A Madison company that makes software approved to gauge treatment response in breast and prostate cancer patients plans to submit a second product, for blood cancers, for approval by early next year.
AIQ Solutions, which is based on technology developed at UW Carbone Cancer Center, raised $3.2 million in equity financing, the company announced this month. Capital Midwest Fund led the round, which also involved Rock River Capital Partners, 30Ventures and Wisconsin Investment Partners.
Noted: Susan Paskewitz, Ph.D., professor and chair of the of the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and senior author on the study, says checking out mouse nests was a logical choice. “We were developing an agent-based model that explored mouse behavior and blacklegged tick numbers on the mice,” says Paskewitz, who conducted the research alongside Wisconsin graduate students Ryan Larson and Tela Zembsch and research associates Xia Lee, Ph.D., and Gebbiena Bron, Ph.D. “The model suggested that mice spend so much time in nests during the day that ticks should be detaching and ending up in that environment at greater rates than we had suspected. So, we decided to look in nests, which turned out to be more difficult than you might imagine.”
Noted: We close out the summer’s birdy nerdery with a celebration of some of these bird geniuses, and learn how researchers are investigating their minds through experimentation and observation. UCLA pigeon researcher Aaron Blaisdell and University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Lauren Riters join Ira and producer Christie Taylor to talk about the brightest minds of the bird world, and the burning questions remaining about avian brains.
Quoted: “Bees actually require the non-plant proteins of these pollen-borne symbionts to complete their growth and development — which makes them omnivores,” said Dr. Shawn Steffan, a research entomologist with the Vegetable Crops Research Unit of the Agricultural Research Service in Madison, Wisconsin and the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In the study, the Dr. Steffan and his colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University and Hokkaido University used isotope- and gas chromatography-based methods to calculate the ratio of nitrogen in two types of amino acids (glutamic acid and phenylalanine) in the tissues of adult bees and in beebread.
Noted: Prarthana Dharampal of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Shawn Steffan, who works jointly at the university and the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS), assessed 14 different bee species in six of the seven bee families. They found that bees eat substantial amounts of microbes, enough to change how they fit within food webs. Scientists use a scale to categorize where organisms belong in that web: those that make their own food, such as plants, register at so-called trophic position 1 (TP 1), herbivores register at TP 2 and carnivores do so at TP 3, or even higher if they eat other carnivores.
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.
ARLINGTON — Farmers and corn seed salespeople received an inside look Wednesday at research into corn diseases taking place at the University of Wisconsin’s Arlington Research Station.
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.
In a study that illustrates the growing potential of computers and genetic testing to reveal new disease risks, UW researchers teamed up with the Marshfield Clinic to probe electronic medical records and DNA samples anonymously from 20,000 patients.
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.
Wisconsin’s agricultural economy has been growing even with a steep decline in the number of dairy farms, a new report from University of Wisconsin-Madison shows.
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.
Quoted: “The cows did not go away. They were bought up by other farms,” said Steven Deller, a UW-Madison agricultural economist and author of the report.
The study published in American Journal of Physical Anthropology Magazine in July of 2019 by T. Douglas Price et al. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that the birthplaces of the individuals varied from near their final resting places in the still waters of the Sacred Cenote (pronounced say-NO-tay) and from far across Mexico and beyond, indicating that the Mayan network extended across thousands of miles.
In an accompanying editorial, Kristen Malecki, Ph.D., MPH, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noted that the findings support the importance of research examining interactions between epigenetics and low-cost therapies such as aspirin. According to Dr. Malecki, “The study by Wang et al. shows that beyond gene-environment interactions, epigenetic and environment interactions also exist, and suggest that DNA methylation could in the future help to support the identification of individuals for whom treatment may or may not be successful.
Dance’s work is part of an effort to form a stronger connection with the state’s Native American tribes and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We have a longer interview in the first segment of WXPR Saturday Edition on our website.
Also involved in the research were David Long, Penn State research technologist in entomology, and Richard Lindroth, professor of ecology in the Department of Entomology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Similarly, David Bell, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Director of Injury in Sport Laboratory, and a team of researchers, found that highly specialized high school athletes are over twice as likely to suffer lower joint injuries, such as around the hips or knees, relative to their unspecialized counterparts.
