Noted: Meanwhile, UW-Madison researchers continue to study Zika in rhesus macaque monkeys.Four monkey babies born to mothers infected with Zika during pregnancy had Zika virus in many types of tissue, and their heads may have been slightly smaller than normal, said David O’Connor, a UW-Madison pathology professor.
Spending on research at UW-Madison declined by more than $100 million between 2012 and 2015, leading the university to fall from the top five of the National Science Foundation’s ranking of research institutions for the first time in more than four decades.
For the first time in nearly 45 years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has fallen from its standing among the nation’s top five research universities, according to data from the National Science Foundation.
Husband and wife team Constance Steinkuehler and Kurt Squire are leaders in the field of video game development. In a matter of weeks, the two are taking their talents to California due to what they say is a very unsupportive environment on the UW campus.
For the first time in 44 years UW-Madison is not a top-five research university and school administrators say state budget cuts are to blame.
Five UW-Madison professors have been elected as fellows into the world’s largest general scientific society.
A remarkable story that I encountered out of the University of Wisconsin–Madison earlier this month reminds me about one of the most vexing mysteries that I’ve encountered as a journalist.
Noted: This was the first year DPI used a variable weighting system and value-added analysis to address the impact of poverty on student achievement. Under this system, the higher the percentage of economically disadvantaged students in a school or district, the higher the weight on student-growth scores. The method for calculating student growth was created by the Value-Added Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Between the stadium lights, flashing scoreboard and pulsing sound system, a football game sucks up vast amounts of energy. But what if spectators at the next Badgers game, by their mere presence, generated enough electricity to power the entire event?
There’s not a lot to like about the stout, spiked branches of the aggressively invasive buckthorn tree. “Buckthorn is spreading actively across the landscape, facilitated by birds eating the berries and spreading seeds,” says Mark Renz, assistant professor of agronomy at UW-Madison and a UW-Extension weed specialist. “The way it is changing the forest understory is really an epidemic in the upper Midwest.”
Professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are researching the effect the state’s new voter ID laws had on turnout in this year’s presidential election.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers are taking up a tricky task after last Tuesday’s election: figuring out whether the presence of the state’s voter ID requirement affected who voted.
A UW-Madison political science professor is launching a study into whether the state’s new voter ID law was a factor in reduced turnout in last week’s election.
University of Wisconsin-Madison student engineers have designed a new prototype to transport organs.
Peter McIntyre at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his colleagues used data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to build a global map of river fisheries, which have historically received less attention than their marine counterparts. They found that pressure from fishing was most intense in areas where biodiversity was also highest, raising concerns about conservation.
In Wisconsin, like most of the country, Raccoons are practically omnipresent. Their adaptability has allowed them to move from the country landscape as a wildlife creature to an urban life in cities and towns across the state. There are a few factors that make the raccoon especially adept at finding the food and shelter they need living among people, said University of Wisconsin-Madison professor David Drake.
Engineers at UW-Madison have created the floor of the future that produces its own power when it’s walked on. It’s made with wood and cardboard fibers that have been treated with a cellulose gel. Because of that, the creators said it’s good for the environment too.
WAUSAU – University of Wisconsin officials commended two longtime central Wisconsin professors for their work in making math more understandable and accessible for students who struggle with the X’s and O’s.
Noted: Cellectar was founded in Madison in 2003 by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Jamey Weichert. Following a 2011 merger with a public company, Novelos Therapeutics, the corporate headquarters was moved to Massachusetts. The company moved back to Madison in 2014.
With relatively few college-educated people moving here and an economy that is generating large numbers of lower-skill jobs, Wisconsin faces a challenging future, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Extension and UW – Madison argue in a new report.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has announced a $99 million gift to UW-Madison to support faculty recruitment and retention, as well as to further opportunities for students during the current school year.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, commonly known as WARF, announced Thursday that its annual gift to the University of Wisconsin-Madison will be $55.2 million for 2016-2017. Additional funding for research with partners, royalties and other grants brings the total investment to $99 million.
The study’s findings, recommendations and future steps will be the focus of a panel discussion from noon to 2 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27, in the Festival Room of Memorial Union. The talk is hosted by the UW-Madison Department of Urban and Regional Planning and the Tenant Resource Center.
Thanks to a four-year grant from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, the University of Wisconsin will increase the number of resident physicians in underserved rural areas in an effort to close the gap of health disparities.
Since 1925, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has racked up quite a roster of patents. That’s kind of the point. A nonprofit institution, WARF exists to support scientific investigations and research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison by stewarding a “cycle of research, discovery, commercialization and investment.”
While thousands of people the world over continue to go solar to generate alternative energy, a lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison just made a major breakthrough on a completely unique new conductive material: wood pulp. While the mention of wood pulp mention leave many scratching their head, the lab found a way to manufacture floorboards out of the commonly wasted material, and did so in a manner that took advantage of its composition of cellulose nanofibers. In other words, the team of engineers managed to develop a flooring material capable of generating electricity by something as simple as a footstep.
With nearly 15 percent of children in the U.S. suffering from childhood poverty, a group of nine professors, including University of Wisconsin’s Timothy Smeeding, have created a proposal that would provide monthly allowances to families with children.
The Wisconsin Science Festival kicked off Thursday morning at UW-Madison.
