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.
A new University of Wisconsin-Madison research study finds that Pokemon Go players are happy people. Investigators discovered playing the game enhanced participants emotional and social lives and improved their level of physical activity.
Eight UW-Madison academic staff are being honored for their contributions to UW-Madison—including studies on unconscious bias in hiring—with 2017 Academic Staff Excellence Awards. Chancellor Rebecca Blank will present the awards.
You dream more than you know. A new way to detect dreaming has confirmed that it doesn’t only occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and has shown why we often don’t remember our dreams. “There is much more dreaming going on than we remember,” says Tore Nielsen at the University of Montreal, Canada. “It’s hours and hours of mental experiences and we remember a few minutes. ”During sleep, low-frequency brainwaves are detectable across the brain. Now Francesca Siclari at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her colleagues have discovered that a decrease in these waves in an area at the back of the brain is a sign that someone is dreaming.
In the 1940s, Americans found a new way to love salt. Not simply for sprinkling on food — we’d acquired a taste for the mineral long before that — but for spreading on roads and sidewalks. Salt became a go-to method to de-ice frozen pavement.
Researchers from University of Wisconsin in Madison and Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, had 40 healthy adults strap on four popular activity trackers, two on each arm. Study participants, ages 30 to 65, also were rigged up to an electrocardiograph, which uses leads in a chest strap to detect the wearer’s heart rate.
Crunchy or smooth peanut butter. Toilet paper tucked over or under. Clicky top or cap pens. Jellies or sponges. No, not the kitchen items—the animals. Maybe you haven’t been debating that last issue with the same passion as the eternal toilet paper question, but evolutionary biologists have. Now one group says they’ve got an answer: it’s the jellies.
Many lakes around the Twin Cities are becoming so salty from winter road maintenance that, within three decades, they will no longer support native fish and plants.
Salting of roads in winter helps drivers navigate snow and ice, but the runoff may be irreparably damaging freshwater lakes in the United States and Canada, researchers warned Monday.
For years, a debate has raged among scientists as to which ancient creature represents the first true animal, sponges or jellies. Using a new genetic technique, a collaborative team of researchers has concluded that ctenophores—also known as comb jellies—were the first animals to appear on Earth. It’s an important step forward in this longstanding debate, but this issue is far from being resolved.
It’s been 25 years since the National Academy of Sciences set its standards for appropriate scientific conduct, and the world of science has changed dramatically in that time. So now the academies of science, engineering and medicine have updated their standards.
Project will allow for better understanding of how such classes of powerful enzymes work.
Have you been tinkering away on an invention you hope will be the next big thing? Or, perhaps you’ve already built a better mousetrap but don’t know how to get it to market. Well, if you are connected with UW-Madison, you might want to talk with John Biondi.
In classrooms across the country, students might be scolded for using “ain’t” instead of “isn’t.” But a UW-Madison student is working to erase the stigma against Ebonics, also known as African-American Vernacular English.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A group of Assembly Republicans are asking University of Wisconsin System officials to start researching more uses for milk.
You can access real-time images from GOES-16 and other satellites using the RealEarth tool maintained by UW-Madison’s SSEC. If that’s not enough, NOAA Satellites maintains a blog and a Twitter page where they post regular eye-candy from the newly-christened satellite.
Column by Andrew Merluzzi, a Ph.D./MPA candidate in neuroscience and public policy at UW-Madison.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison spent nearly $1.1 billion on R&D in 2015.
A 10km² area of forest, known as RPPN Feliciano Miguel Abdala, surrounded by agricultural land is now silent after losing the majority of its brown howler monkeys in an unprecedented epidemic. Karen Strier from the University of Winconsin-Madison visited the forest in January 2017 and has been studying primates there for decades.
With hundreds of special education degree programs around the country, University of Wisconsin has had to remain unique in their approach to special education to earn College Choice’s No. 2 ranking in the nation.
Bill’s opponents believe it would hamper UW’s credibility.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A former University of Wisconsin-Madison animal researcher fired for taking two federal officials into a closed room during a tour and not relaying what he told them is appealing his termination.
When President Trump proposed a cut of nearly 20 percent in support for the National Institutes of Health, many wondered how the administration would even attempt to find such reductions. The answer emerged in the congressional testimony last week of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who argued the government could save billions without hurting research by cutting back on the overhead reimbursements to colleges and universities.
Noted: “It was huge,” says Kevin Eliceiri, a microscopist at the University of Wisconsin Madison, of the initial discovery of bacteria. “There was a lot of confusion about what made you sick. The idea that there are bacteria and things in the water was one of the greatest discoveries ever.”
Evidence from human research also suggests meditation and respiration are closely connected. In a recent study, for example, Antoine Lutz, a scientist who studies the neurobiology of meditation at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Madison discovered long-term meditators develop slower breathing patterns than those who did not practice on a regular basis. The slower breathing in long-term practitioners may “activate this ascending pathway less,” says Lutz, who was not involved in the current study. “Maybe it’s a signature of a different level of stress.”
Parents who raise children on the autism spectrum face unique challenges — not only as parents, but as partners. Research shows they’re at a higher risk of divorce and report lower satisfaction with their marriages than other parent couples.New research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Waisman Center may help explain why: the challenges these families face can change the parents’ relationship — but not in the ways we might think.
The researchers built two systems to collect and parse through the colossal range of data. First was GeoDeepDive, a digital library that could rapidly read millions of papers and pluck out particular nuggets. The massive computing it requires is generated by UW-Madison’s Center for High Throughput Computing and HTCondor systems. The second, Macrostat, is a database that tracks the geological properties of North America’s upper crust at different depths and across time.
The Trump administration’s plan to cut billions of dollars in research spending by eliminating indirect cost reimbursements would devastate university science, especially at public institutions, experts warned.
UW leads half of the 60 weather stations studying Antartica’s extreme temperatures.
