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Category: Research

How a ‘solar battery’ could bring electricity to rural areas

The Verge

The problem of energy storage has led to many creative solutions, like giant batteries. For a paper published today in the journal Chem, scientists trying to improve the solar cells themselves developed an integrated battery that works in three different ways. It can work like a normal solar cell by converting sunlight to electricity immediately, explains study author Song Jin, a chemist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It can store the solar energy, or it can simply be charged like a normal battery.

Water Flea Giving Birth Makes a Big Splash in ‘Small World’ Videos

Live Science

Giving birth has never looked as easy (and weird) as it does in a video captured by photographer Wim van Egmond. In it, a wee see-through daphnia, or water flea, expels a wriggling, googly-eyed larva, its body just as transparent as its mama’s. Seconds after emerging into the water surrounding its mother, the young water flea darts swiftly away.

Monkey sanctuary in central Wisconsin is retirement home for primates used for medical research

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Noted: Kerwin and her staff are busy building the sanctuary on 17 acres of land, which consists of a concrete building and a couple of geodesic domes. Taking a break last week from constructing walkways for the monkeys to travel outside from their indoor enclosures, Kerwin said she decided while working at the Harlow Center for Biological Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to someday open a sanctuary.

Climate change: National parks at greater risk, study says

The Washington Post

A new study published Monday has warned that climate change has adversely and uniquely affected many of the 417 national parks spread across the United States and its territories, according to scientists from the University of California at Berkeley and University of Wisconsin.

Study Eyes Climate Change Impact on National Parks

NBC Southern California

Emissions from cars, power plants and deforestation are leading to the increase in wildfire burn zones, the melting of glaciers as well as shifting vegetation, according to the study, which was conducted by University of California, Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Wisconsin Study Finds Binge Drinking Differences Between Men & Women

WUWM

With few exceptions, the legal drinking age in Wisconsin and the rest of the United States is 21. UW-Madison researcher Jason Fletcher wanted to focus on other problems that crop up when people start drinking legally. So, he looked at data from Add Health, a long-term national study covering adolescent to adult health.

What is threat of climate change to national parks?

Charlotte Observer

“A higher fraction of national parks are in extreme environments,” said Patrick Gonzalez, a forest ecologist at University of California, Berkeley who authored the study with UC Berkeley colleagues and scientists at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Party drug used for depression at UW Health amid research on psychedelics

Wisconsin State Journal

About three dozen patients have taken ketamine for depression at UW Hospital since last year. A campus study of psilocybin, the hallucinogenic ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” found the drug to be safe in healthy volunteers. Researchers are planning trials of psilocybin for people with depression or addiction to opioids or methamphetamine.

Climate Change Causing Huge Rainstorms

Urban Milwaukee

On the Aug. 30, 2018 edition of Wisconsin Public Radio’s Route 51 show, two University of Wisconsin System scientists discussed where Wisconsin stands in the bigger picture of climate change. The ripple effects vary around the world — wildfires in California and above the Arctic Circle in Sweden, a deadly heat wave in Japan, the bleaching of coral in the Great Barrier Reef, and, closer to home, a worrisome toxic algal bloom on Lake Superior.

Humans have been messing with the climate for thousands of years

Popular Science

“There is a huge difference between the very gradual and accidental warming trend that early farmers probably caused, versus the much more rapid climate changes that our modern industrial world is effecting knowingly,” said Stephen Vavrus, a senior scientist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Climatic Research who conducted the study, which recently appeared in the journal Scientific Reports.

The ‘dunce robots’ of Japan will help children learn

CNN

Joseph Michaelis, a doctoral student in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explained that social robots “interact with humans using natural social cues like gestures, tone of voice, or head and eye movements to convey meaning.”

Signal d’alarme chez les plantes

Cite Sciences Franciase

C’est en fait le calcium, un nutriment de la plante, qui produit un signal chimique et électrique pour donner l’alarme, comme vient de le montrer, dans une étude parue dans la revue Science du 14 septembre 2018, une équipe américano-japonaise dirigée par Silmon Gilroy, professeur de botanique à l’université du Wisconsin-Madison.

Lucid dreaming is like observing physical actions

The Big Think

Three researchers — Stanford University’s Philip Zimbardo and Stephen LaBerge; the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Benjamin Baird — tackled the longtime question of whether dreaming mimics perception or imagination, finally proving the former.

