The Discovery Channel and movies such as “Twister” turn storm chasers into folk heroes, so it’s only right that Hollywood make heroes of UW-Madison professor Susan Paskewitz and her crews for fearlessly hunting Wisconsin’s disease-spreading deer ticks.
To put it in simple terms, the Wisconsin H-Alpha Mapper, better known as WHAM, is a high-powered instrument used for studying the sky.
Noted: UW Health plans to start offering corneal cross-linking by July, spokeswoman Emily Kumlien said. Unity Health Insurance will cover it there, spokeswoman Jennifer Dinehart said.
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.’”
Last winter’s cold conditions contributed a further influx of road salt into the USA’s lakes. New evidence suggests that these environments are suffering from increased salinity
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.
John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Marina Elliott of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and their colleagues describe 131 new H. naledi specimens representing at least three individuals from another part of the cave system, the Lesedi Chamber, located about 100 meters from the Dinaledi Chamber.
A new study reveals some startling findings when your child spends too much time on the iPad.
When bones of a new human species were found deep in a South Africa cave a few years ago, they looked 2 million years old.
It makes sense that the more we run our air conditioners during the heat of the summer, the more pollution we put into the air. But now scientists have figured out exactly how much more.
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).
Far in the back of a twisty, narrow cave in South Africa lie the remains of three pre-humans with small heads and clever hands.
A team of scientists from around the world led by a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor has found a second chamber with fossils of a species related to humans, the Homo naledi.
A multiyear effort coordinated by a UW-Madison professor to painstakingly excavate thousands of fossils from a cave in South Africa has now assembled one of the most complete skeletons of a near-human creature ever found.
A year and a half after adding a puzzling new member to the human family tree, a team of researchers working in South Africa have offered an additional twist: the species is far younger than its bizarrely primitive body would suggest, and may have shared the landscape with early Homo sapiens.
JOHANNESBURG — A species belonging to the human family tree whose remnants were first discovered in a South African cave in 2013 lived several hundred thousand years ago, indicating that the creature was alive at the same time as the first humans in Africa, scientists said Tuesday.
A new haul of ancient human remains has been described from an important cave site in South Africa.
Just as a high-profile expedition to retrieve fossils of human ancestors from deep within a cave system in South Africa was getting underway in 2013, two spelunkers pulled aside paleoanthropologist Lee Berger. They had found what looked like an ancient thigh bone in a completely different cave. “Can we go get it?” they asked.
Deep within the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa, archaeologists have discovered the remains of at least three Hominin naledi.
Africa’s richest fossil hominin site has revealed more of its treasure. It’s been a year and a half since scientists announced that a new hominin species, which they called Homo naledi, had been discovered in the Rising Star Cave outside Johannesburg.
Not even two months ago, the Trump administration shocked the biomedical research community by proposing an 18-percent cut to the budget of the National Institutes of Health.
Homo naledi, a strange new species of human cousin found in South Africa two years ago, was unlike anything scientists had ever seen. Discovered deep in the heart of a treacherous cave system — as if they’d been placed there deliberately — were 15 ancient skeletons that showed a confusing patchwork of features. Some aspects seemed modern, almost human. But their brains were as small as a gorilla’s, suggesting Homo naledi was incredibly primitive. The species was an enigma.
On a cloudy day in February, Will Cox pointed to a pair of news photos that prompted a room of University of Wisconsin, Madison, graduate students to shift in their seats. In one image, a young African American man clutches a carton of soda under his arm. Dark water swirls around his torso; his yellow shirt is soaked. In the other, a white couple is in water up to their elbows. The woman is tattooed and frowning, gripping a bag of bread.
For years, scientists have believed women suffer from depression more frequently than men. But new research from a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor found the gender gap begins much earlier than once believed, breaking away between boys and girls as young as 12.
A medical breakthrough that might save millions of lives could be crawling in your backyard.AdvertisementWISN 12 News’ Kent Wainscott investigates the groundbreaking research in Wisconsin aimed at stopping deadly, antibiotic-resistant superbugs with actual bugs.
William Cox, a social psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his colleagues conducted a study on prejudice-based aggression using 166 undergraduate students as participants.
Share on twitter Share on reddit2Share on linkedin55OGphoto/iStockphotoHow science fares in the U.S. budget dealBy Science News StaffMay. 1, 2017 , 11:15 AMCongress has finally reached a deal on spending bills for the 2017 fiscal year, which ends on 30 September. House of Representatives and Senate leaders announced last night that they expect lawmakers to vote this week on an agreement that wraps together all 12 appropriations bills that fund federal operations.
If there was any doubt that a Republican-led Congress might give a strong boost to federal science spending, the Trump administration probably sealed the deal.
The National Institutes of Health will get a $2 billion funding boost over the next five months, under a bipartisan spending deal reached late Sunday night in Congress. The agreement marks a sharp rejection of President Trump’s proposal to cut $1.2 billion from the medical research agency in the current fiscal year.
Alice Goffman’s ethnographic research is making waves again.
Even with its tradition of research excellence, UW-Madison is caught in a perfect storm of challenges to its prominence.
A new UW-Madison study found women are twice as likely to have depression, and the gap in mental health between genders begins at age 12. UW professor Janet Hyde said a gender gap in mental health has been known in the scientific community for decades but had not been confirmed on a scale as large as this study.
A UW-Madison scientist’s chance opportunity to study a curious colony of rats in Mexico nearly three decades ago has resulted in an animal model for a newly discovered human disease related to multiple sclerosis.
