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Category: Research

Madison levels up: A guide to the exploding game development scene

Isthmus

You don’t really see it until it’s all in one place.

That was certainly the case in mid-October, when more than 400 game developers from Madison and the Midwest converged at the second edition of M+Dev, the game developers’ conference held annually here. As the assembled masses networked and swapped personal stories, it was hard not to feel — and impossible not to see — an ongoing sense of critical mass.

Wisconsin GOP and Scott Walker Block Incoming Governor Tony Evers

Jezebel

As an example, he pointed to the state’s voter identification law, one of the most restrictive in the country. In 2017, as reported by the Journal Sentinel, a University of Wisconsin-Madison study estimated that “thousands of registered voters in Dane and Milwaukee counties were deterred or prevented from voting” in the 2016 election as a result of the law, a form of suppression that “more heavily affected low-income people and African-Americans.”

The Trailer: How lame-duck legislatures are trying to affect the 2020 election

The Washington Post

Wisconsin. Just a few of the changes being debated by the lame-duck GOP legislature would affect voting rights, but they’d all have teeth. One rule would limit Evers’s ability to curtail the state’s voter ID; academics at the University of Wisconsin estimated that the voter ID law kept around 17,000 registered voters from the polls.

How to Accept a Compliment — Even if It’s From Yourself

The New York Times

Dr. Chris Cascio, an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that when participants were subconsciously primed to think about things they cared about, and then shown messages encouraging new exercise habits, the areas in their brain associated with reward and positive self-valuation lit up.

Asian carp threat stymies plans for fish passage on 100-year-old Wisconsin River dam

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: John Lyons, a fisheries scientist now retired from the DNR, said he and others at the agency spent considerable time planning to move fish through the dam.

“The issue of invasive species, particularly invasive Asian carp, was always a big issue,” said Lyons, now curator of fishes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s zoological museum.

Don’t hype stem-cell discoveries — Eric A. Johnson

Wisconsin State Journal

Letter to the editor: The State Journal recently published several articles and an editorial asserting that UW-Madison is the epicenter of the discovery of stem cells and their utility in medicine. This representation is far from the truth, and several laboratories worldwide have been active in stem-cell research for many years prior to UW-Madison’s culture of embryonic stem cells in 1998.

Meet the Wisconsin botanists whose work is truly out of this world

Big Ten Network

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin opened his lunchbox. Inside, he had three aluminum tubes, two filled with pureed meat and one with chocolate sauce. A peculiar lunch, indeed, but for Gagarin it was a peculiar day. He was in the middle of the first human spaceflight, and his less-than exciting spread was the first meal consumed in space.

Your Wisconsin weather news: The forecast, a Wisconsin connection to hurricane prediction and Mars

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Noted: The Tropical Cyclone Research Group at the UW-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center ended up in the middle of the heartland because of the groundbreaking work of atmospheric science professor Verner Suomi, who is widely credited with developing imaging technologies that spawned modern weather satellites in the 1960s and ’70s.

Our brains benefit from sleep. Here’s why, and how parents can help teens get plenty of it.

Washington Post

Noted: Sleep “cleans up” the brain. When you sleep, your brain removes information you don’t need and consolidates what you learned that day. This makes room for new learning. After all, do you really need to remember what socks you wore, the joke you heard during first period, or what you ate for breakfast? Neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin found that many of our synapses shrink at night as the brain weeds out or “forgets” information that it no longer needs. And it’s not just memories that need to be cleaned up. According to the National Institutes of Health, sleep also flushes out toxins that accumulate during the day.

UW Madison to Pay $32 Million Over Patent Contract

Inside Higher Ed

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the patent-licensing organization for the University of Wisconsin at Madison, was ordered to pay $32 million to Washington University in St. Louis after a judge ruled that UW Madison violated a royalties contract between the two universities, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

As a genome editing summit opens in Hong Kong, questions abound over China, and why it quietly bowed out

STAT

Quoted: Law professor and bioethicist R. Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a member of the summit organizing committee, thinks that’s the right emphasis. “We continue to have a public fascination with the least likely applications” of CRISPR, she said: “Germline editing, which will be the most complicated use to evaluate in terms of its risks and benefits, and enhancement” — using CRISPR not to treat a disease but to improve someone’s appearance, strength, or other traits. People, she added, put these applications together — germline editing for enhancement, a.k.a. “designer babies” — “and we’re off to the races.”

California wildfires: steps for evacuation and preparation

Slate

Even as the risk of extreme wildfires rises, more people are choosing to live in harm’s way. The number of homes across the country built in WUI areas increased by 41 percent between 1990 and 2010, according to U.S. Forest Service research headed by the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s SILVIS Lab. While living away from bustling cities and closer to undeveloped landscapes has an appeal for many homeowners, it carries an inherent set of risks.

Foxconn to buy Wisconsin ginseng

Agri-View

The partnership also will provide an opportunity for the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the UW-Carbone Cancer Center to engage in research surrounding the health benefits of ginseng, according to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

Wildfire Engulfed Yellowstone 30 Years Ago. Its Recovery Could Predict The Future of the West

Discover Magazine

A total of just over 1,240 square miles would burn that year — more than a third of the park — and although news reports at the time marked Yellowstone as destroyed, that hasn’t been the case. In the 30 years since, Turner, now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has amassed a considerable amount of data and scores of papers.

How to prepare for a wildfire

High Country News

The number of homes across the country built in WUI areas increased by 41 percent between 1990 and 2010, according to US Forest Service research headed by the University of Wisconsin Madison’s SILVIS Lab. While living away from bustling cities and closer to undeveloped landscapes has an appeal for many homeowners, it carries an inherent set of risks.

How the Body Adapts at High Elevation

WXPR

The human body is an amazing and adaptable machine.  The next time you head for the mountains, bring plenty of sun block and be prepared for some strenuous hikes and heavy breathing.For Field Notes, this is Scott Bowe from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Kemp Natural Resources Station.

UW prof Kathy Cramer, MIT technologists team up on plan to record, analyze community conversations

University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Kathy Cramer, author of “The Politics of Resentment,” and a media analytics team from Cortico, a nonprofit organization that uses artificial intelligence to assist journalists tell stories, and Massachusets Institute of Technology’s Laboratory for Social Machines will be testing the new platform, called the Local Voices Network, in Madison between Jan. 2 and April 2.

First Universal Flu Vaccine to Enter Phase 3 Trial

The Scientist Magazine

RedeeFlu’s mechanism for achieving broad effectiveness is that, like other LAIVs, it stimulates both antibody and T-cell responses, but RedeeFlu does those things better than other LAIVs, according to FluGen cofounder Yoshihiro Kawaoka, who holds joint appointments at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Tokyo.

How to get more woman CEOs

Chicago Booth Review

The researchers, University of Wisconsin’s Matthew J. Wiswall and Arizona State’s Basit Zafar, suggest that gender differences in preferences explain a quarter of the early-career wage gap.

Healing kidneys with nanotechnology

Science Blog

In new research appearing in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, Hao Yan and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in China describe a new method for treating and preventing AKI.

Will that Seattle view bust your budget or soothe your soul?

The Seattle Times

In a 2017 study published in the journal Psychological Science, psychologists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison reported that happiness levels in American adults are a strong predictor of cardiovascular disease, and subjects who felt happier saw improved health markers in their daily lives.

How Meditation Might Help Your Winter Workouts

The New York Times

So for the new study, which was published in September in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Iowa State University and other institutions set out to examine different ways to inspire people to keep moving as a Midwestern winter approached.