Last week, the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene at UW-Madison received a sample from a patient who had Novel coronavirus — but the lab couldn’t confirm that themselves.
Experts from Northeastern University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and California State University, Long Beach also participated in the research.
Melody Harvey, National Poverty Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty, found in a study she conducted that state-level personal finance education requirements make young individuals significantly less likely to borrow payday loans than peers who were not provided the education, across race, ethnicity and gender.
Previous research has shown us how regular exercise can be beneficial for cognitive function and help stave off the brain degeneration associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s, but scientists continue to learn more about the mechanisms at play. The latest discovery in this area comes courtesy of researchers from the University of Wisconsin (UW), who have published a new study describing a relationship between regular aerobic exercise and a reduced vulnerability to Alzheimer’s among high-risk adults.
UW Professor Robert Kirchdoerfer explores ways to prevent similar future viral outbreaks.
“It’s commonly said that neutrinos are ’elusive’ or ’ghostly’ particles because of their remarkable ability to pass through material without smashing into something,” Alex Pizzuto of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, one of the leads on this paper, said in a press release. “But at these incredible energies, neutrinos are like bulls in a china shop — they become much more likely to interact with particles in Earth.”
This field of study is known as immunotherapy, and while it’s showing promise it can be quite expensive. Now, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed artificial nanoparticles that should be cheaper and easier to produce.
“It could come right from here,” said graduate student Nithesh Chandrasekharan. “That’s the goal.”
Kevin Sanchez-Rivera spends many hours in the first-floor labs of the engineering building on campus, just a block or so away from Camp Randall. The graduate student feels like the scientific community has a responsibility to figure out a way to make sure plastics are used more than once.
In his UW-Madison lab, Robert Kirchdoerfer studies proteins from six different types of coronaviruses, including SARS and MERS, which caused deadly human outbreaks in recent years.
Nearly 1 year ago, Science reported that the Health and Human Services review panel had approved two H5N1 projects in labs in Wisconsin and the Netherlands—the same labs that launched the controversy in 2011. The news infuriated opponents of such research, and they slammed federal officials for not disclosing the approvals in an op-ed in The Washington Post. HHS and NIH soon publicized the two approved projects but did not release the risk reviews.
Average freeze date later than 150 years ago, consequences important to community, UW professor says.
Vatsan Raman, a University of Wisconsin Assistant Professor of Biochemistry, talked about the value of certain biochemicals over others.
American Family Insurance announced the creation of the David R. Anderson chair to direct the American Family Insurance Data Science Institute at the University of Wisconsin, according to UW News. UW Professor Brian Yandell, current director of the DSI, will fill the position.
Although T. gondii can be transmitted to different animals, the parasite cannot reach sexual maturity anywhere other than in the feline intestine. The reason why remained a mystery for many years, until in 2019, an eye-opening study from the University of Wisconsin–Madison revealed what makes the cat gut a hotbed for parasitic sex.
Professor emeritus John Kutzbach from the University of Wisconsin–Madison said: “It’s like two hands meeting. There were stronger summer rains in the Sahara and stronger winter rains in the Mediterranean.”
Noted: America’s education desert zones are generally less populated than those with easy access to a college, with the average population of a commuting zone desert approximately 72,100, according to a study done by Nicholas Hillman and Taylor Weichman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But not all are — 15 commuting zone deserts across the nation have populations of more than 250,000.
Quoted: Monica Turner, a fire ecology scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said “it is climate that is responsible for the size and severity of these fires.”
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.
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.