“It’s now about a 20-year period,” Watras said.
The UW Trout Lake Station in Boulder Junction has kept records of lake levels since the 1940s. Those levels followed a consistent cycle for much of that time, but in the 2000s, when levels should have gone up, they continued to go down until the lakes reached their all-time low in 2013.
“We’ve just completed roughly 15 years of declining water levels,” said Watras.
From leading astronomy writer, Phil Plait, on the Wisconsin H-Alpha Mapper: One of my favorite things is to learn something new. Especially when it’s something big. In this case, I mean it literally: The galaxy is filled with warm, ionized hydrogen gas, it forms a huge pancake-like structure 75,000 light years across and more than 6000 light years thick, and it has a name: the Reynolds layer. Even better, when it was discovered, it was a shock, briefly defying explanation until better physical models of the galaxy made it more clear.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has announced its latest group of projects for the UW2020: WARF Discovery Initiative, which funnels millions of dollars into research.
It’s not the size of your brain, it’s how you organise it. The most recently discovered species of early human had a skull only slightly larger than a chimpanzee’s, but its brain looked surprisingly like our own – particularly in an area of the frontal lobe with links to language.
Alice Goffman’s star fell almost as fast as it rose a few years back, as sociologists divided over her controversial book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, and allegations that it eschewed crucial disciplinary norms. Some of Goffman’s supporters maintained that her six-year embed with inner-city Philadelphia youths pushed ethnography forward in important ways. But others questioned her unusual methods — including the destruction of records she said could one day compromise her subjects, to whom she was unusually close.
Central Time talks to Hilary Dugan, a UW-Madison researcher, about a recent study showing that our freshwater lakes are getting saltier due to road salt used during winter months.
Noted: Blue Sky Science is a collaboration of the Wisconsin State Journal and the Morgridge Institute for Research.
UW-Madison is partnering with the Dane County Sheriff’s Office on a two-year, federally funded study to measure the effectiveness of virtual reality tools and 3-D-capture technology on crime scene investigations.
Noted: In a report, University of Wisconsin-Madison economists estimated that farms of 500 or more cows accounted for 40% of state milk production in 2013 compared to 22% in 2007.
Radio broadcasts by famed Wisconsin conservationist Aldo Leopold 80 years ago have been recreated as part of this year’s Earth Day celebration.
Before retiring, Holly Walter Kerby spent her career educating students about the atoms that make up the planet. From the periodic table to the basics of chemical bonding, students in her chemistry class at Madison College were shown the world around them — on a microscopic level.
Organizers of the March for Science said that the event in Washington, D.C., and the satellite marches across the country this weekend were just the beginning of a movement to champion science.
DePuy Synthes Products, part of Johnson & Johnson, has acquired 3D printing technology from Tissue Regeneration Systems, a Michigan company based in part on research from the lab of William Murphy of UW-Madison.
When a pediatrician in Flint, Michigan, discovered dangerous levels of lead in children’s blood, she did something untypical for a scientist.
The ninth annual bioethics symposium at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health discussed disparities in health care for the LGBTQ community.
An innovative study in the University of Wisconsin-Madison could soon put an end to drug-resistant bacteria by using an edible version of CRISPR. This probiotic could target specific bacteria, making it more effective than antibiotics.
As resistance to antibiotics grows in the U.S., researchers are looking for new ways to fight germs like Clostridium difficile, a bacterium that can cause fatal infections in hospitals and nursing homes. Now scientists want to turn CRISPR into ultra-precise antimicrobial treatments to “specifically kill your bacteria of choice,” says food scientist Jan-Peter Van Pijkeren of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Hundreds of millions may have already given up on last summer’s tech hit, Pokémon Go. A new University of Wisconsin-Madison study suggests they should pick the game back up again.
An eighth grader from Wausau, with dreams of playing in his high school band, is getting some help from a group of engineers at UW-Madison.
“It was just silence, a sense of emptiness. It was like the energy was sucked out of the universe,” Karen Strier, an anthropological professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said upon her visit to the reserve in January 2017.
It wasn’t that long ago when Pokémon Go exploded onto the scene.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say players of Pokemon Go tend to be happy people.
If you spent a significant portion of last summer knocking into lampposts in pursuit of a wiley Bulbasaur, cursing wildly because you walked five miles to hatch an egg that turned out to be a dingy-old Pidgey, or patiently explaining to your parents that you are indeed a single 25-year-old playing a video game on her phone and yes, you do believe this is time well-spent, I have good news for you. This week, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison released a study which suggests “Pokemon Go” players are happier, friendlier, and more physically active than their non-”Pokemon Go” playing peers (or, Poke-muggles, as I have been repeatedly asked to stop calling them).
The 12th annual Wisconsin Stem Cell Symposium is set for Wednesday, April 19, in Fitchburg. It features prominent stem cell researchers from around the world. One of the presenting scientists will discuss the latest developments in stem cell therapies and what advances are being made by researchers here at the University of Wisconsin and around the globe.
New research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests not only are Pokémon Go players walking more, they’re happy people.
The Madison event will include a march, a rally and a science expo on the Library Mall. Keynote speakers at the rally will include Bassam Shakhashiri, UW-Madison professor and creator of the popular “Science is Fun” demonstrations, and Tia Nelson, director of the Outrider Foundation and daughter of Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson.
New research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests not only are Pokémon Go players walking more, they’re happy people.
