Category: Research

A UW-Madison professor is on the route home after biking over 1,000 miles across the Midwest.

How’s this for irony: A food source that many people find gut-wrenching might be just the ticket to stop that gut from wrenching.

Co-author Jean Michel-Ane from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, agrees that this discovery opens up all types of new possibilities. “Engineering corn to fix nitrogen and form root nodules like legumes has been a dream and struggle of scientists for decades. It turns out that this corn developed a totally different way to solve this nitrogen fixation problem. The scientific community probably underestimated nitrogen fixation in other crops because of its obsession with root nodules,” he says in a statement. “This corn showed us that nature can find solutions to some problems far beyond what scientists could ever imagine.”

A recent international study found that a variety of maize native to southern Mexico’s Sierra Mixe region can fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and reduce the use of chemical fertilizers, the Mexican government said on Thursday.

A University of Wisconsin researcher is hoping to use the traits from a variety of corn found in the Mexican mountains to reduce the need for nitrogen fertilizer.Jean-Michel Ané tells Brownfield the giant corn can stand more than 16 feet tall and unlike most corn, it can fix much of its own nitrogen similar to legumes.  “Right before tasseling, that corn gets 40-50 percent of its nitrogen from the air.”

Now, after over a decade of field research and genetic analysis, the team has published their work in the journal PLOS Biology. If the nitrogen-fixing trait could be bred into conventional corn, allowing it to produce even a portion of its own nitrogen, it could reduce the cost of farming, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and halt one of the major pollutants in lakes, rivers and the ocean. In other words, it could lead to a second nitrogen revolution.

WASHINGTON — If you want a healthy gut, new research shows you can skip the probiotic pills, and instead, chow down on some crickets.

Every August, the Northern Hemisphere is treated to one of nature’s most popular celestial events, the Perseid Meteor Shower. This year, if conditions are favorable, the Perseid should be the best show of the year. Peak nights for viewing this year happen to coincide with new moon, so there will be virtually no interference from the moon lighting up the sky. These nights are August 11-12 and August 12-13, with August 12-13 being slated as the night for the better show.

Noted: Abel has performed this procedure hundreds of time since she joined Randall Kimple’s lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Kimple, a radiation oncologist, uses PDX mice to carry out experiments on human tumours that would be impractical in people, such as testing new drugs and identifying factors that predict a good response to treatment. His lab has created more than 50 PDX mice since 2011.

Probiotics have become increasingly popular as more people learn about the health of their microbiome, the billions of microbes that live inside all of our digestive tracts and elsewhere. Now new research suggests that a diet that includes crickets could feed the beneficial bacteria that help maintain a healthy gut. Crickets may increase enzymes in the stomach that aid metabolism as well as promote good bacteria in the stomach, according to a study published in Scientific Reports, the first clinical trial of its kind.

Valerie Stull, lead author of the study, told the University of Wisconsin-Madison that though the trial is small, the viability of insects as a sustainable food source is worth exploring in the future. “It’s gaining traction in Europe and in the U.S. as a sustainable, environmentally friendly protein source compared to traditional livestock,” she told the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The research of Amaya Atucha, an assistant professor and Gottschalk Chair for cranberry research in the university’s horticulture department, focuses on how cranberry plants are able to withstand subfreezing temperatures during winter, as well as strategies to reduce the impact of frost and winter stress in cranberry plants.

To the layperson, weather is largely a mysterious force of nature. It is an immutable reality that can, at best, be prepared for. But meteorologists know well that weather is a turbulent combination of many factors, from the energy of the sun falling on the planet to humanity’s chemical output and our constructs of steel, concrete, glass and asphalt. As air heats and cools and gathers moisture at one point and expels it at another, the whole of the world, natural and manmade, comes to bear.

Two prominent academic economists, James Hamilton of University of California San Diego and Kenneth West of the University of Wisconsin, and two leading Wall Street economists, David Greenlaw of Morgan Stanley and Ethan Harris of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, closely monitored market reactions to Fed announcements and other news from QE’s introduction in November 2008 through 2014, when the Fed stopped buying securities.

It was shortly after that Luke Odell, a Ph.D. students and storm chaser from UW-Madison, met Schultz. “It was like a war zone,” Odell said. “I was so numb because I’d never really seen something that horrific that close.”

The connections in the regions of the brain that contribute to whether we develop anxiety disorders may be something we inherit, according to a study.

Patterns of brain activity associated with anxiety in monkeys are passed from parent to child, researchers report today (July 30) in the Journal of Neuroscience. The results could give clues to the heritability of severe anxiety in humans and how to treat it. In the study, Ned Kalin of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and colleagues studied the stress response and cortisol levels of 378 young monkeys after an intruder entered the animal cage. The researchers also took scans of the monkeys’ brains while the animals were anesthetized and found that the monkeys with greater stress responses had differences in brain activity in the extended amygdala compared with those that were less stressed.

“Get online. There are some really excellent resources out there. The Russell labs at UW-Madison have a fantastic website with identification tools,” Zaspel adds.

In 2016, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University found that curiosity could dramatically change people’s behavior for the better.  Among other things, they discovered that posting a trivia question next to an elevator and telling people the answer was in the stairwell could actually get more people to use the stairs!

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are working to expand newborn genetic screening for Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities in the state.

Hormone therapy doesn’t increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, especially in healthy women who take natural estrogen around the age of menopause, according to new UW-Madison research.

Research conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that girls who grow up in stressful environments are more likely to experience physical and emotional problems, including anxiety, depression and mood disorders.

A new modeling framework from UW-Madison could be used to identify economically viable candidates for bio-produced chemicals.

Thirty-five students from UW-Madison are testing their pod design this week at an international competition in California put on by the company Space-X.

It’s a hallmark of modern apocalypse movies: Someone tries their cellphone, and when they (gasp!) have no reception, they try the internet. That’s when the real horror hits, because the internet isn’t working, and not even memes can save them now. All joking aside, though, climate change does pose a real threat to the internet, according to a new study. The report suggests that underground fiber optic cables that provide internet to heavily populated areas along the West and East Coasts of the U.S. may be underwater within the next 15 years.

Some of the key internet infrastructure in the U.S. will likely be underwater in as little as 15 years because of rising seas, scientists say.

Parts of the infrastructure that forms the backbone of the Internet — from fiber optic cables to colocation facilities — is at risk of being flooded and knocked offline during the next few decades as a result of climate change-related sea level rise, according to a new study.