New research on how to reduce the number of unvaccinated children

WisBusiness.com

Adding more steps to opt out of mandatory vaccinations could cut the number of unvaccinated children, according to new UW-Madison research. Researchers from the university’s Applied Population Laboratory analyzed how a law change in California affected the rate of unvaccinated children in kindergarten.

Foxconn Committed to Wisconsin Development

WSAU - Wausau

Alvarez explains why Foxconn has partnered with Wisconsin for ginseng market development. “With ginseng, we also think that there are medical benefits. And so we’re partnering with UW-Madison and looking with the Carbone Cancer Center and looking at what some of those benefits can be. So we’re looking forward to selling those products not only in Asia but also here in the US.”

Chemical in cigarette smoke may damage important aspect of vision

Reuters

“This particular aspect of vision is really important because it affects your ability to see the end of a curb or put a key into a lock in low light,” said lead author Adam Paulson of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, School of Medicine. “It’s something that at this point in time there’s no way to correct, unlike visual acuity, which you can easily correct with glasses or contact lenses.”

Signal d’alarme chez les plantes

SCIENCE ACTUALITÉS.fr

C’est en fait le calcium, un nutriment de la plante, qui produit un signal chimique et électrique pour donner l’alarme, comme vient de le montrer, dans une étude parue dans la revue Science du 14 septembre 2018, une équipe américano-japonaise dirigée par Silmon Gilroy, professeur de botanique à l’université du Wisconsin-Madison

6 Reasons Why College Campus Diversity Matters

Mandatory

A study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that ideas generated by diverse teams were of better quality in terms of feasibility and effectiveness. The research showed that critical analysis and suggested solutions were more nuanced when they came from diverse teams. They also noticed that input from individuals with diverse backgrounds offered alternatives to problems that weren’t previously raised.

UW Involved In Teen Tech Study

WSAU - Wausau

Facebook and the U-W School of Medicine and Public Health will partner to study teens’ use of digital technologies – and their mental and social health.

Plants use blazes of light to communicate

Mother Nature Network

Science is just beginning to understand the subtle but intricate ways that plants — once thought of as an inert branch of life — can communicate and process information about the world around them. Now new research out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has revealed nervous system-like mechanisms within plants that might be our most stunning look yet into the communicative world of flora.

Plants Have A Secret Code For Signaling Danger To One Another

Inquisitr

A new study just published in the journal Science uncovered that plants can feel any tactile stimuli that touch their leaves, including the imperceptible movement of a caterpillar’s tiny toes. What’s more, they have a unique system of passing on the message to other leaves, warning them when an assailant is on the prowl and alerting them to brace for an imminent attack.

Watch Plants Light Up When They Get Attacked

The New York Times

Plants have no eyes, no ears, no mouth and no hands. They do not have a brain or a nervous system. Muscles? Forget them. They’re stuck where they started, soaking up the sun and sucking up nutrients from the soil. And yet, when something comes around to eat them, they sense it.

Watch a Mutant Plant Burst Into Action When Attacked

National Geographic

When plants are wounded, they send out warning signals that spread to other leaves, raising the alarm and activating defense mechanisms for the undamaged areas. Now, researchers have captured this burst of activity in a set of mesmerising videos that are helping to explain the tricky topic of plant “intelligence”.

Watch the Awesome Way in Which Plants Defend Themselves Against Threats

Gizmodo

New research published today in Science is providing an unprecedented view of the signaling action that happens within plants when they’re under attack. A second or two after a plant receives an injury, like a chomp from a caterpillar, a warning signal radiates from the location of the wound, spreading out through the entire plant in a process that takes fewer than 120 seconds.

Watch a Mutant Plant Burst Into Action When Attacked

National Geographic

“Plants look like they are just so intelligent—they do the right thing at the right time, they sense a huge amount of environmental information, and they process it”, says Simon Gilroy, who runs the botany lab that at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But they don’t have the brain, the information processing unit that we think should be necessary to make those really elegant calculations”.

When Plants Sense Danger, They Cry Out With Calcium

Science Friday

Plants have a unique challenge in staying alive long enough to produce offspring. Unable to move and at the mercy of their surroundings, they present a tempting source of nutrition for bacteria and animals alike. But they’re not helpless. Botanists have long known plants are capable of sensing their environments and responding to them. They can grow differently in response to shade or drought, or release noxious chemicals to fend off predators, even as a caterpillar is mid-way through chewing on a leaf.