Acetaminophen—the active ingredient in many Americans’ go-to pain reliever, Tylenol—typically stems from a surprising source: coal tar, a viscous liquid produced when oxygen-deprived coal is subjected to high heat.
Advancements in Artificial Intelligence are at its forefront. Almost every other day, some or the other jaw-dropping scientific research makes its way to the news headlines. From self-driving cars, a robot that can write articles to AI doctors and teachers, there’s hardly any area that hasn’t been touched by AI. And now another research by University of Wisconsin–Madison involved a way to create AI using nothing but a piece of glass. It neither requires a computer nor any electricity.
The University of Wisconsin System recently launched a proposal to form the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin using the collective water expertise of faculty at all 13 UW System campuses. Building on existing strengths, the UW System proposes to create the Freshwater Collaborative to allow students to pursue elite, cross-disciplinary, water-related studies at the 13 campuses. The collaborative would also bring local, regional and global research talent to Wisconsin to help meet the global, regional and local demand for a skilled water workforce that could solve water resource problems here and throughout the world.
Noted: Imagine sauntering up to your favorite Wisconsin lake and recoiling from the stench of rotting fish and the sight of pale carcasses littering the shoreline.
Those days are coming, according to two researchers who worked together at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In a report released Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, Samuel Fey and Andrew Rypel predict fish die-offs in Wisconsin lakes will double by 2050 and quadruple by 2100.
The new technology is currently being developed at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, by researchers Zongfu Yu, Ang Chen and Efram Khoram.
Noted: “At some point, it may be the case that we are completely prevented from using fossil fuels,” said John Ralph, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose lab conducted the research.
And while that initially sounds like a good thing, viewing irrigation as a defense against climate change is not the message, according to Mallika Nocco, lead author of the study out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Nanomedic joins other researchers attempting to reimagine the wound healing process. Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for example, created a new kind of protective bandage that sends a mild electrical stimulation, thereby “dramatically” reducing the time deep surgical wounds take to heal.
Researchers led by biologists Carly Ziter and Monica Turner, then both at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, used air temperature sensors attached to bicycles to track how temperatures related to tree and impervious surface cover.
’We’re using optics to condense the normal setup of cameras, sensors and deep neural networks into a single piece of thin glass,’ says UW-Madison electrical and computer engineering professor Zongfu Yu.
It’s the smartest piece of glass in the world. Zongfu Yu at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his colleagues have created a glass artificial intelligence that uses light to recognise and distinguish between images. What’s more, the glass AI doesn’t need to be powered to operate.
UW Hospital plans to launch the first study in the country of a cell therapy for a potentially serious complication of kidney transplants, the most common type of organ transplant.
UW-Madison is one of two test sites in a NASA-funded study starting in coming weeks to see if the headband can help astronauts sleep more deeply and improve their cognitive performance.
Quoted: “Maybe we can use this as some kind of repellent to replace or supplement some of the things out there that people are sometimes a little more nervous about using,” said Susan Paskewitz, chairwoman of UW-Madison’s Department of Entomology and one of the researchers involved.
Doug McLeod, Evjue Centennial Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, just finished teaching his Sports Marketing Communication course before educating the Summerfest crowd how to rock. Yes, that’s correct, McLeod is the co-founder and bass guitarist of Tent Show Troubadours. The quartet McLeod plays with opened for Young the Giant at the Uline Warehouse Stage.
A new study on the irrigated farms of Wisconsin’s central sands region is suggesting that something farmers in more arid climates have known for a long time is also true in the Midwest: a high concentration of irrigated farms can cool regional climate.And while that initially sounds like a good thing, viewing irrigation as a defense against climate change is not the message, according to Mallika Nocco, lead author of the study out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison study focused on synapses, the spaces between two connected neurons. To communicate with one another, neurons release neurotransmitters, chemical messengers that nerve cells use to communicate, into synapses. In the mouse experiment at the heart of the study, the authors found that synapses shrink during sleep and expand during wakefulness.
An expert on poverty says the state should raise its minimum wage and provide more help for families who are struggling despite record-low unemployment. University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Timothy Smeeding co-wrote a report that found Wisconsin’s poverty rate has remained stagnant for nearly a decade, fluctuating between 10% and 11% from 2008 to 2017.
