When the Internet goes down, life as the modern American knows it grinds to a halt. Gone are the cute kitten photos and the Facebook status updates—but also gone are the signals telling stoplights to change from green to red, and doctors’ access to online patient records.
Critical portions of America’s internet infrastructure, particularly in New York City, Miami, and Seattle, may be submerged and damaged by rising sea levels—possibly within the next 15 years, according to research presented Monday at a meeting of internet researchers.
You probably didn’t give much thought to how exactly you loaded this webpage. Maybe you clicked a link from Twitter or Facebook and presto, this article popped up on your screen. The internet seems magical and intangible sometimes. But the reality is, you rely on physical, concrete objects — like giant data centers and miles of underground cables — to stay connected.
The fiber optic cables that carry internet and are buried along the coastal United States may be threatened by rising sea levels, a new study has found.
For more than a century, the origin of cosmic rays — fragments of atoms that rain down on the Earth at close to the speed of light — had been one of the great mysteries in science, thwarting the best minds in physics.An international team of scientists (including at UW–Madison) reported Thursday that the likely solution arrived at just after 3:54 p.m. Central Time on Sept. 22, in a scene beyond anything special effects wizards in Hollywood could have imagined.
Luke Zoet is an assistant professor of geoscience with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He says erosion makes bluffs steeper and more prone to small-or medium-scale landslides.Zoet says the university is using instruments called extensometers to gather data on the movement of bluffs experiencing erosion.
From Vitamin D and human embryonic stem cells to blood thinners and new treatment avenues for patients with Alzheimer’s Disease, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been home to numerous scientific advances since its founding in 1849.
The scientific question eluded researchers around the world for more than a century.
The initial detection by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica, and subsequent observations of high energy radiation from the same source by space telescopes and ground-based observatories, indicate such black holes act as the particle accelerators responsible for at least some of those cosmic rays.“The evidence for the observation of the first known source of high-energy neutrinos and cosmic rays is compelling,” said Francis Halzen, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor of physics and the lead scientist for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.
Scientists have finally located a source of the most energetic rays. Starting with a single signal—a flash of light in a detector at the South Pole—and combining it with telescope data from a collaboration of over a thousand people, astrophysicists have traced the origin of some of Earth’s cosmic rays to a blazar, a type of galaxy, 4 billion light years away. “We’ve learned that these active galaxies are responsible for accelerating particles and cosmic rays,” says physicist Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “It’s exciting, no doubt, to have finally nailed the cosmic accelerator,” says the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Francis Halzen, lead scientist with IceCube. The results are reported today in three papers appearing in Scienceand the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Astronomers said the discovery could provide a long sought clue to one of the enduring mysteries of physics and the cosmos. Where does the rain of high-energy particles from space known as cosmic rays come from?
An international team of scientists led by Halzen and other researchers at UW-Madison identified a blazar — a technical term for a galaxy with a massive spinning black hole in its center — as the first known cosmic source for a neutrino detected September 22, 2017.
Noted: Inmates in private prisons appear to serve 4 to 7 percent additional fractions of their sentences, which amounts to 60 to 90 days for the average inmate, according to a paper released by Anita Mukherjee, Ph.D., an assistant professor of actuarial science, risk management and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business.
“Air conditioning saves lives from heat waves,” Jonathan Patz, who directs the University of Wisconsin’s Global Health Institute, told Earther. “But if the electricity to run air conditioners requires coal-fired power plants, then we have a problem.”
According to new research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, increased use of air conditioners may only be making a bad problem even worse.
Wisconsin youth who are transgender, nonbinary and gender expansive/nonconforming, or TNG, say many doctors aren’t aware of their needs, according to a survey by the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
Mike Sussman, who ran the Biotechnology Center for over 21 years, will become director of the Genome Center of Wisconsin, which is in the Biotechnology Center.
An international team of astrophysicists will reveal a “breakthrough” discovery Thursday (July 12), and you can watch the announcement live.The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced in a statement that it will host a news conference Thursday at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) to unveil new “multimessenger astrophysics findings” led by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an NSF-managed facility at the South Pole.
