Category: Research

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.

Thirteen percent of children in the U.S. are living in families with incomes below the poverty line. Beyond what this ends up costing the country — estimated to range between $800 billion and $1.1 trillion annually —  this has implications for children’s health and development. We talk with an economist about his plan to cut child poverty in half over ten years.

Guest: Timothy Smeeding

The study, released Tuesday, is a collaborative effort between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It uses the most recent available data from a range of sources, much coming from last year.

Adrian Treves is an expert on the coexistence and conflicts between humans and wildlife, and especially carnivores like wolves, bears and big cats. He is a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he founded the Carnivore Coexistence Lab. EmilyClare Baker is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Oregon. Her doctoral research at the University of Wisconsin helped reveal the genes that make lager yeast love cold and sugar.

Polar Radiant Energy in the Far Infrared Experiment (PREFIRE) from University of Wisconsin-Madison. This mission is composed of two satellites that will monitor far-infrared radiation and determine its role in Arctic warming, sea ice loss, ice sheet melt and sea level rise.

A new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center on Wisconsin Strategy – or COWS – has concluded that Wisconsin could generate jobs and improve public health by transitioning its energy system away from fossil fuels.

Chin Wu, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, headed a team that studied what caused the July 4, 2003 events that spurred seven drownings on Lake Michigan.

UW professor of economics and public affairs Timothy Smeeding is one of the researchers who worked on the congressionally-mandated study.

Horseshoe crabs have been crawling on our planet for nearly half a billion years, yet for all the brains we evolved in our measly half-million-year existence, we never did figure out what they actually are. Now a genetic study published this weekend in the journal of Systematic Biology finds evidence for the theory first postulated in the year 1881: the horseshoe crab is not a crab after all. It is a sister group to Ricinulei, the hooded tick spider.

According to the report, one of the labs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will resume testing in a few weeks after researchers received a grant from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland.

Some studies show that voter ID laws favored by Republicans have a deterrent effect, especially on minority voters, who tend to vote for Democrats. Wisconsin enacted a voter ID law before the 2016 election. A study from the University of Wisconsin found that the new requirements deterred thousands of eligible voters in two counties from casting ballots.

He has been developing a competing theory in collaboration with its originator, the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling in 2013 had no bearing on Wisconsin. The University of Wisconsin-Madison study she relied on for her 40,000 estimate says its findings from two counties should not be extrapolated to form statewide conclusions. Her spokesman did not cite any study for the 80,000 estimate. Voter registration in Georgia did not decline from 2012 to 2016.”