UW-Madison researchers have received a patent for a way to synthesize acetaminophen, the active ingredient in the pain reliever Tylenol, from plant material, an alternative to the current process using chemicals from coal tar.
UW-Madison’s effort was known as “DreamUp Wisconsin,” and Berger said last May that the goal was to put about $4,000 in the pockets of Dane County families. The university’s Institute for Research on Poverty led the effort and helped solicit proposals, which all included a partnership between the university and community.
Study leader Christina Hull, professor of biomolecular chemistry and medical microbiology and immunology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, focuses on Cryptococcus, the most deadly inhaled fungus. The short answer, she says, is that lung macrophages abandon their posts as bodyguards and begin smuggling spores into the bloodstream.
Needless to say, however, not all researchers come to the same conclusion. Take a study conducted a decade ago entitled “Are All Americans Saving ‘Optimally’ for Retirement?” Its authors were two economics professors at the University of Wisconsin—Madison: John Karl Scholz and Ananth Seshadri.
It’s time to bring the heat — literally.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have determined that heat can kill the cocoons of jumping worms, the invasive earthworms that have spread dramatically throughout the state in recent years.
The $81 billion state budget the Republican-run Legislature is approving this week includes $8.8 million for research on dairy farming at UW-Madison, UW-Platteville and UW-River Falls. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers is expected to — and should — issue partial vetoes to improve the Republican-proposed budget. But he should leave the Dairy Innovation Hub intact.
Wherever Ebola strikes, it does come back again, says Dr. Alhaji N’jai, a scientist at UW-Madison, a native of Sierra Leone, and the founder of Project 1808, Inc.
Poverty in Wisconsin has remained mostly stagnant over the past decade, despite historically low unemployment in recent years, according to a new report from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
An unending series of mass shootings in the U.S. has produced a familiar public response over the years: an outpouring of grief, followed by heated debate over gun laws, often ending in the failure of gun control advocates to win passage of even popular measures like background checks.
Technology has the power to completely shape our lives, but it could also alter our bodies in unexpected ways. Recent research suggested small, hornlike spikes could grow on our skulls, and smartphones could be the culprit behind this change.
You might have heard recently, from publications like the Washington Post, NBC, and of course, Newsweek, that some people are growing a “horn” or a “spike” out of the back of their skull from using a smartphone too much.
A 2018 study out of Cooperative Children’s Book Center of Education (CCBC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that the percentage of books depicting characters from diverse backgrounds is abysmally low.
For that third study, the researchers crunched the numbers, and reported that a lot (35 to 40 percent) of the young people that they studied seemed to have enlarged bone growths at the back of their head, and that males tended to have larger bumps, though graphs presented in the study don’t actually seem to support that second conclusion, as University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks points out in a blog.
In order to understand why, University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Nathan Seltzer went looking for potentially correlated data sets and settled on numbers tracking the decline in manufacturing jobs.
“The students looked to create a prosthetic leg for Stubbs to create a little more mobility at home,” shop manager at UW Maker Space, Karl Williamson said.
The success of this project is primarily due to Omar Poler, instructor of the TLAM class at UW-Madison; Janice Rice, retired UW librarian and member of the Ho-Chunk Nation; and the students from the last three spring semesters’ TLAM classes.
New research by University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Nathan Seltzer identifies a link between the long-term decline in manufacturing jobs — accelerated during the Great Recession — and reduced fertility rates. Analyzing every birth in America at the county level across 24 years, Seltzer found that the share of businesses in goods-producing industries better predicted a metropolitan area’s fertility rate than the region’s unemployment rate.
The Vaccine Against Canine Cancer Study (VACCS) is seeking to sign up 800 dogs who live within 150 miles of one of the participating trial sites – Colorado State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of California-Davis.
The coauthors are Francisco Santiago-Ávila (a PhD candidate at the Nelson School of Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison), Professor Joann Lindenmayer (Public Health and Community Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine), John Hadidian (Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University), Research Fellow Arian Wallach, Ph.D. (Centre for Compassionate Conservation, University of Technology Sydney), and Professor Emerita Barbara J. King (Anthropology, College of William and Mary)
We surveyed the U.S. public on this topic. In March and April 2018, we surveyed 2,948 U.S. adults, who resembled the general U.S. population with respect to gender, age, geographic location and race. The online survey asked all participants to read a hypothetical scenario about the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
Jessica L.P. Weeks (@jessicalpweeks) is associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
Noted: In the 1990s, researchers found that flies use these genes to build their limbs. In an influential paper, Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago, Sean Carroll of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Cliff Tabin of Harvard University speculated that flies and vertebrates — and other animals with appendages — inherited this network of genes from a common ancestor.
