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.
Experiments that go according to plan can be useful. But the biggest scientific advances often emerge from those that do not. Such is the case with a study just reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When they began it, Hector DeLuca of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his colleagues had been intending to examine the effects of ultraviolet (UV) light on mice suffering from a rodent version of multiple sclerosis (MS). By the project’s end, however, they had in their hands two substances which may prove valuable drugs against the illness.
Research by the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health found high schoolers who say they were highly-specialized in one sport had an 85% higher chance of lower extremity injuries than multi-sport athletes.
Dr. Mark Burkard, a UW Health oncologist heading up the research, got the idea for the study from Geisler’s remarkable story. After her cancer returned in 1982, she was told she had a 15 percent chance of living five years. But she has withstood recurrences in 2003, 2008 and 2013.
Quoted: “The significance is high because for almost 20 years there have been no real promising developments to alleviate, and certainly not to cure this disease,” said Dr. Emery Bresnick, director of the UW-Madison blood research program.
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.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a big-idea powerhouse.
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.
The U.S. Department of Energy announced Monday the University of Wisconsin-Madison will receive a new, five-year round of funding for its energy research center that has produced 160 patents and spawned five start-up companies in its 10-year history.
Researchers have identified hearing loss, verbal fluency, and hospitalization as new factors that can provide clues about cognitive health and aid in early detection of Alzheimer’s and other dementias.
Old guys who hunt have been stepping up to help the Snapshot Wisconsin project, a booming citizen-based science initiative that’s using trail cameras to document what’s going on in our woodlands and other wild places when we’re not looking.
As U.S. Department of Justice Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller looks into whether President Trump’s campaign assisted Russia in targeting Wisconsin voters with fake news last year, a UW-Madison researcher is working to determine just how often Russia was placing such phony stories here.
A study done by the University of Wisconsin shows that keeping dairy cows ‘udderly’ content can lead to those cows producing more milk. For Five Star Diary in Elk Mound, that’s leading to a few farm upgrades.
“We’ve added sprinklers, we’ve added foggers and a lot of fans,” said Five Star Dairy owner Lee Jensen.
Amasino said some people may be expressing their opposition to monopolies in agriculture by being against the use of GMOs.
“It’s tough being a consumer these days when you’re confronted with all this information and misinformation,” he said. “But there is no question that certain technologies when deployed successfully by a company give that company a greater share of the market.”
Adena Rissman studies the ways human interaction with ecological systems can be harmonious or ruinous. As part of a $4.9 million National Science Foundation project, the UW-Madison professor delved into people’s attitudes about government policies that rely on voluntary anti-pollution measures and those policies’ failure to rid lakes of unnatural bacteria, algae and weed growth.
If you think scientists have it bad today, spare a thought for the early philosophers – some even got burnt for heresy. Philosopher Steven Nadler and graphic artist Ben Nadler talk us through their book, “Heretics!”
Bears, they’re just like us. And I’m not referring to a subset of hairy humans, but to some furry critters in Wisconsin whose diets contain a staggering amount of junk food. Seriously!
We talk to Jake Vander Zanden, an expert about the ongoing efforts to curtail the spread of Zebra mussels in Wisconsin lakes.
A chunk of ice the size of Delaware broke off from the Antarctic Peninsula this week. We’ll learn about why this happened and what it means for climate change around the world and close to home in Wisconsin.
Larva means never having to say you’re sorry. Although I’m sure caterpillars are at least slightly apologetic when they eat a plant that releases a chemical that turns them into cannibals — and then eat their pals.
The arms race between insects that eat plants and plants, has had millions of years to evolve some pretty amazing interactions. Not least the tomato plant that produces chemicals that make caterpillars turn into cannibals.
The DNR began working on the study in 2014 with help from the UW-Madison, and financial support from NASA and the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Program.
House Republicans issued a fiscal 2018 budget plan on Wednesday that rejects the Trump administration’s proposal to eliminate or sharply cut so-called indirect-cost payments to universities for medical research.
‘Udder’ happiness is the best way to get more milk from cows, that’s according to a new study by the University of Wisconsin.
It emphasizes the importance of healthy environments for cows and the impact of happiness on milk production.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Morgridge Institute for Research have taken the first step toward developing laboratory-made arteries that could eventually be used to help combat heart disease.
MADISON, WI — There’s nothing like a spa day to peel away layers of stress and reveal a happier, more productive you. It turns out deep tissue massages and other relaxing treatments are good for dairy cows, too, according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison initiative that focuses on making dairy cows happier so they will produce more milk.
