Category: Research

The government shutdown is over — at least for now — but worries remain for researchers who rely on federal grants to pay for their work.

By tweaking plant genes, Gilroy Lab has improved growth of plants in space, benefitting life everywhere.

Outreach, exchange with public are key to building confidence in and realizing scientific research.

Most of the candidates discovered to date have been based on plant products. But now, in an article published in Science Advances, University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Mayur Kajla and his colleagues have discovered that chemicals produced by the bacterium Xenorhabdus can deter multiple mosquito species from feeding. And they do it with equivalent – or better – efficacy than DEET

For almost ten years, Jonathan Pauli and M. Zachariah Peery, professors at the University of Wisconsin, and their colleagues have been tracking a group of sloths in Costa Rica. The animals are equipped with radio collars that transmit their location five or six times a month, so the team knows where each sloth’s usual territory is. The team has also taken DNA samples and figured out the sloths’ family tree, so they can tell which individuals are having the most babies.

Researchers hope their work may prompt more diverse, culturally-aware studies in the future.

Before the government shutdown started, Dominick Ciruzzi, a PhD student in the hydroecology lab, had never considered how a lapse in federal funding might personally affect him. However, over the last 33 days, he and his colleagues have been unable to apply for federal grants or contact their collaborators in federal scientific research agencies, which could have long-term consequences on his research.

The first is an ongoing policy experiment conducted by researchers from the United States (US); Kweku Opoku-Agyemang from the Blum Center for Developing Economies, University of California, Berkeley; and Jeremy D. Foltz from the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

It’s what Reeves has been doing, mostly alone, since arriving in Madison from Idaho in 2007. But Reeves still has a list of about 350 people he wants to interview.

Published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the study underscored just how sensitive the ice sheet is to climate change, according to Richard Levy of GNS Science and Victoria University of Wellington and Stephen Meyers of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who jointly led the research team.

The researchers, led by Richard Levy of New Zeland’s GNS Science and Victoria University of Wellington and Stephen Meyers of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, were able to recreate a broad history of the Antarctic ice sheet going back 34 million years to when the ice sheet first formed — documenting multiple cycles of ice growth and decay resulting from natural variations in the planet’s tilt.

But one 2017 paper published by four political scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests that reality may be more complicated. The authors analyzed early voting in the 2004, 2008 and 2012 presidential elections and found that while Election Day registration tends to benefit Democrats, early voting on its own is more likely to benefit Republicans.

That’s the key takeaway from a recent study published in Journal of Accounting, Auditing & Finance. Researchers from Villanova University and University of Wisconsin found that charities earning a seal of transparency from the nonprofit GuideStar gained an average of 53% more contributions one year later.

In the U.S., some ranchers worry about wolf attacks on their livestock as the native predator is reintroduced to more areas, according to information from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. However, for livestock owners in Chile, wolves are not the potential threat; pumas are

“The implications are huge,” Omar Ohrens, a postdoctoral scholar in environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and lead author of a study on the findings, said in an interview.

In addition to federal action, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy found that more than 42,000 jobs were created between 2013 and 2016 because of the state’s Manufacturing and Agriculture Credit. The center’s study reported that more than 88 percent of tax credit recipients were small businesses, with incomes of less than $1 million.

Of those, 87% were reported by the private company Charles River Laboratories. Similarly, in the second highest state, Wisconsin, ~80% nonhuman primates were reported by the private company Covance Laboratories. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, which houses one of the seven National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Primate Research Centers, reported the remaining ~20%.

Noted: After stints in Switzerland and Canada, Khorana found a research position at the Institute for Enzyme Research, a “vanguard of chemical biology” at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA.

In was his decade-long stint here, he “helped to decipher how RNA encodes for the synthesis of protein,” the ground-breaking research which helped him land the Noble Prize in 1968.

Noted: A study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that the children the researchers examined who were in out-of-home placements consistently struggled with academics more than children in stable living situations.

The researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Extension say female leaders they studied were nervous about going door-to-door asking for signatures to get on the ballot and that they also didn’t want to challenge an incumbent.

As for the search for life in the clouds of Venus, a paper published this autumn in the journal Astrobiology by a team led by Sanjay Limaye at the University of Wisconsin-Madison presents an argument for how and why it ought to be pursued further — now more than ever. And it hinges on data we’ve been able to uncover here on Earth. (Story also includes link to limnology site.)

“The pulses correlate with the stomach’s motions, enhancing a natural response to help control food intake,” said Xudong Wang, a professor of materials science and engineering, in a prepared statement.