Category: Research

We hear from Paula Niedenthal, a UW-Madison professor about a new smile study that may help us decipher what a person’s smile really means.

Three years ago, the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association put new rules into play to limit contact in high school football practice. A University of Wisconsin-Madison study showed it’s working. Concussions were more than twice as high in the two seasons before the rule change.

It happens to all of us: you’re out shopping for a gift and you find something you like so much you want to get it for yourself too, but you don’t buy two because the maxim “it’s better to give than to receive” was drilled into your head at an early age. If the scenario is familiar, I have good news for you: a new study indicates it might be better for everyone for you to buy that gift — and have it too.

A UW-Madison professor is headed to Washington to write a secret history of the nation’s war against terrorism for the Pentagon.

All life on our planet, to some degree, evolves over time. Think of the furry land mammals that slipped into the water to catch a fish and surfaced – albeit millions of years later – as modern whales.

Baits often consist of high-calorie foods like meat, candy or cookies. MacFarland, along with researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sampled bear bait and native foods in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest for the study. They then compared those samples to tissues taken from black bears during the 2011-2013 hunting seasons.

Scores of Chicagoans and suburbanites retreat from the dog days of summer by heading to bucolic vacation spots around Lake Michigan.

Noted: “The hope would have been that by targeting this, you could especially capture some of the people who early on fall off and get them to keep going for longer,” said Justin Sydnor, one of the report’s authors and a risk-management and insurance professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “These incentive programs did increase slightly how often people went, but only by about one visit, and then it really has no lasting impact.”

“If passing the virus by casual contact were easy, I think we would see a lot more of what we would call secondary transmission in a place like the United States,” said lead researcher Tom Friedrich, from the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Scientists have cracked the science behind one of our most common facial expressions – the smile. They say the distinction between sincere and fake smiles that is often made is not entirely accurate.

If your only exposure to archaeology is watching the Indiana Jones movies, than let us quickly disabuse you of the notion that archaeologists spend their days dodging bullets and nabbing ancient idols.Archaeology is dirty work. The researchers that dedicate themselves to the discipline are a dusty sort, armed with an array of trowels, brushes and other tools for unearthing long-lost artifacts.It’s that kind of gritty, grimy, sweaty archaeology that’s a hallmark of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Archaeology Field School at Aztalan State Park.

It takes a hookworm four to six weeks to travel through the human body and reach the gut, where it latches onto the small intestine and sucks blood to sustain itself.

There are three distinct types of smile, a new study has revealed. People switch between ’reward’, ’affiliation’ and ’dominance’ smiles, using different facial muscle combinations to make them, according to researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In 2013, the Wisconsin’s wine industry supported more than 700 jobs statewide, generating about $151 million in sales and another $9 million in state and local taxes, according to a UW-Madison Extension study about the impact of the industry.

Researchers at the Upper Midwestern Center of Excellence in Vector Borne Diseases, a CDC-funded center to increase surveillance efforts in the Midwest, have identified three individuals of the mosquito, Aedes albopictus, in Wisconsin for the first time, according to a press release.

B. Lynn Allen-Hoffmann was already growing human skin in an organotypic culture when she met the burn doctor who would change everything. The department of pathology and laboratory medicine faculty researcher and professor had been at UW–Madison 15 years when she made the serendipitous discovery that would ultimately lead to Stratatech, the Madison-based skin regeneration company she founded in 2000.

Look around you and imagine: All you can see—rustling birch leaves, purring cat, your hand against your knee—is less than 5 percent of what’s actually there.

The Badgerloop Pod looks sort of like the DeLorean from “Back to the Future,” winged doors stretched open to the sky.

Two months after mammary gland physiologist Laura Hernandez arrived at UW–Madison in 2011 to work on making dairy cows healthier, her daughter was born.

It’s been 15 years since UW–Madison College of Engineering emeritus research professor David Gustafson, who is not an addict or alcoholic, checked himself into rehab to better understand what patients go through. The end result of his Center for Health Enhancement Systems Studies team’s work was A-CHESS, a revolutionary smartphone app designed to aid people in recovery that today has 6,000 users and is a finalist in Harvard’s 2017 Innovations in American Government Awards. Now, he has set his sights on helping a population he says suffers from similar issues of isolation and loneliness: senior citizens.

All researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison needed to do the trick was a splash of water in a black cup and a Popsicle stick for the insect to lay its eggs on.

Stem cells used to protect respiratory function.

Jim Tinjum, an avid bicyclist and professor of energy engineering and sustainability at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is in the middle of a 1,250-mile biking trip dedicated to promoting wind energy.

In the wake of the Zika outbreak researchers at the UW Medical Entomology lab have been working for the past year trying to find this bug.

Graduate students from the University of Wisconsin have helped bring a little piece of Norwegian history to life in Mount Horeb.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin Medical Entomology Laboratory and health officials from the Department of Health Services and Public Health Madison-Dane County announced Monday that the Aedes albopictus mosquito was found in Dane County.

A UW-Madison research center that has used the university’s largest-ever federal grant to develop ethanol technology over the past decade will shift its focus to other alternative fuels after winning another major award from the U.S. Department of Energy.

“What we’ve discovered here is there are aspects of language that are affected earlier than we thought,” before or at the same time that memory problems emerge, said one study leader, Sterling Johnson of UW-Madison.