Noted: The intersection of creativity and procrastination gathered mainstream buzz in 2016, when the New York Times published an op-ed by Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, author, and Wharton School of Business professor. In the piece “Why I Taught Myself to Procrastinate,” Grant posits procrastination as a “virtue for creativity” and shares the research of one of his students, Jihae Shin, now a professor at the Wisconsin School of Business.
That is according to a report prepared for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction by graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs.
Susan Paskewitz is the chairwoman of the entomology department at UW-Madison and helped develop the app. She says researchers are collecting data on all types of ticks, but they’re especially interested in nymph data.
Researchers at UW-Madison have developed a new smartphone app to help them understand where ticks are active and how people expose themselves to ticks. The app is being released as Wisconsin faces an ever-increasing number of Lyme disease cases, sparking heightened concern about tick-transmitted diseases.
But that, say scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is killing us, too.It may be more subtle than a heat wave, but the toll air-conditioning takes could have a much deeper, long-term impact.
“Air conditioning saves lives from heat waves,” said Jonathan Patz, a co-author on the study who directs the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute, to Earther. “But if the electricity to run air conditioners requires coal-fired power plants, then we have a problem.”
Noted: Author Ryan J. Owens, J.D., Ph.D., is a political science professor at UW-Madison, a faculty affiliate at the University of Wisconsin School of Law, and the Acting Director of the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership.
One way of tackling this problem is to roll out more air conditioning systems, but according to Professor Jonathan Patz at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this means trading one problem for another.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison forecast as many as a thousand additional deaths annually in the Eastern US alone due to elevated levels of air pollution driven by the increased use of fossil fuels to cool the buildings where humans live and work.
Dawn Dudley, scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, also lead author of the study, said the problem with studies of Zika in humans is they rely on symptomatic infections.
Now, a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has a disturbing new revelation: In a simulation of a three-month summer period, air pollution directly related to fossil fuel burning that powers air conditioning accounts for about 1,000 deaths.
There’s an app for everything — even ticks. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Columbia University are studying how and where Wisconsin residents interact with ticks. They created The Tick App with a two-sided purpose — for research and as a resource.
“We’re always interested in how temperatures behave,” says Matthew Lazzara, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the study’s authors. “In Antarctica, we still haven’t learned a lot of the basics.” His team found conditions need to be just so, in the right spot, to brew up the perfect freeze.
After the endangered species list was created and targeted conservation efforts began, eagle populations recovered. Researchers have found that one of the keys to recovery is protecting the nest of breeding pairs of eagles. Their results were published earlier this year in the Journal of Applied Ecology. Ecologist Benjamin Zuckerberg, an author on that study, explains what it means for the future conservation of eagles and endangered raptors.
Dawn Dudley, senior scientist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and the lead author of the study called the high rate “alarming.” While Dudly believes the true rate of human miscarriage in Zika-infected pregnancies is somewhat lower than what they found in monkeys, she said it’s also likely higher than the 8 percent figure.
But that, say scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is killing us, too.It may be more subtle than a heat wave, but the toll air-conditioning takes could have a much deeper, long-term impact.In a study published in PLOS Medicine this week, the researchers suggest our AC dependency could kill as many as 1,000 more people every year in the eastern U.S. alone. The trouble, they note, is the burden air-conditioning puts on fossil-fuel burning electricity plants.
As many as 1,000 additional people each year along the Eastern U.S. could die from complications due to higher levels of air pollution from increased air conditioning use, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison said in a new study published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Medicine.
Noted: Karen Strier knew something was wrong as soon as she entered the patch of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais where she has been studying primates for 35 years. Instead of the usual deafening roar of howler monkeys, some of the most common monkeys in the region, there was an “eerie silence, like when something is wrong,” says the University of Wisconsin–Madison anthropologist. “It was stunning.” The animals had been silenced by the yellow fever virus, which had wiped out most of the local population of 500 howler monkeys.
Noted: One way of tackling this problem is to roll out more air conditioning systems, but according to Professor Jonathan Patz at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this means trading one problem for another.
