A 2014 study by University of Wisconsin pediatrician Barbara Knox and colleagues found that in 38 cases of severe child abuse, 47 percent of parents had never enrolled their children in school or pulled their youngsters out when abuse was suspected and told authorities they were home schooling.
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education, which advocates for tougher homeschool regulation, has a graphic database of homeschool abuses, from starved children to teenagers locked in cages. A 2014 study of extreme child abuse conducted by a University of Wisconsin pediatrician and five colleagues found that in nearly half of the school-age cases, the abusers had pulled their children out of classes to homeschool; another 29 percent had never even enrolled their children in school.
New research suggests warmer water in Lake Michigan could mean more bird deaths along the shoreline. The study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and U.S. Geological Survey found warmer water could favor the growth of algae with toxins that are killing off birds.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Energy Institute and a national nonprofit called The American Jobs Project have issued the look at job growth in what’s called the advanced energy sector — think of products like energy-conserving water heaters and thermostats.
New research suggests warmer water in Lake Michigan could mean more bird deaths along the shoreline. The study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and U.S. Geological Survey found warmer water could favor the growth of algae with toxins that are killing off birds.
There’s no known way to eradicate the invasive species called “jumping worms” when they make their way into a large area, a UW-Madison Arboretum ecologist said, but there also isn’t definitive proof that the worms would harm local vegetation.
“Young adults aren’t necessarily moving to Wisconsin, they’re going to move to a particular community in Wisconsin,” said Randy Stoecker, a sociologist who works with the University of Wisconsin-Extension Center for Community and Economic Development. The questions become very local, he said.
Over two-and-a-half decades later, it’s being hailed as an unqualified success. On Tuesday, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey announced in the Journal of Applied Ecology that bald eagle populations at Voyageurs have been tremendously rehabilitated to stable numbers thanks to nest protection. Collected data in reveals that the breeding population of these birds has risen from 10 pairs in 1991 to 48 pairs in 2016.
Scientists at the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies looked at 230 verified wolf attacks on livestock in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan from 1998 through 2014.
This is not the first time a professor has faced controversy because of their courses or lesson plans. In May, student protesters shut down a sociology class at Northwestern University after a professor invited both an Immigration and Customs Enforcement public relations officer and an undocumented immigrant to speak in back-to-back lessons. Last year, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison started teaching a course titled “The Problem of Whiteness,” prompting complaints from a Republican lawmaker in the state, who called on the university to discontinue the class. The school defended the course and is offering it again this semester.
A new report shows an invasive species found in the UW-Madison Arboretum is spreading, but it’s had a limited effect so far.
Although the result is most relevant to large, undisturbed habitat like Voyageurs, “the model can be used for other raptors, in other places, regardless of the level of disturbance,” says Zuckerberg. “Long-term monitoring data is really hard to fund, but it’s critical for conservation. This is a perfect example of the benefits of collecting data in a standardized way over a long period of time.”
Wisconsin researchers issued a paper Wednesday that questions whether governments should kill wolves that are attacking livestock. Scientists at the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies looked at 230 verified wolf attacks on livestock in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan from 1998 through 2014.
The project is led by Department of Natural Resources staff in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UW-Extension.
Madison is going to be at the forefront of new transportation technology.
A different approach to the universal vaccine is under way at FluGen, a biotech firm in Madison, Wisconsin. Backed by both government and VC funding, the company is working with technology first discovered at the University of Wisconsin-Madison by Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka and Dr. Gabriele Neumann and exclusively licensed to FluGen. “Our vaccine, called RedeeFlu, is based on a premise that says what happens if you take a [naturally occurring] ’wild type’ of flu virus and modify it to infect the human body but don’t allow it to replicate and cause illness,” said Boyd Clarke, executive chairman of FluGen. (Coincidentally, his maternal grandfather died in the 1918 pandemic.)
In 1960, he move to the US for a role at the Institute for Enzyme Research in the University of Wisconsin. It was there that he made his Nobel-worthy discovery and became a naturalized American citizen. In 1970, Khorana joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Alfred P. Sloan professor of biology and chemistry, the position he held until he died on Nov. 9, 2011 at age 89.
Khorana went on to do research at universities around the world, including Canada and the United States. In 1968, he and two other researchers at the University of Wisconsin – Madison earned the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
In the words of Alfred W McCoy, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of a new book, In the Shadows of the American Century, “Afghanistan is the world’s first true narco-state – a country where illicit drugs dominate the economy, define political choices and determine the fate of foreign interventions.”
It celebrates the 96th birthday of Har Gobind Khorana, an Indian-American biochemist whose passion for science started under a tree in the small village of Raipur, India, and grew into Nobel Prize-winning research on nucleotides and genes while at UW-Madison.
