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Category: Research

NIH Abandons Plan to Limit Per-Person Grant Awards

Chronicle of Higher Education

Facing protests from senior scientists, including members of its own advisory board, the National Institutes of Health on Thursday abandoned a plan to help younger researchers by imposing a general three-grant limit.

Phone app helps people recovering from addiction

Isthmus

While she had tried to get sober before, it wasn’t until her doctors treated her disease in several ways that she began recovering. Her treatment regimen includes enrollment in a methadone program, outpatient care and the use of a new smartphone app called A-CHESS, created by a UW-Madison professor.

Addiction CHESS, or A-CHESS, is designed to aid recovery and prevent relapse for people after they leave treatment for substance-use disorders.

On A Cosmic Real Estate Scale, Milky Way Lies In A Sparsely Populated Region

International Business Times

To think of the structure of the universe, and the distribution of matter within it, picture a chunk of Swiss cheese and its holes. Think of all the solid parts as all the invisible and unobservable dark matter and dark energy, while the holes — about 5 percent of the total — contain most visible matter. Add some veins between the holes, and those are like the filaments in space, making up the rest of the visible matter.

UW Hopes To Make Most Of Rediscovered Mosses

Wisconsin Public Radio

A collection of more than 2,000 mosses has been discovered at a University of Wisconsin-Madison building known for its plant specimens. The collection was  found inside a cabinet at Birge Hall, where the Wisconsin State Herbarium is housed.Director Ken Cameron said the mosses were gathered in the 1920s by several people including retired Herbarium curator Lellan Cheney. Cheney, who served as served as curator 1891-1903, died in 1938.

UW-Madison Professor Archiving Podcasts For Future Generations

Wisconsin Public Radio

Jeremy Morris is a futuristic thinker. While some are heralding podcasts as a trendy new medium, Morris is worrying about what will become of them in the future when we may not use iPhones, iPods or MP3s. Morris, an assistant professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, founded PodcastRE, a project that aims to archive podcasts.

Promote research on self-driving vehicles

La Crosse Tribune

The Governor’s Steering Committee on Autonomous and Connected Vehicle Testing and Deployment will advise Walker on how best to advance the testing and operation of self-driving vehicles in Wisconsin. It will include a mix of industry, technology, regulatory and academic members, and build upon the selection of the UW’s Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory as a test bed.

Even the Threat of Budget Cuts Can Hurt U.S. Science

The Atlantic

If the White House has its way, in 2018, 5.8 billion dollars will disappear from the budget of the National Institutes of Health—the largest funder of biomedical research in the U.S. That cut, which was revealed as part of President Trump’s budget proposal last Tuesday, represents 18 percent of the NIH’s budget. It has been described as “a significant blow to medical research” that would “set off a lost generation in American science.”

Bad rap: Madison has a complicated relationship with hip-hop

Capital Times

A local hip-hop-boosting group, along with a University of Wisconsin-Madison sociology researcher … (is) wading into a nexus of music, race, science and politics to undo the damage hip-hop’s reputation has suffered in Madison throughout the years … “Because of the poor relationship the city of Madison has with hip-hop as a whole, and the lack of performance space for so many talented artists, we have taken on this research project that looks at the relationship between music genre and violence, as seen through police calls for service,” reads an initial draft of the study, led by UW-Madison sociology professor Randy Stoecker.

Wisconsin gives autonomous vehicle innovation a lane to drive itself

Wisconsin State Journal

The Governor’s Steering Committee on Autonomous and Connected Vehicle Testing and Deployment will advise Walker on how best to advance the testing and operation of self-driving vehicles in Wisconsin. It will include a mix of industry, technology, regulatory and academic members, and build upon the selection of the UW’s Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory as a test bed.

Lawmakers Show Sympathy for Trump Plan to Squeeze Research Costs

Chronicle of Higher Education

As talk of extreme budget-cutting is again in vogue in Washington, that argument appears to have resonance. But an attempt to reduce research overhead could pose the most serious threat not to well-endowed institutions like Harvard, but to state research universities and cash-strapped private colleges.

