Category: Research

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Looking at the same color side by side, it’s typically hard to see any difference. This is because humans are trichromatic, meaning they can only process three color channels, consisting of red, blue and green wavelengths. Mikhail Kats, an assistant professor of Engineering and Computer Sciences at UW-Madison, asked the questions, “Why?” and, “How can we see more?”.

Spinach is known as a super food for its nutritional value, but a new experiment reveals another power of the green leaf.

Spinach is giving a whole new meaning to the term “super food.” A team of researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Arkansas State University-Jonesboro published a paper on Wednesday that outlines how they used spinach to grow human heart tissue.

As clouds billowed like smoke rising from a forest fire, a twirling white funnel suddenly snaked downward.

Appearing before Congress at the start of the budget season, the director of the National Institutes of Health made clear he did not agree with his own president on how much money the NIH needs.

Someone tell Popeye: Spinach isn’t just good for your muscles. It can actually become muscles.

Most of the monkeys that have perished from yellow fever are brown howlers. This creates an interesting opportunity for the critically endangered muriqui monkeys, according to a UW-Madison news release. Muriquis are less susceptible to yellow fever. Researchers are studying if their population will thrive in the absence of howlers.”No one really knows the consequences for the other primates or the forest when nearly the entire population of an abundant species dies from disease in just a few months,” says Karen Strier, PhD, professor of anthropology.

What have you accomplished this week? Did you have a productive work meeting? Make a healthy dinner? Match your socks? If you’re one of the researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, or Arkansas State University-Jonesboro, you used a leaf to grow some heart tissue.

Noted: Some volunteers photograph the bees on their own, while others join local groups that conduct coordinated monitoring efforts. In Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum trains and coordinates bumble bee monitoring throughout the southern part of the state. The Arboretum and other locations in Wisconsin are home to some of the last known populations of the rusty patched bumble bee, making a concerted effort to monitor them with citizen science even more important.

The northern muriqui monkeys of Brazil — popularly known as “hippie” primates — are vegetarians, begin their day with a group hug, and are one of the planet’s most peaceful and egalitarian animals. They normally share their forest habitat with noisy howler monkeys that eat their food and appear to get on their nerves, but the hippies are now in flux. A yellow fever epidemic just wiped out thousands of howlers, leaving the hippies as the only thriving primates in the forest.Karen Strier, a University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist, just visited the forest, which lies within the federally protected RPPN Feliciano Miguel Abdala reserve near the Brazilian city of Caratinga.

Weather conditions are changing rapidly in the Great Lakes region, especially in winter. Climate change has led to warmer temperatures and less precipitation, a life-altering issue for many organisms that live in the region.