A 2018 study written by Limaye and his former colleagues found that climate change would lead to thousands more heat-related deaths in the eastern United States by the middle of the century.
General anesthesia allows those having surgery not to feel pain or remember what occurred on the operating table. Both functions are controlled by the brain so no matter what part of the body is being operated on, the brain also is affected. To what degree has been unclear. Past studies have had mixed results.
Noted: To find out, for nearly a decade, Ozioma Okonkwo, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and his colleagues have studied a unique group of middle-aged people at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s. Through a series of studies, the team has been building knowledge about which biological processes seem to change with exercise. Okonkwo’s latest findings show that improvements in aerobic fitness mitigated one of the physiological brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s: the slowing down of how neurons breakdown glucose. The research, which has not been published yet, was presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association on Aug. 9.
Everything raised will go to the UW Carbone Cancer Center to support research.
We appear to be safe from a catastrophic reversal of the north and south magnetic poles, according to evidence showing that the last swap took a lot longer, and was a lot messier, than scientists thought. The magnetic field shields Earth from the sun’s harmful radiation and cosmic rays, so a sudden polarity reversal could affect our power and communications systems, as well as our health.
But a new study August 7 in Science Advances says we should probably calm down, since the last magnetic field reversal on Earth took quite a bit longer: at least 22,000 years. It’s one more piece in the puzzle of how and why our planet’s magnetic field operates, and slowly but surely researchers are figuring it out.
“Our data suggest that, on average, major surgery is associated with only a small cognitive ’hit,’ and while there was a doubling in the risk of substantial cognitive decline, this only affected a small number of patients,” said senior study author Dr. Robert Sanders. He’s an assistant professor in the department of anesthesiology at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison.
What’s new: In research published this week in Science Advances, geologist Brad Singer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues homed in on the last reversal event in search of the steps leading up to it.
Cheesy sci-fi movies depict the magnetic field shift as happening virtually overnight, and while researchers know that’s not the case it’s still hard to pin down an estimate. Now, a new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests that a pole flip which occurred around 770,000 years ago took tens of thousands of years to finish once it began.
That said, scientists generally don’t know what causes a reversal, nor how long it takes to play out – it’s believed that the average is about 7,000 years, but some studies suggest it could happen in less than 100 years. To investigate for the new study, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UC Santa Cruz and Kumamoto University looked to the turbulent time around the last geomagnetic reversal.
In their paper published today in Science Advances, Brad Singer of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his colleagues calculate that Earth’s last magnetic field reversal took roughly 22,000 years.
In a study published in Science Advances, a team led by Brad Singer, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, looked at lava flows to trace back the last major reversal and find out how long it took.
“[Polarity reversal] is one of the few geophysical phenomena that is truly global,” says Brad Singer, professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and lead author of the study.
“We found that the last reversal was more complex, and initiated within the Earth’s outer core earlier, than previously thought,” lead study author Bradley Singer, a professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Space.com.
“Reversals are generated in the deepest parts of the Earth’s interior, but the effects manifest themselves all the way through the Earth and especially at the Earth’s surface and in the atmosphere,” said Brad Singer, study author and University of Wisconsin-Madison geologist. “Unless you have a complete, accurate and high-resolution record of what a field reversal really is like at the surface of the Earth, it’s difficult to even discuss what the mechanics of generating a reversal are.”
Robert Sanders, UW assistant professor of anesthesiology, said on average people’s cognition is “pretty much the same” after a major operation as compared to before, according to a study he authored that was recently published in the British Medical Journal.
New work from University of Wisconsin-Madison geologist Brad Singer and his colleagues finds that the most recent field reversal, some 770,000 years ago, took at least 22,000 years to complete. That’s several times longer than previously thought, and the results further call into question controversial findings that some reversals could occur within a human lifetime.
Tens of thousands of American service members never returned home.
People who pulled on American uniforms, raised their right hand to support and defend the Constitution before dying in foreign lands and waters far from their homes, and worried families who never got the chance to bury their loved ones.
But the missing in action have not been forgotten. Not by a nation that sent them to war and not by a dedicated group of volunteers and researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
That increased use of electricity to cool buildings could also result in as many as a thousand additional deaths annually in the Eastern U.S. alone due to elevated levels of air pollution, posits a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Universidad de Zaragova in Spain reported their results Monday in the journal Nature.