Lovastatin is already approved for use in children with high cholesterol, so if proven effective for fragile X, it could quickly be prescribed for people with the syndrome, says Xinyu Zhao, Jenni and Kyle Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The UW-Madison, the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Marshfield Clinic are spearheading a statewide effort to help the NIH build a national biomedical database of unprecedented depth and scope.
Greg Nemet, a professor with UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, has written a new book on the global policy and market forces that combined to make solar electricity one of the cheapest forms of energy.
It is mid-March and two researchers trudge on snowshoes through feet of snow on a wooded trail, dragging a small plastic sled full of equipment.
More research labs are retiring primates to sanctuaries like Primates Inc., a 17-acre (7-hectare) rural compound in central Wisconsin, where they can live their remaining years, according to the sanctuaries and researchers. For some monkeys, it’s their first time hanging out in the fresh air.
“Just to see them look around in amazement. You know it was all very calm and peaceful,” said Amy Kerwin, who worked for 15 years to get the Westfield, Wisconsin, sanctuary off the ground after being employed in a University of Wisconsin research lab.
Watras and Rubsam walk onto frozen Little Rock Lake in Vilas County near their base at the University of Wisconsin’s Trout Lake Station. They are scientists for UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology and the state Department of Natural Resources.
A new, more accessible and much cheaper approach to surveying the topology and strength of interstellar magnetic fields — which weave through space in our galaxy and beyond, representing one of the most potent forces in nature — has been developed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Meanwhile, a 2018 study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that more than 4,000 fiber optic cabling will be submerged underwater.
Megan Sykes, an immunologist at Columbia University, has spent years using human fetal tissue to develop a mouse with a humanlike immune system, which mimics how type 1 diabetes develops in humans. The tissue is donated after elective abortions, and the mice are testbeds for potential diabetes treatments.
A new report out of the University of Wisconsin at Madison shows that students have trouble pursuing internships because they’re preoccupied with work or had too heavy of a course load.
Barneveld became part of a landmark study of tornado debris by University of Wisconsin-Madison meteorology professor Charles Anderson. In the days following Barneveld’s tornado, Anderson and his students placed ads in newspapers, conducted a ground survey and a mail and phone campaign seeking information on the fallout of debris.
In their paper published in the journal Pediatrics in 2016, they wrote that high mortgage and student loan debt didn’t have the same negative impact on parents’ and kids’ well-being as credit card or medical bill debt, says lead author Lawrence M. Berger, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty and professor and doctoral program chair in the School of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told USA Today the technology for a carbon-free economic system is already in place.
Watras and Rubsam walk onto frozen Little Rock Lake in Vilas County near their base at the University of Wisconsin’s Trout Lake Station. They are scientists for UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology and the state Department of Natural Resources.
Could Wisconsin establish itself as the “Silicon Valley of Water”? That’s what the University of Wisconsin System is trying to do with the launch of a Freshwater Collaborative that will bring together its 13 campuses into a first-of-its-kind research hub focused on water topics.
Alice Goffman wrote one of the most widely read sociology books in recent memory. But On the Run, her account of young black men caught up in the criminal-justice system, became entangled in ethical controversies. Now her academic career appears to be foundering.
Noted: Part of the problem is that phosphorus emitted from cow manure and fertilizers used on farms is leaking into Madison’s lakes, according to the UW-Madison Center for Limnology.
Leaders from across the University of Wisconsin System announced a statewide initiative to connect every UW campus in focusing on freshwater resources.
Noted: Barneveld became part of a landmark study of tornado debris by University of Wisconsin-Madison meteorology professor Charles Anderson. In the days following Barneveld’s tornado, Anderson and his students placed ads in newspapers, conducted a ground survey and a mail and phone campaign seeking information on the fallout of debris.
Quoted: But other green technologies have achieved lower costs and more widespread adoption precisely because of the relatively free movement of ideas, people and production, as University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Gregory F. Nemet notes in his new book, “How Solar Energy Became Cheap.”