At issue are grant payments known as indirect-cost reimbursements. Those are the additional amounts that agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation provide to universities that win research grants, to help cover administrative and facilities costs.

Scientists target air pollution along lake Michigan shoreline

Sheboygan Press

Scientists in Sheboygan will be measuring the area’s air pollution problem by land, air and sea.Sheboygan County has long had the reputation of having some of the worst air quality in the state — but scientists have not been able to pin down exactly way.“Having those high ozone levels along the Lake Michigan shore has been a perplexing science problem for a long time,”  R. Bradley Pierce, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said.

The muriqui, fascinating hippie monkey

Le Monde

In French (use Google Translate): Karen Strier will never forget this January 20, when she returned to the Federal Reserve Feliciano Miguel Abdala, Brazil. The American primatologist had just granted himself a few months’ absence, far from the 1,000 hectares of forest he has been scrutinizing for more than thirty years. (May be behind paywall).

NIH Is Firm on Plan to Limit Per-Person Grant Awards

Chronicle of Higher Education

Despite facing protests, the National Institutes of Health promised Wednesday to move ahead with a plan to impose a general limit of three major grants per researcher, persuaded by data linking quantity to declining effectiveness.

Kindness in the classroom

NBC-15

An ongoing study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds is working to incorporate mindfulness techniques into everyday activities for elementary students.

Kindness in the Classroom

WSAW

An ongoing study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds is working to incorporate mindfulness techniques into everyday activities for elementary students.

The Kindness Curriculum helps students focus on their minds and bodies, while also adding elements of kindness and empathy.

Cranberry research to get a boost in Wisconsin

Wisconsin State Journal

The $1.5 million research station is being paid for through a public-private partnership that includes $750,000 in private funds and $650,000 from the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. The property will include 30 acres of production cranberry beds to generate revenue to help support research, along with another five acres of beds for further research studies by faculty at UW-Madison and the USDA.

Cranberry research to get a boost in Wisconsin

La Crosse Tribune

The $1.5 million research station is being paid for through a public-private partnership that includes $750,000 in private funds and $650,000 from the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. The property will include 30 acres of production cranberry beds to generate revenue to help support research, along with another five acres of beds for further research studies by faculty at UW-Madison and the USDA.

A UW-designed dam removal tool moves data rather than concrete

WisContext

Dam removal is growing in popularity so that fish routes can be restored and they can be removed before they fail and cause harm. But which ones should be removed first? A recent study on barriers in the Great Lakes Basin looked to answer that question with a new tool called Fishwerks. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison developed an online application to help decide which removal project is the best removal project.

These people want you to know climate change isn’t just for liberals

Ars Technica

He doesn’t start with an apocalyptic description of future impacts when he talks to people about climate change, but, for some audiences, University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Environmental Studies Calvin DeWitt does turn to the book of Revelation. “I’ll have a white-out pen in my pocket, and I’ll have them read Revelation chapter 11, verse 18. It’s a description of the sounding of the last trumpet, as you hear in Handel’s ‘Messiah,’ and the end verse says, ‘The time has come for destroying those who destroy the Earth,’” DeWitt told me. “And so, I say, ‘I have a white-out pen here for anyone who would like to correct their Bible.’”

Homo naledi dating could change what we know about evolution

Wired

The discovery of a new human ancestor in 2015 stunned palaeontologists across the globe. Headlines lauded the work for rewriting our history; for filling gaps in the evolutionary record, while others claimed it had the potential to upend everything we know about our cultures and behaviours. This ancestor was dubbed Homo naledi.

Ancient human cousin found in South Africa is surprisingly young

The Verge

Two years ago, scientists announced the discovery of a puzzling new species of early human: Homo naledi. The 15 partial skeletons were uncovered deep inside a cave in South Africa — and featured human-like hands and feet, but surprisingly small brains the size of a gorilla’s (a third the size of modern human’s).