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Category: Research

UW-Madison ‘Kindness Curriculum’ Nurtures Emotional Awareness In Preschoolers

Wisconsin Public Radio

UW-Madison’s Center For Healthy Minds is providing its “Kindness Curriculum” to preschool teachers. Thousands of teachers have requested the curriculum, including Sesame Workshop. The researchers at the Center For Healthy Minds consulted on kindness episodes for the 47th season of “Sesame Street” premiering Sept. 18 on Wisconsin Public Television.

Planting crops by plane; new method for area farmers

WISC-TV 3

Noted: Farms in DeForest, Waunakee, Sun Prairie and Fitchburg are participating in a project to help clean up Dane County lakes. Around nine farms are partnering with Dane County land and water resources department, UW-Extension, Yahara wins, and the natural resources conservation service.

What’s the buzz? Officials helping to strengthen bee populations in Dane County

Wisconsin State Journal

Bees aren’t necessarily welcome at picnics and outdoor events, but they are essential for pollinating crops worth millions of dollars to the Wisconsin economy. To that end, UW-Madison and UW-Extension staff in Dane County are working with the Dane County Environmental Council to increase bee education and get the most out of bee-friendly land use and development.

Fire on the mountain: 2 forests offer clues to Yellowstone’s fate in a warming world

New York Times

What will happen to the forests of Yellowstone if a changing climate means not only old forests burn, but young ones, too? That’s what (former UW graduate student) Brian Harvey and his colleague, Monica Turner, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, are here investigating. Yellowstone’s recent fires offer a rare natural experiment to see how forests regenerate after burning and reburning at short intervals.

UW lab urges hunters to test deer for CWD

Wisconsin Radio Network

The UW-Madison lab that checks deer carcasses for chronic wasting disease says new scientific research shows the importance of testing. Keith Poulsen at the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, says it would be a mistake to not get your deer tested for CWD this fall.

Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Jose: View from Space

TIME

We can now watch Irma and Jose’s stunning fury nearly in real time. Researchers and engineers at the Space and Science Engineering Center at University of Wisconsin-Madison stitched together daytime and nighttime imagery for a full, composite picture of the storms, made available to TIME.

Hawks: Renewed excavations in the Rising Star cave

Medium.com

ur team is underground this month in the Rising Star cave system, in South Africa. Project leader Lee Berger and I, along with several other team members, are doing periodic updates from the site on Twitter and Facebook, with hashtags #Homonaledi, #LesediChamber, and #DinalediChamber.

This Wisconsin floor has some powerful potential

Big Ten Network

Well, if you liked reading about this innovative source of green energy, then you might want to check out University of Wisconsin-Madison engineer Dr. Xudong Wang’s equally astonishing triboelectric nanogenerator, or TENG, technology.

Marshfield study: Kids raised on dairy farms less likely to get allergies, rashes

Wausau Daily Herald

A study of rural children in the Marshfield area suggests that kids raised on dairy farms are much less likely to suffer severe respiratory illnesses, allergies and chronic skin rashes, according to the University of Wisconsin.

Christine Seroogy, associate professor of pediatrics, and James Gern, professor of pediatrics at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, worked with researchers at the Marshfield Clinic on the study.

Next wave breeding

Isthmus

Inside the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery, Madison chef Tory Miller stands over a tiny bamboo serving boat, concentrating as he pipes a dollop of bearnaise to finish off a bite-sized dish.“Tomato,” he says, almost reverently, placing the specimen in front of a hungry dinner guest. But it’s not your standard grocery-variety (or even garden-variety) fruit — it’s from a special breeding line developed as part of UW-Madison’s Seed to Kitchen Collaborative.

The universal cost of sex

Isthmus

Dan Levitis and his wife, Iris, were living in Germany when they lost their first pregnancy. An ocean away from their families, they had few people they could talk to about their loss. Then they had a second miscarriage and were devastated.

UW-Madison Scientist: Nothing In Historical Record Rivals Hurricane Harvey’s Flooding

Wisconsin Public Radio

Hurricane Harvey was a 1-in-1,000-year flood event, according to new calculations by the University of Wisconsin’s Space Science and Engineering Center at UW-Madison. The research scientist who mapped this calculation explains why Harvey’s record shattering rainfall over Southeast Texas and Louisiana was so devastating.

Hip hop/hip hope in the classroom

Wisconsin Public Radio

African American children fail and drop out of school at an alarmingly high rate, but providing them with skilled teachers who bring African American culture into the classroom can reverse that trend.  Gloria Ladson-Billings, an internationally acclaimed scholar of education at UW–Madison credited with the concept of “culturally relevant pedagogy,” discusses hip hop as a transformative educational tool.

Big data will be focus of new UW research institute

Capital Times

The Institute for Foundations in Data Science, which will be part of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, will re-examine the core mathematics, statistics and computer science that make big data science possible. The ultimate mission will be to come up with new ways to more efficiently and effectively use big sets of data.

Why Blue Is the World’s Favorite Color

Artsy

“It turns out, if you look at all of the things that are associated with blue, they’re mostly positive,” explains Karen Schloss, an assistant professor of psychology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s really hard to think of negative blue things. A lot of things that we kind of think of as blue and bad aren’t really that blue.”

Psychedelic drug being looked at to treat PTSD

WISC-TV 3

The Food and Drug Administration has deemed MDMA a “breakthrough therapy” in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, putting it on a fast track for possible approval. MDMA is also known by the street name Ecstasy. “MDMA opens up a space where people feel safe, they feel better about themselves, and they feel better about other people…,” said Dr. Charles Raison, a psychiatrist and member of the scientific advisory board of MAPS, which stands for Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

The Looming Decline of the Public Research University

Washington Monthly

Quoted: “What difference does having a major research university in a place like Wisconsin make?” said University of Wisconsin Chancellor Rebecca Blank. “It’s the future of the state.” If Blank is right, then current trends put that future in doubt for much of the Midwest. Many of these same universities have suffered some of the nation’s deepest cuts to public higher education. Illinois reduced per-student spending by an inflation-adjusted 54 percent between 2008 and last year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The figure was 22 percent in Iowa and Missouri, 21 percent in Michigan, 15 percent in Minnesota and Ohio, and 6 percent in Indiana. While higher education funding increased last year in thirty-eight states, Scott Walker’s 2015–17 budget cut another $250 million from the University of Wisconsin system. The University of Iowa recently had its state appropriation cut by 6 percent, including an unexpected $9 million in the middle of the fiscal year.

The model lake

Isthmus

When Lake Mendota turned the color of a bad Gatorade experiment in June, you should have seen it through Steve Carpenter’s eyes.Carpenter, who is retiring this month after 28 years at the UW Center for Limnology, talks about Lake Mendota with a subtly relaxed sense of time.

E-visits have unintended consequences, new research finds

Digital Commerce 360

Medical “e-visits”—electronic communications between patients and physicians, primarily via secure messaging—have been touted as a low-cost method for doctors and patients to stay in touch without the time and expense involved with office visits. But, so far, they seem to be doing more harm than good, according to new research from the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.