Perhaps you’ve heard that millennials are obsessed with plants. For a long time I remained unimpressed, considering plants can’t make sound, attack robbers, or even move. But I was wrong. Plants can do something beyond the abilities of mere cats*, dogs, and birds: they secrete a chemical that makes the caterpillars that eat them eat each other instead.
If you’re a hungry caterpillar and you’ve got a choice between eating a plant or another caterpillar, which do you chose?
Researchers at a Wisconsin university have been awarded a $1 million grant to develop a tool to find and fix algorithmic bias.
Sauk City farmer has seen milk production increase.
“I think it’s really important that we give them the spa treatment,” said Nigel Cook, who has directed the Dairyland Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine since 2010.
Letter to the editor: Oscar Mayer allowed UW departments to collect tissue samples that led to innovation. An example was the use of pig heart valves to pioneer “bird cage” heart valves for humans. The company’s unpublished discoveries and inventions have been applied throughout the meat industry.
In a step toward one of stem cell science’s chief goals, UW-Madison researchers have grown functional human artery cells that helped lab mice survive heart attacks.
It is not unusual for insect pests to feast on each other as well as on their staple veg, but it’s now been shown that tomato plants can team up to directly push caterpillars into cannibalism.
Caterpillars turn into cannibals and eat each other when plants deploy defensive chemicals to make their foliage less appetising, research has revealed.
Plants are often seen as taking a passive role in their environments, just hanging out and soaking up the sunlight. But that impression is wrong—plants have many sophisticated ways of influencing their environment, and other plants and animals in it. And this includes leading herbivores down the garden path to cannibalism.
In the caterpillar-versus-plant fight, the winner might seem obvious. One side sits motionless in the sun, while the other feasts on it. But the tomato plant has a nefarious defence strategy. In some encounters with herbivores, it winds up relatively unscathed, while the caterpillars wind up eating each other.
Some plants have been found to use nature’s dog-eat-dog world to their advantage, forcing herbivores to become cannibals when the plants feel threatened by a caterpillar’s endless appetite.
LAKE ALFRED, FLORIDA — Put expensive high-tech scientific equipment in a former citrus packing house more than 60 years old, throw in an overworked air conditioner, a corroding foundation, and the sticky Central Florida climate, and you’ve got problems.
Authors of an updated study of wolf threats to Wisconsin livestock say they have a proven way to lower the risk of animal deaths. University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have tested a map they put out six years ago that showed verified reports of where grey wolves attacked livestock in the state. The updated findings show that “risk map” predicted the geographic area of about 90 percent of subsequent attacks.
Many people complain about the people they work with sometimes, but Hannah Black’s co-workers are a bunch of monkeys, literally. The Waunakee woman looks after the primates at the UW-Madison’s Harlow Primate Lab, feeding them and hosing down their cages.
In March, the rusty patched bumble bee was listed as an endangered species.One of the places this species is still found is right here in Madison. A visiting bee expert from California found a rusty patched bumble bee at the UW Arboretum in 2010, says Susan Carpenter, a native plant gardener there. Now the organization has a group of volunteers keeping an eye out for this species, as well as the 11 other bumble bee species found on the 1,200 acres.
Scientists at a Wisconsin university have created a mineral coating that mimics bone and keeps protein-based drugs more stable.
The three-year study, involving 58 colonies of the grassland rodents in seven Western states, tested a vaccine developed at UW-Madison and the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center on Madison’s West Side.
Physicist Usama Hussain laughed uncomfortably every time the conversation even got close to the question, “Do you look for nothing?” His professors would kill him if they heard him agree with that. After all, he’s technically looking for a brand new particle that may or may not exist, with the hopes that it might help explain some of the Universe’s weirdness.
Stagakis and Wojcik set out to create an ice cream bar that would stand out in the industry, and for fine tuning, the partners took their recipe to the UW-Madison Dairy Science Department to make sure the product met the standards they were looking for.
UW-Madison scientists, inspired by proteins found intact in centuries-old human bones, created a mineral coating that mimics bone and appears to keep proteins stable.
Prairie dogs with a taste for peanut butter, scientists reported recently, can now be vaccinated against plague — the Black Death that killed much of Europe centuries ago.
It’s that time of year again where things tend to go boom! We’ll hear from a UW-Madison chemistry professor about the science behind fireworks.