Born in 1922 as the youngest of five children in a rural village that is now part of eastern Pakistan, Khorana learned to read and write with help from his father, according to the Nobel Prize’s biography of the biochemist. With a number of scholarships, Khorana went on to earn a doctorate in organic chemistry in 1948. He conducted his Nobel Prize-winning research on nucleotides at the University of Wisconsin, and he later became the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Parkside draws much of its student population from regional school districts, Ducoffe said. The number of people graduating from high schools in Wisconsin has been relatively flat since at least 2012, according to the Applied Population Laboratory at UW-Madison. The trend is projected to continue.
After 16 years and more than $1 trillion, this Guardian piece argues western intervention has resulted in Afghanistan becoming the world’s first true narco-state. “Washington’s massive military juggernaut has been stopped in its steel tracks by a small pink flower – the opium poppy,” Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Alfred W McCoy, writes. “Throughout its three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium – and suffered when they failed to complement it.” In this piece, McCoy outlines how the heroin trade explains the US-UK failure in Afghanistan.
It’s called “digital self-harm,” and its rates are similar to traditional means of self-harm, such as cutting or burning, researchers say.The study, led by Justin Patchin, professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, found that 6 percent of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 engage in digital self-harm.
Alan Attie, whose University of Wisconsin lab studies the genetic and biochemical processes underlying genetics, called it “beautiful and elegant work.””An exciting development in the diabetes field is the discovery of extraordinary plasticity in alpha and beta cells,” he told Gizmodo. “Work such as that from the Gittes Lab demonstrates the way in which this plasticity can be harnessed for therapeutic purposes.”
More than half of hunters treated for falls from tree stands at UW Hospital suffered one or more spinal fractures, including at least five who had paralyzing injuries, a new study says.
Noted: “Wisconsin is part of the pattern of the Upper Midwest,” said Egan-Robertson. “The states in this area are generally growing quite slowly. A lot of that is due to migration in the country; its been a long-term pattern for decades. There tends to be more movement out of the Midwest and northeast states into the south and western states.”
If you walk the trails of the UW-Madison Arboretum this winter, you may cross paths with Karen Oberhauser. The Arboretum’s new director is on a mission to get to know every inch of the 1,700-acre facility, which includes tall grass prairies, savannas, wetlands, forests and gardens.
Providing farmers with unbiased performance comparisons of hybrid seed corn for both grain and silage available in Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin-Extension and the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agriculture and Life Sciences recently released the 2017 hybrid performance trials.
Quoted: “Risk of heart disease, heart attack or stroke goes down after six to 12 months after quitting smoking, we see the blood vessels relax as quickly as two weeks after quitting smoking, risk of lung disease, which there’s a whole range of lung disease that smoking effects improves within two to four weeks as well,” UW cardiologist Dr. James Stein said.
For the next few months, University of Wisconsin professor Simon Gilroy will have an extension of his lab that is sky high. Well, actually, it will be more than sky high; it will be 254 miles above the surface of the earth and travelling at a rate of 4.76 miles per second. And his research assistants will be the crew of the International Space Station.
Up to 1,000 smokers from the Madison and Milwaukee areas are being sought for a study of whether using a pill and a patch together, or taking the pill twice as long as usual, makes it easier for people to quit smoking.
Four years ago, Inda Lampkins, a 42-year-old Milwaukee mother diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, took one of the most difficult and most important steps to improve her health. She quit smoking.
“This is the culmination of decades of thoughts, wishes to have him have a proper burial,” said Dr. Ryan Wubben, a member of UW-Madison’s Missing in Action Recovery and Identification Project and director of UW Med Flight. “It was an incredibly powerful and meaningful moment.”
Since time immemorial, humans have had a knack for being complete and utter dicks to the other animals we share our planet with. Often, we even manage to screw things up for other species without meaning to. A study published earlier this month in the journal of Emerging Infectious Disease has retroactively uncovered one such incident: That time we gave a town of chimpanzees a cold bug that ultimately left five dead, including an adorable 2-year-old baby named Betty (pictured above).
If humans eventually travel to Mars and beyond, scientists must figure out how to feed them.
Having ethnically diverse peers can help students learn about other cultures. But according to a study co-authored by a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor, students with diverse peers also had higher grades.
The Great Lakes are shown sparkling in the moonlight under frosty skies in a satellite image being shared by a science cooperative at the University of Wisconsin.
There isn’t enough evidence to claim that Zika virus causes abnormally small heads in babies of infected mothers, according to a UW-Madison study that challenges government findings.
