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…
Life on Earth is, at the very least, about 3.5 billion years old. That’s what researchers at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin–Madison have determined through analysis of microscopic fossils found in a rock in Western Australia.
University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists have helped confirm that tiny fossils detected in an Australian rock are the oldest fossils ever found.
Life on Earth is, at the very least, about 3.5 billion years old. That’s what researchers at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin–Madison have determined through analysis of microscopic fossils found in a rock in Western Australia.
“People are really interested in when life on Earth first emerged,” John W. Valley, a professor of geoscience at University of Wisconsin-Madison and author on the study told said in a statement. “This study was 10 times more time-consuming and more difficult than I first imagined, but it came to fruition because of many dedicated people who have been excited about this since day one … I think a lot more microfossil analyses will be made on samples of Earth and possibly from other planetary bodies.”
Take that survey on voter suppression in Wisconsin. Kenneth Mayer, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was the lead researcher on a project that sent surveys to 2,400 people in two counties who hadn’t voted in the 2016 election, then published the results as a press release. Twelve percent of people replied to the survey, and by extrapolating those 288 responses to all people in those counties who were registered to vote but did not, Mayer’s team estimated that between 11,000 and 23,000 Wisconsinites could have been deterred from voting because of the state’s ID law.
To the PI, failure is the albatross that hangs around one’s professional neck. The PI in this case is Francis Halzen, of the University of Wisconsin, an “oracular” presence, Mr. Bowen tells us, whose formidable intellect gushes forth in scientific forums: “Ideas splashed across his mind so fast that his mouth couldn’t keep up.”
Also recently published, by American Behavioral Scientist, is a new paper on state-based performance funding by Nick Hillman, an associate professor of education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who has published several papers on the issue.Hillman’s new study found equity problems with performance funding.
The result has made been made possible after nearly two decades of research by a group led by Dr. Aseem Ansari, a scientist based at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, U.S. Scientists from the Delhi-based CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) contributed to the research by testing the efficacy of the molecule in blood cells drawn from a dozen FA patients at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi.
“This was an explosive outbreak of severe coughing and sneezing,” says Tony Goldberg, a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine who studied the outbreak.
University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Ken Mayer released results of a study this fall that found changes to the state’s voter ID law led to enormous confusion and deterred thousands from voting.
Studies of DNA from living Africans, and from the 2,000-year-old African boy, so far indicate that at least several branches of Homo— some not yet identified by fossils — existed in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago, says paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
One morning seven years ago, Tony Goldberg was working in the tropical forests of Uganda’s Kibale National Park, when a colleague arrived at his research station with two students in tow. They were searching for bats. Goldberg, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of epidemiology, had been visiting the station for several years, long enough to have noticed the jet-black figures that fluttered away from the kitchen building whenever he disturbed their daytime sleep.
In partnership with the Waisman Center at UW-Madison, he’s showcasing his line of greeting and holiday cards, and they are on sale this holiday season.
UW–Madison pathobiological science professor Tony Goldberg a team of scientists working with chimps in Kibale National Park in Uganda have found that they can catch the common cold from humans — and don’t have any immunity. Many of the chimps developed respiratory problems, and some died.
Researchers from Iowa State University, the University of Iowa and the University of Wisconsin-Madison—who are all affiliated with Iowa State’s Nanovaccine Institute—have collaborated on a research project to develop and test whether a new nanovaccine could be a better way to fight the flu virus.
A new study out of the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention at the University of Wisconsin shows even small, monetary incentives can help some quit smoking.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers are challenging the long-thought idea that only a woman’s ovaries produce estrogen, making doctors rethink how ovulation works.
If you’re reading this story on a cell phone, tablet or laptop, the technology in your hand is thanks to the University of Wisconsin alum’s startling invention 70 years ago Saturday.
Kathy Cramer, the University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor best known for “The Politics of Resentment,” her 2016 book exploring discontent among rural voters, is headed back to research after a stint leading the Morgridge Center for Public Service.
Studies of DNA from living Africans, and from the 2,000-year-old African boy, so far indicate that at least several branches of Homo — some not yet identified by fossils — existed in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago, says paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a member of the H. naledi team who refrains from classifying Jebel Irhoud individuals as H. sapiens.
Understanding how corals use this amorphous phase to construct their skeletons presents a challenge: scientists only have a short window to observe what’s happening at the cellular level before the coral skeleton crystalizes and assumes its final, solid form.This is why Mass teamed up with physicist Pupa Gilbert, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin, to look at fresh samples of hood coral polyps, Stylophora pistillata, using powerful X-ray imaging from the Advanced Light Source at Berkley. Their findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in August.
A Republican member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission wants to see all the data that went into a University of Wisconsin professor’s survey that found nearly 17,000 people didn’t cast a ballot because of the state’s voter identification law.
When Charles Konsitzke and Dhanu Shanmuganayagam first met, they were both just trying to get some peace and quiet. It was early 2014, and they were representing the University of Wisconsin-Madison at a fancy event to promote the university’s research to local politicians. After hours of talking to senators, Shanmuganayagam was fried, and went for a walk to clear his head. That’s when he bumped into Konsitzke, an administrator at the University of Wisconsin’s Biotechnology Center. They introduced themselves, and discussed their work. Shanmuganayagam said that he ran a facility that rears miniature pigs, which are genetically engineered to carry mutations found in human genetic disorders. Scientists can study the mini-pigs to better understand those diseases.
At the University of Wisconsin alone, 38 researchers are working on AI-related projects.
For those who are not poor, remember that poverty and homelessness are not issues afflicting faceless people in some far-away place, but friends and classmates who we see every day. As a study from the Wisconsin HOPE Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison remarks, “Contrary to popular expectations, there appears to be very little geographic variation in hunger and homelessness among community college students. Basic needs insecurity does not seem to be restricted to community colleges in urban areas or to those with high proportions of Pell Grant recipients, and is prevalent in all regions of the country.”Homelessness is everywhere, and we as a community need better recognize the extent to which it affects students.
Temperatures are rising in the Himalayan yak range, with a projected mean annual temperature increase of between 2.2 and 3.3 degrees C by 2050. A University of Wisconsin-Madison study in 2014 found that in the eastern Tibetan Plateau, daily low temperatures have increased in the past 24 years, and daily high temperatures have increased at a rate of 5 degrees C over a period of 100 years.
Allison Stegner, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studies packrat middens in the Bear’s Ears national monument. That might sound cute, but the research involves anything but fuzzy rodent gloves. These small mammals collect carnivore bones, coyote poop, and the regurgitations of raptors and owls. “It’s really charming,” says Stegner.
Stegner says that oil and gas mining pose a threat to the rare fossil beds in Bear’s Ears, which shed light on how different species once interacted. “I have no problem with multi-use land in any way, but I do have a problem with giving over this incredible place, that is so important culturally and scientifically, to [serve] the interests of a few people,” she says.
