Category: Research

Noted: Rozalyn Anderson, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health, told Business Insider that her work in monkeys also suggests metabolism is at the center of the aging process.

Noted: The study authors—Michael Light, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Ty Miller, a graduate student at Purdue University—wrote that ramped-up border enforcement had not led to an overall reduction of crime in the U.S. because undocumented immigrants were not responsible for increased crime rates in the first place.

According to Steve Vavrus, senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research, a combination of high humidity and a very slow-moving storm is what caused the huge amount of rainfall.

MADISON, Wis. – The University of Wisconsin–Madison Center for Limnology is experiencing flooding from lake levels on Lake Mendota rising, a blog post from center said.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Lucidity Institute in Hawaii have figured out a more consistent way to create a lucid dreaming state, and it involves the use of drugs normally used to treat Alzheimers.

“Russian groups appeared to identify and target nonwhite voters months before the election with benign messages promoting racial identity,” said the author of the report, Young Mie Kim, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Then, on Election Day, the group sent them an ad encouraging them to boycott the presidential election.

For most, the idea of sitting down to take a bite out of a grasshopper or cricket seems unappetizing. But for Valerie J. Stull, PhD, MPH, a post-doctoral research fellow at University of Wisconsin-Madison, the idea is not as ludicrous as some might think.

In the 21st century, nearly a century after its founding in the 1930s, the institution balances Wisconsin’s tradition of ecological research with public outreach, citizen-science projects, and hosting visitors, whether they want to learn more about prairie ecosystems or just enjoy the scenery.

A 2008 study conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison of inter-district choice in Colorado found that under the policy, poorer and lower performing districts tend to lose students while wealthier and higher performing districts gain them.

The British researchers, working with psychologists from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, found that the 3-year-olds categorized as most impulsive became young adults who were prone to tension and anxiety.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have helped discover a corn variety that could reduce the amount of nitrogen fertilizer farmers need to spread.The tropical variety of corn has been grown in Oaxaca, Mexico for thousands of years. Because the area’s soils have little nitrogen, the corn has adapted over the years, developing a system for taking nitrogen out of the air.

“Insects are novel to the American diet, but they should be considered a potentially helpful food that contains important nutrients and fibers that could have benefits to our overall health, including our gut microbiome,” said the study’s lead author, Valerie Stull. She is a researcher at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

An indigenous variety of corn in Mexico fixes nitrogen from the air instead of getting the nitrogen from synthetic fertilizers. Researchers believe cross-breeding this trait into conventional corn varieties could reduce fertilizer use.

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.