Five healthy chimpanzees in Uganda that died following a mysterious respiratory disease outbreak in 2013 were actually killed by a common human cold virus, scientists now say. The deaths in the small chimpanzee community followed an “explosive outbreak of severe coughing and sneezing,” according to study author Dr. Tony Goldberg, a professor with the University of Wisconsin’s School of Veterinary Medicine.
Five healthy chimpanzees in Uganda that died following a mysterious respiratory disease outbreak in 2013 were actually killed by a common human cold virus, scientists now say.
The Lost Worlds Revisited team has been reflecting on a bumper twelve months of palaeontological discoveries. Overwhelmed with choice, we also asked on Twitter for other people’s favourite fossil finds of 2017. So here is a combination of those fossiliferous suggestions, alongside some of our personal favourites. Enjoy!
John Valley, a UW–Madison geoscientist, and UCLA paleobiologist William Schopf have analyzed 3.5-billion-year-old microscopic fossils encased in Australian rocks and found they do indeed represent ancient microbes — ones potentially so complex that life on our planet must have originated some 500 million years earlier.
The end of the year is a time of holiday gift giving, and finding just the right gift can sometimes feel like an impossible task. But folks at an animal eyeball lab say that a gift they’ve just received, partly thanks to NPR, has made this the “best Christmas ever.”
The project began in the fall of 2016, and although it’s only in the first year of a 3- to 4-year monitoring effort, the project — which is an expansion of an existing project between the National Park Service and University of Wisconsin-Madison to monitor the wildlife of the broader Apostle Islands — has already discovered some interesting differences between the islands, he said.
Events, including Lily’s Luaus held each January since 2009, have raised more than $1.2 million. About $450,000 has been given out in grants and fellowships. Another $100,000 grant will be awarded at the next Lily’s Luau, scheduled for Jan. 20 at UW-Madison’s Union South.
The experiment was installed on the space station Wednesday by astronaut Scott Tingle. Botanists Simon Gilroy, Sarah Swanson and Richard Barker watched a live stream from space, and held their breath as Tingle placed petri dishes in a growth chamber under LED lights.
“The difference in carbon isotope ratios correlate with their shapes,” said John Valley, professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the study. “Their C-13-to-C-12 ratios are characteristic of biology and metabolic function.”
“The difference in carbon isotope ratios correlate with their shapes,” said John Valley, professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the study. “Their C-13-to-C-12 ratios are characteristic of biology and metabolic function.”
Noted: The Applied Population Laboratory is a group of researchers and outreach professionals within the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison which provides enrollment projections. Many factors go into student population counts, according to Kemp, but births and migration — families moving from one district to another — are the two main ones.
Some scientists have questioned whether the fossils were just minerals. But researchers from UW-Madison and the University of California, Los Angeles have used a hi-tech device called a secondary mass ion spectrometer (SIMS) to determine the fossils are indeed ancient bacteria and microbes.John Valley. Image courtesy of William Graf/University of Wisconsin-MadisonUW-Madison geology professor John Valley co-led the study.
Just look at the work done by Badgerloop, a student-run hyperloop team out of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The group’s maglev design uses Halbach arrays in a novel fashion, says technical director Justin Williams, allowing for passive movement, as opposed to superconducting magnets that require a flow of electricity to work. It could significantly reduce the amount of energy required to propel a levitating train. The team won an innovation award at Elon Musk’s hyperloop competition in January.
The Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance is sponsoring the initiative with support from UW-Madison, UW-Extension and the Department of Natural Resources.
A team of botanists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has sent seeds to the International Space Station to learn more about how plants grow in space. The seeds were delivered to the space station by a SpaceX Dragon capsule launched by a reused Falcon rocket Friday.
One bill would ban the use of aborted fetal tissue for research or any other purpose. A coalition supporting that proposal includes the Wisconsin Catholic Conference, Wisconsin Family Action, Wisconsin Right to Life and Pro-Life Wisconsin. UW-Madison has opposed the measure.
If humans eventually travel to Mars and beyond, scientists must figure out how to feed them.
The federal government announced on Tuesday that it is lifting a three-year moratorium on funding controversial research that involves genetically altering viruses in ways that could make them more contagious, more deadly, or both — and that critics say risks triggering a catastrophic pandemic.
More than 3 years after imposing a moratorium on U.S. funding for certain studies with dangerous viruses, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, today lifted this so-called “pause” and announced a new plan for reviewing such research. But federal officials haven’t yet decided the fate of a handful of studies on influenza and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) that were put on hold in October 2014.
Listen, it would be easy to make a joke about how so many of us know little about the world and its history from before we were born…
