Category: Research

Now researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison believe they have found a way to get these kids and their families the help they need.

Born in Cleveland and raised in Long Beach, Calif., Smith previously worked as the director of strategic planning and special projects for Catholic Charities of Madison, before his position with WID.

Trout Lake Station, just southwest of Boulder Junction, has been conducting research on area lakes and bogs for close to 100 years. Yet every year during their annual open house event, residents and visitors alike remark about how they never even knew the station existed.

“What people are seeing when they are looking into their backyards and along the shores of Lake Michigan, they are seeing a part of a huge wave of monarchs that are moving south right now,” said Karen Oberhauser, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Arboretum.

The senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Big Country with an Empty Nest” believes China has 115 million people fewer than the 1.4 billion people in the official data.

In a new study released this month, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison said that the most popular method of teaching about 9/11 and the War on Terror was showing a documentary or “similar video.”

UW, Foxconn plans for research sites, funding have made little progress.

The eastern population of North American monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) migrates annually in early autumn to a mountainous region in central Mexico. The incredibly long distances covered during these journeys, and the striking sight of these butterfly populations on the move have captivated people’s imaginations. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Tenger-Trolander et al.1 document the loss of migratory behaviour in monarchs that had been bred in captivity over multiple generations.

The Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has announced that Derrick L. Smith is their new director of development.

Nearly 100 years ago in a lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, psychologist Harry Harlow set out to understand the effects of parental love and affection on children as well as it’s deprivation. His belief that a baby’s first love, their mother, had a positive and lasting impact on their lives was in stark contrast to prominent figures in the medical and research fields of the early and mid-20th century.

University of Wisconsin-Madison archeologists unearthed the remains in the 1960s before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers discovered the collection, officials said. The Corps was then tasked by a regional historic preservation officer to locate Alaska archaeological collections.

The NIH granted Dhavan Shah and John Curtin $3.42 million to work on a mobile phone app. The app seeks to prevent relapse amongst those recovering from addiction.

A pilot study analyzed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy finds that dementia patients given access to tablets loaded with apps for photos and music, and common apps such as YouTube, experience more positive moods. Half of the patients involved in the study saw improvements in their moods.

After their dad’s battle with Alzheimer’s, Deterding’s brother heard about an Alzheimer’s study being conducted at the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His brother was on the board of the Alzheimer’s Association, which is where he first learned about the study.

A pilot study analyzed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Pharmacy finds that dementia patients given access to tablets loaded with apps for photos and music, and common apps such as YouTube, experience more positive moods. Half of the patients involved in the study saw improvements in their moods.

Monica Turner, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and a co-author of the study, says that impervious surfaces – like roads, sidewalks and buildings – absorb heat from the sun during the day and slowly release that heat at night.

Dr. Richard Davidson, Director of Center for Health Minds developed the mindfulness-based Kindness Curriculum for preschoolers to help them pay closer attention to their emotions.

Noted: A 2006 University of Wisconsin study revealed that viewers of local news in the Midwest got 2.5 times more information about local elections from paid advertisements than from local news. A 2004 study of 11 media markets by USC Annenberg found that only 8 percent of the 4,333 broadcasts during the month before the election had stories that even mentioned local races.  The new shows featured eight times more coverage on accidental injuries than on local races.

We were particularly curious about the possibility that short- and/or long-term meditation training may impact social perception (i.e. how one is perceived by others),” said study author Simon Goldberg, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and affiliate faculty at the Center for Healthy Minds.

The researchers used a suite of satellites to monitor the long-term variations in ultraviolet light. As Sanjay Limaye, a planetary scientist at University of Wisconsin–Madison, explained:The difference between Earth and Venus is that on Earth most of the energy from the sun is absorbed at ground level while on Venus most of the heat is deposited in the clouds.

University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) released its annual “State of Working Wisconsin” this week, showing that since the passage in 2011 of Act 10 — the law that stripped public unions of bargaining rights — union membership has declined by 53.9%. That’s three times the decrease of 14.9% in neighboring Minnesota. The decrease nationally was 21.2%.

Noted: An innovation of a different sort happened in 1890 when Stephen M. Babcock perfected the first reliable butterfat-content milk test, providing an easy way for creameries and farmers to check milk quality.

Wednesday marked the first field day at the university’s Arlington Agricultural Research Station, where researchers shared what they have learned so far.

Researchers at UW-Madison are helping future astronauts get a better night sleep.

Noted: In 2010 and 2011, the labs of Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands separately announced that they had succeeded in making the deadly H5N1 avian flu virus more transmissible through genetic engineering. Since it first spilled over from poultry to human beings in Hong Kong in 1997, H5N1 has infected and killed hundreds of people in sporadic outbreaks, mostly in Asia. The virus has a roughly 60 percent fatality rate among confirmed cases, but fortunately, H5N1 almost never spreads from person to person. Nearly every infection is due to close contact with infected poultry.

Noted: A study published by researchers at the University of Oregon and the University of Wisconsin-Madison looked at fiber optic cables in low-lying regions, and how they’d hold up as sea levels start to rise. Based on the prediction that ocean levels would rise by a foot in the next 15 years, they said at least 6,400 km of fiber optic cable in just the US would be permanently submerged, affecting network connections from New York to New Mexico. Which means your precious Instagram scrolling hours could very well have a deadline.

Biases need to see the light of day. Research collected by the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows:* “Randomly assigning different names to resumes showed that job applicants with ’white-sounding names’ were more likely to be interviewed for open positions than were equally qualified applicants with ’African-American-sounding names.’”

The National Hurricane Center upped the odds of development for two tropical systems in the Atlantic on Friday. (NOAA/University of Wisconsin Madison)

Matt Chotlos is an undergraduate student at UW-Madison. For the last two summers, he’s been waking up at UW-Madison’s Trout Lake Station in Boulder Junction five days a week with a group of other researchers and driving to McDermott Lake in Iron County, where he traps bass and other sunfish–up to 2,000 a day–with the goal of removing every last one. By the end of this July, he had helped remove a total of 150,000 fish.

The Loka Project: Finding solutions to environmental crises around the world seems insurmountable, but local scientists and educators are exploring how faith leaders could ignite a global movement to address climate change.

Additional coauthors are from Penn State and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Funding came from the US National Institutes of Health and the US National Science Foundation.

Some animals — like a shy mountain caribou species that went extinct from the wild in the lower 48 states last winter, despite protection under the Endangered Species Act — struggle and disappear out of sight. Monarchs can serve as reminders of the others, says Karen Oberhauser, director of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, and a conservation biologist who has studied monarchs since 1984. That was before a boom in soybeans, corn and herbicide wiped out milkweed in pastures converted to row crops.