Category: Research

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.

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.

What do you think UW-Madison Astronomy Professor Eric Wilcots eats on his pizza?  Or what his greatest fear is working in the field?  Find out during this edition of Science Slam! New show from WPR’s Central Time, in partnership with Discover Magazine.

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.

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.

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

A new study reveals some startling findings when your child spends too much time on the iPad.

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 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.

A new haul of ancient human remains has been described from an important cave site in South Africa.

Deep within the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa, archaeologists have discovered the remains of at least three Hominin naledi.

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.

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.

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.

Even with its tradition of research excellence, UW-Madison is caught in a perfect storm of challenges to its prominence.

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.

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.