corn that can draw nitrogen from the air rather than from the soil. This new corn from natural crosses could one day reduce the use of chemical fertilizers and create an agricultural and environmental revolution, reportsLa semaine verte. Microbiologist Jean-Michel Ané takes us to the experimental fields at the University of Wisconsin in Madison where rare specimens of ancient corn grow.

UW–Madison agronomy and bacteriology professor Jean-Michel Ané and his partners on campus are growing a strain of corn that can acquire its own nitrogen from the air in partnership with bacteria. A report from La semaine verte.

Now, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are envisioning a toilet that can analyze urine for indicators of disease (such as blood, protein, or metabolites), connect to the internet, and send the information to your phone or your doctor.

Writing in the journal Archaeometry, lead author Sean Scott of the University of Wisconsin-Madison along with an international team composed of Martin Shafer, Kate Smith, Joel Overdier, Barry Cunliffe, Thomas Stafford, and Philip Farrell detail their novel method for identifying lead (Pb) levels from ancient skeletons and the results they obtained.

According to University of Wisconsin, Madison, archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, the mounds grew organically over the centuries as people kept building platforms and walls for their houses.