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.
Warm temperatures in December and early January caused ice to accumulate later than usual as the freeze date neared the latest on record for Mendota, according to the Clean Lakes Alliance. The latest freeze date on record for Lake Mendota is Jan. 30, 1932.
That’s Dr Jo Handelsman, who studies microbes at the University of Wisconsin – not only the vast array of microbes that live on and in us, but also the even greater number that lurk in the soil beneath our feet. I talked with Jo about why both the microbes within and below us are so important to our survival. But we began our conversation, which took place last fall, talking about the weather…which—these days—often leads to talk that’s far from small.
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.
This quantum bottleneck is only going to grow more acute. Data is scarce, but according to research by the Quantum Computing Report and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, on one day in June 2016 there were just 35 vacancies worldwide for commercial quantum companies advertised. By December, that figure had leapt to 283.
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.
Connor Wood, a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, joined a grant to study the endangered spotted owl across California’s 38,000 square-mile Sierra Nevada range. He was stumped by the assignment until he heard about bioacoustics.
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.
Noted: It touted efforts it plans to focus on over the coming years, such as developing a program in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin to assist farmers to reduce leaching nitrates from fertilizer into groundwater. The report also noted the administration had started a program to monitor water chemistry and fish tissue near sites contaminated with PFAS.
People who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods may have smaller centers of learning and memory in their brains, according to a UW-Madison study.
Guests: Jennifer E. Gaddis, assistant professor of Civil Society and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison & author of The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools
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
Martin Shafer, principal researcher with the National Atmospheric Deposition Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the Guardian, “There were folks not too long ago who felt the atmospheric transport route was not too important. The data belies that statement.”
That’s the thinking of two scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Joshua Coon and Ian Miller, who believe a “smart toilet,” can become a tool to closely monitor your health, and eventually learn more about the early molecular signs of diseases like cancer and diabetes.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin epidemiologist Tony Goldberg is helping with the investigation. He specializes in wildlife diseases of unknown cause — and recently he’s been busy.“ Along with invasive species, we’re seeing invasive pathogens,” Goldberg said. “Often it’s the coup de grace for a species that is holding on by a thread.”
“There were folks not too long ago who felt the atmospheric transport route was not too important,” says Martin Shafer, principal researcher with the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP), based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The data belies that statement.”
According to a study I published this year from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, these Russian trolls are more coordinated than we thought when the news first broke.
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.
Quoted: “Our data suggest that the environment was changing before the asteroid impact,” said Benjamin Linzmeier, the study’s first author, said in a statement. “Shells grow quickly and change with water chemistry,” Linzmeier, a postdoctoral geoscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement. “Because they live for such a short period of time, each shell is a short, preserved snapshot of the ocean’s chemistry.”
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.
Noted: What’s more, severely rent-burdened respondents in that survey were more likely than renters overall to have postponed a routine check-up because they couldn’t afford it. Around 11% of U.S. households are severely housing cost-burdened, according to a report published this year by County Health Rankings & Roadmap, a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute.
Quoted: “Any advance in fetal therapy, however welcome for good and important reasons, poses a risk of increasing pressure on pregnant women to sacrifice their own interests and autonomy…with women being subject to civil commitment or even criminal charges for failing to optimize the health of their fetuses,” said bioethicist Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin, now a fellow at Stanford University.
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.
Not everyone agrees. A 2017 survey at the University of Wisconsin-Madison asked 1,600 members of the general public about their attitudes toward gene editing. The results showed 65 percent of respondents think gene editing is acceptable for therapeutic purposes. But when it comes to whether scientists should use technology for genetic enhancement, only 26 percent agreed.
UW-Madison’s national research ranking, cemented for nearly 45 years as one of the top five in the country, has dropped in recent years, with the latest figures placing the university eighth among hundreds of institutions.
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.
The city of Madison is teaming up with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to identify the problems that come with climate change and ways to adapt to them.
Bullying and cyberbullying on social media can be a significant risk factor for depression, substance abuse and even suicide.
As the Madison region anticipates warmer temperatures and heavier rains in the future, the city and UW-Madison are partnering in a new effort to identify and proactively plan for the risks that climate change poses for infrastructure and operations.
Environmental health scientist Sean Scott of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues found that lead levels in bones taken from three cemeteries in Londinium may be more than 70 times higher than those in remains from pre-Roman Iron Age Britain.
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.
Now UW-Madison researchers hope to add to the growing field of personalized medicine by developing a device based on a common activity — urination.
One morning in mid-September, Jed Colquhoun, an expert in fruit and vegetable production systems, hopped on the phone to discuss the state of cranberries and climate change in the state of Wisconsin, our country’s most bountiful producer of that tart indigenous berry.
LONG BEFORE THE STALAGMITES SAT on Ian Orland’s desk in Madison, Wisconsin, they jutted up from the floor the Soreq Cave in Israel’s Judean Hills, 18 miles west of Jerusalem. There, in the dripping darkness, the mounds of calcite were standing witness to the world outside.
Madison and Dane County officials say the area is in a housing crisis. Home values and median rent in Madison have been on the rise for years, according to a city report from August. And a University of Wisconsin-Madison study found about a quarter of all people in Dane County spend more than half their income on rent.
“Wearable devices that collect data continuously are disrupting healthcare in a positive way,” Joshua Coon, a professor of biomolecular chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Digital Trends.
University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center caught video of the meteor, too, flying over Lake Mendota.
However, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found worrying evidence that, in the process of banishing the virus, the drug may cause it to mutate while it is still infectious, and that drug-resistant mutation can be passed on to others.
On analyzing samples taken from the two children, the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka found that the H3N2 strain harbored a new kind of drug-resistant mutation that is capable of passing between individuals and just as capable of causing illness as the non-mutated strain.
