Category: Research

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.

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.

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.

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.