Scientists at the UW Department of Pathology and Medicine, along with the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, teamed up with six other primate research centers across the U.S. to collaborate data on how the Zika virus affects pregnancy.
Several hurricanes appear to be moving more slowly, according to new research. This means they are spending increased time over land. This means more local rainfall and dangerous flooding.According to James Kossin, who works at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Center for Weather and Climate (University of Wisconsin–Madison), the speed at which hurricanes track along a paths is slower.
Ophelia Venturelli, a professor of of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her colleagues have been trying to find ways to disentangle the complex relationships between bacteria by investigating how they interact.
A recent study lists South Carolina among a growing number of states where white deaths outpace births. Discrepancies aren’t unusual, and can be based on labeling. The Applied Population Lab study, done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, deals specifically with “non-Hispanic whites.” The state data lists births by mother’s race alone, and only as “white.”
A 2018 report by graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s LaFollette School of Public Affairs found that absent significant investments by the state, such an evaluation would be very difficult.
Noted: The work on McDermott, led by researchers from the University of Wisconsin and UW-Stevens Point and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, is looking at such questions.
Noted: The mosquitoes were gathered and tested by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Entomology.
A team of researchers from Florida International University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Miami, the Syrian Centre for Tobacco Studies, and the University of Pittsburgh selected 279 posts from 11,517 posts tagged hookah or shisha within a four-day period.
Luke Odell is a PhD student researching tornado dynamics at UW-Madison. He pinpointed Montana days in advance based on detailed analysis, during what was otherwise a quiet weather pattern.
In a partnership with UW-Madison’s transportation engineering department, testing has already started for a new technology that would show roadway notifications on the driver’s dashboard.
Noted: Once indoors, I contacted Stanley Temple, the famed UW-Madison ornithologist, for his insights into nesting robins. Temple suggested a better idea: “Let’s discuss how birds defend their nests,” he said. “It’s something I’ve researched and written about.”
“The restlessness expressed today is pretty astonishing,” said Bradley Singer, a geology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the lead author of the study, referring to the rising ground. But “we do not believe that this current astonishing state of unrest is something new.”
Noted: The University of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison is taking things further. Press releases about animal research at other universities usually skate over sensitive information, but UW’s describe injecting monkeys with Ebola virus and performing heart surgery on pigs, for example, and its web pages detail its animal research program. UW also posts its USDA inspection reports online, even after the agency began scrubbing them from its own website in a controversial move last year.
To mark Wisconsin Cheese Day, Gov. Scott Walker had a big announcement in Madison that will help dairy research.
Quoted: Chelsea Nestel, a PhD student specializing in cartography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks of modern map-making in similar terms.
Noted: To determine what that “something” was, Serido and her research partner, professor Soyeon Shim of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, continued to study the same subjects as they advanced through their 20s.
A professor from electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has found an ultra-thin stealth sheet which can hide objects with your warm including human bodies or from infrared light or cameras.
News of the Nassar case prompted leaders at the University of Wisconsin to launch a wide review of their own practices, including safety measures guiding team doctors. Officials declined to share details, saying the study has yet to wrap up.
Metamaterials that cloak people and objects from radar, visible light or infrared are usually thick and heavy, but now engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed an ultrathin, lightweight sheet that absorbs heat signatures and can even present false ones.
Noted: At the University of Wisconsin, a CRISPR antibiotic is being developed to selectively target super-resistant bugs. In the UK, researchers used CRISR gene editing to eliminate malaria in new mosquito strains. And last year Chinese scientists corrected lethal mutations in 3 human embryos.
If there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done, help may be at hand — the days are actually getting longer. For hundreds of millions of years days have been growing longer and if you could travel back in time 1.4 billion years, a day on Earth would be just over 18 hours. That is largely because the moon was a lot closer to Earth and changed the planet’s spin on its axis.
Stem cell pioneer and onetime UW–Madison scientist James “Jamie” Thomson changed history by deriving the first human embryonic stem cell line in 1998.