“The take-home message is that infrastructure in most parts of the country is no longer performing at the level that it’s supposed to because of the big changes that we’ve seen in extreme rainfall,” lead author Daniel Wright, a hydrologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement.
Led by University of California San Francisco along with the University of Utah and University of Wisconsin-Madison, the new study looked at 2,422 patients attending a sleep disorder clinic over a nine-year period to investigate the prevalence of advanced sleep phase.
Economists study poverty using hard data – but the numbers don’t always reflect personal experiences. University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor Sarah Halpern-Meekin joins guest host Courtney Collins to talk about how low-income parents struggle for family and community — and how a vacuum of social ties can perpetuate the cycle of hardship. Halpern-Meekin’s new book is called “Social Poverty: Low-Income Parents and the Struggle for Family and Community Ties.”
The IPMS method was based on prior work by the Bateman laboratory that immunoprecipitated A? to isolate it from plasma, then used liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry to determine A?42 and A?40 concentrations, wrote Barbara Bendlin, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Henrik Zetterberg, MD, PhD, of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, in an editorial accompanying the study.
Article by Sarah Kemp, a researcher with the school enrollment projections program at the University of Wisconsin Applied Population Laboratory and the UW-Madison Department of Community and Environmental Sociology.
Now a team at University of Wisconsin–Madison is hoping to clear up some of these lingering mysteries surrounding solar wind by building what they call the “Big Red Ball,” a device that can actually mimic solar winds.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison constructed the 3-meter-wide (10 feet) aluminum vacuum chamber, which they dubbed “the Big Red Ball,” to re-create some of the solar physics that take place in and around the sun.
“We’re not re-creating the sun, because that’s impossible,” plasma physicist Ethan Peterson of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told Science News. “But we’re re-creating some of the fundamental physics that happens near the sun.”
Physicists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison built a swirling orb of plasma they’re calling a “miniature Sun” — so they can study how stars work up close.
To try to shed some light on the matter, Douglas Price of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, looked at 40 human teeth recovered from different people cast into the Sacred Cenote. He and his colleagues have just published their results in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
“There’s usually a perfect storm, or a constellation of events all happening at once in a young adolescent’s life when they get to middle school,” Geoffrey Borman, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher and the lead author of the paper, said in an interview. “We usually notice a very pronounced decline in student performance when they hit middle school, and it usually has something to do with the transition to a new school that is much more complicated.”
When scientists need to learn about something, recreating it in the lab is often one of the best ways – and now that even applies to the Sun itself. Physicists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have built a mini-Sun in the lab, and used it to probe the secrets of the real thing.
Enter the Big Red Ball (BRB), a “mini-Sun” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison built to simulate solar dynamics in a laboratory setting.
US scientists have recently built their own “mini-sun” in the University of Wisconsin-Madison for studying solar winds
In a new study by the University of Wisconsin–Madison, physicists report the creation of a mini sun, a laboratory model of the Parker spiral system based on a rapidly rotating plasma magnetosphere and the measurement of its global structure and dynamic behavior.
A team of scientists in Wisconsin have created an artificial, miniature sun in their lab.
Middle school, as documented in such educational opuses as Eighth Grade and School of Rock, is legendarily awful. Students who have done well in elementary school often stumble, become isolated and fall behind. But Geoffrey Borman, a professor at University of Wisconsin Madison who specializes in education policy and analysis, and his team, think they may have found an answer.
The results took researchers by surprise, according to Benjamin Baird, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin-Madison involved in the study. “It worked amazingly,” Baird says. “It was not at all clear that it would be this powerful of an effect.”
In 2015 the University of Wisconsin-Madison developed what appears to be similar technology to that used by Sumitomo, using a nonogenerator to capture the energy from the movement of the tyre.
The scientists have a simple model for the Sun’s magnetic field: a bar magnet, or a dipole, which has a north and a south pole. A research team from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, built those three elements into their laboratory model.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, built a 3-meter-wide plasma containment chamber called the Big Red Ball, inside of which they created a model of the mysterious, charged, flowing environment of the sun.
According to Karen Strier, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison , feces throwing is not that normal of an occurrence in primates, especially in the wild.
