Category: Research

Nearly 130 UW undergraduates showed off their research in the Capitol Rotunda on Wednesday. Topics ranged from environmental research to social media analysis.

Engineer students at UW Madison are trying to change the way people travel.

The next generation of transportation may come right out of UW-Madison.

Finding conflicts with February report that said expansion would cost $600 million.

In a study published this month in PLOS Genetics, lead author Qiongshi Lu, assistant professor in the department of statistics at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his colleagues used attractiveness scores to locate and identify several genes correlated to facial attractiveness in 4,383 individuals.

Now, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US have developed a spectrometer so small and simple that it could integrate with the camera of a typical cellphone without sacrificing accuracy.

Chris Hittinger is a University of Wisconsin microbiologist who’s researched Saccharomyces for years. He says this wild yeast discovery was a big step forward for the field. Since then, his lab has been setting the groundwork that could set us up for some pretty sweet brews in the future.

The studies are part of Project LEAP, for Leveraging Early Algebra Progression, a program developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to boost math concepts for low-income elementary students.

A big cancer breakthrough, thanks to researchers at UW Madison.  A special team has solved the mystery behind the most studied protein in cancer biology.   ’Many pharmaceutical companies invest millions ..billions of dollars to target those mutant P-53 cancer cells — but it’s hard,’ UW Madison Post Doctoral Fellow Suyong Choi said.   So hard no one has ever unlocked the secrets of the cancer regulating protein.

Searching for the genetics behind a subjective trait like beauty is a dangerous game, but lead study author Qiongshi Lu, Ph.D., a biostatistician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was willing to try. He turned to the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a database of genetic information and high school yearbook photos of high school seniors who graduated in 1957. After a team of coders assigned attractiveness scores to each photo, Lu noted that there was “genetic architecture” that seemed to be related to how high — or low — a person’s score was.

Why would that be? The researchers, led by Qiongshi Lu, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, speculated on a reason: Cholesterol is involved in synthesizing testosterone, and more testosterone might mean higher attractiveness ratings for men

“We knew that cities are warmer than the surrounding countryside, but we found that temperatures vary just as much within cities,” explains says Monica Turner, a professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was a co-author of the study. “Keeping temperatures more comfortable on hot summer days can make a big difference for those of us who live and work there.”

High stress levels can block memory processes, making us forget what we’ve learnt. But, more importantly, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that each stressful incident could age your brain by 1.5 years.

According to a 2014 study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found in a review of Wisconsin divorce records that mothers were granted sole custody 80 percent of the time in 1980; by 2008, that rate had dropped to 42 percent.

A meteotsunami, generated by a 15-minute storm, caused the deaths of seven people at Lake Michigan in 2003, the Sea Grant Institute at the University of Wisconsin reported.

Noted: In fact, a meteotsunami, generated by a 15-minute storm, caused the deaths of seven people at Lake Michigan in 2003, the Sea Grant Institute at the University of Wisconsin reported. The meteotsunami generated rip currents that pulled people away from the shore and put them in a situation that increased their risk of drowning. After the storm passed, the weather became agreeable and sunny. This led people to mistakenly believe it was safe to swim, so they went back into the water.

For the study, Yang and his co-author, Yang Wang, an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, used birth-record data collected by the New Jersey Department of Health for 2014 and 2015

The All of Us research program has a goal of recruiting one million participants over the next five years, and 100,000 of them will come from Wisconsin.

Noted: During the four-year period 2008 to 2012, Minnesota lost wetlands at the highest rate in the country and cut down forests at a rate that was second only to Georgia, according to a study from the University of Wisconsin.

UW postdoc, Global Health Institute investigate social, environmental implications of insect consumption.

Simons Fellowship funding allows professors to focus on research, travel to conferences.

Professor Monica Turner from the University of Wisconsin-Madison investigated the effects and how trees can be used in the future to prevent rising global temperatures.

But compared to neighboring states, Wisconsin state unemployment benefits fall short, said Sarah Halpern-Meekin, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Human Ecology.

Carol E. Lee, a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, will research the ability of plankton to adapt and evolve with the Earth’s changing climate, with funding from the Make Our Planet Great Again initiative.

A UW-Madison graduate developed a new mobile app, for users keep track of fitness goals, while making a philanthropic impact.

With like-minded researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Vincent helped form a new campus group by the name of OoLALA – Origins of Life, Artificial Life and Astrobiology. The founders of OoLALA hope it can coordinate the dozens of labs that are addressing some aspect of astrobiology and inspire others to join the work.

“I love being able to record and study the behavior and function of living organisms under physiological conditions?—?without harming them, and without them realizing that they’re being observed.”?—?Michael Weber, Morgridge Institute for Research, in affiliation with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Flamingo Project.

According to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, saving energy could also save lives and alleviate the costs of health problems caused by air pollution.

Noted: A report released on Thursday, largely from scientists at Midwestern universities, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, highlight current and future impacts of climate change on the Great Lakes.

Consequently, a study by University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor Noah Williams and Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty research director Dr. Will Flanders shows how expanding Medicaid could result in the crowding-out of private insurers and the sky-rocketing of private-sector health care costs to nearly $600 million per year, even after the savings to the state.