For a soldier patrolling a city street in a warzone, seeing what’s around the corner of a building could be the difference between life and death. The Morgridge Institute for Research and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are collaborating to make a camera that can recreate scenes that are out of sight using what is known as scattered light technology. The project is being supported by a $4.4 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
University of Wisconsin-Madison spent $23.6 million in retention efforts this past year, according to a report released Friday by the university.
Three UW-Madison undergraduates have attempted to uncover through research that standardized testing exemplifies systematic racism and makes it challenging for young black students to attend college.
Noted: Blue Sky Science is a collaboration of the Wisconsin State Journal and the Morgridge Institute for Research.
After seven years of studying three-toed sloths, scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have made it official: the tree-dwelling animals are the slowest mammals on earth, metabolically speaking. “We expected them to have low metabolic rates, but we found them to have tremendously low energy needs,” says ecologist Jonathan Pauli.
Recent legislative attempts in Madison would make it a state crime to donate fetal tissue derived from abortions or do research on tissue lines. It also proposes prosecution of researchers using this type of tissue. The dean of the UW Medical school, Robert Golden, said researchers follow ethical guidelines and federal law and hope to someday eliminate the use of fetal tissue.
Fetal cell lines were critical in the development of the polio vaccine and other types of fetal tissue research have saved countless children from the devastation of infectious diseases. But now, many of these types of vaccines could be at risk if the bill just proposed in the Wisconsin Legislature becomes law.
Fight Colorectal Cancer and the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center are working together to train survivors and caregivers to advocate for further research. The Colorectal Cancer Research Academy has drawn survivors and caregivers from across the country for two days of training.
Two research teams — one with a potential vaccine for the Zika virus and the other with a new way of monitoring sedated patients — have won $10,000 each in an innovation competition organized by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
The Wisconsin Energy Institute is buzzing with about 400 scientists, graduate students and staff.
The Wisconsin Energy Institute is buzzing with about 400 scientists, graduate students and staff.It boasts the University of Wisconsin System’s largest grant, $265 million over a decade. But, its sunsets next year, and the Energy Institute is at a pivotal point, both in leadership and funding.
Noted: Each meter of cored sediment reaches further back in time. As team member Jack Williams of the University of Wisconsin-Madison guides the sixth segment into a tube, he notices the mud changes from a warm brown with a pudding-like texture to a blacker, firmer consistency. The team estimates it corresponds to deposits from roughly 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, spanning the period when Graham’s mammoth died in the cave. That means this segment could include the period of extinction, if mammoth DNA is present in its lower, older layers but absent from the top. “There’s mammoth in there,” Williams predicts.
The first critical assessment of changes in teacher compensation published in Wisconsin since Act 10 was released this fall in a study by the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.
Noted: Writer Ian D. Duncan is a professor of medical science at UW-Madison
Stem cell research might be the key to treating heart disease.Researchers at University of Wisconsin, University of Alabama at Birmingham and Duke University are developing “heart patches” — collections of fabricated heart cells — that will be used to mend unhealthy hearts.
Noted: “Seventy-five percent of it stays right here in south central Wisconsin,” Heitzinger said. “The remaining 25 percent funds national breast cancer research, including breast cancer research at the UW-Madison.”
Noted: Jeremy Hemberger is a graduate student with the department of entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a volunteer with the campus Insect Ambassadors organization.
The Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery building on the UW-Madison campus will be a hive of activity Oct. 20-23 during the 6th annual Wisconsin Science Festival, where thousands of people will engage in science, often in unique ways.
On a snowy Friday morning in 2005, Jeri Lake was riding her bicycle to the clinic where she worked as a nurse and midwife when a car suddenly drove into her path.
When local gardeners turn over a spade of soil, they’re usually happy to find an earthworm or two. While these familiar worms were brought over by European settlers and are not beneficial to native habitat, they can form a healthy partnership with plants that farmers and gardeners have come to depend on.
It took getting a Ph.D. in genetics for Nadia Drake to realize she was more interested in writing about science than practicing it.
While Wisconsin’s new voter ID requirement continues to cause controversy, the Dane County Clerk’s office will study the November election to see how much of an impact the law really has on voters.
UW System students will have the chance to attend one of the world’s most innovative campuses, as the system ranked 13th in Reuters’ 2016 list of top 100 innovative universities.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison and two other universities have received a seven-year, $8.6 million grant to study one of the biggest, and perhaps most difficult goals of stem cell scientists — creating heart tissue in the lab for people who’ve suffered severe heart attacks.
Seven and a half hours of boredom, plus 30 minutes of terror. That’s how Dr. Michael Spierer, a Madison-based psychologist, describes the typical police officer’s shift. Eight hours of paperwork and petty crime, with the knowledge that a high-pressure and dangerous turn of events may be just around the corner. Chronic stress is inherent to the job, he says.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are gathering opinions about drones and other technologies available to journalists, and The Post-Crescent will host two focus groups in October.
Stem cell pioneer James Thomson and biotech entrepreneur Ralph Kauten received achievement awards at the 2016 Wisconsin BioHealth Summit in Madison on Tuesday.
A group of psychology researchers at the University of Wisconsin – Madison discovered a breakthrough with those who have blindness to motion. In the journal published Wednesday, Madison psychology Professor Bas Rokers says blind motion comes from a failure inside the brain, and not the eyes
David Thomas is looking over his life’s work at the Spooner Agricultural Research Station in northern Wisconsin. After 26 years with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the professor of sheep genetics and management is retiring and the research station’s dairy sheep program is going along with him.
Droughts, floods and heat waves are becoming more common in various parts of the world thanks to climate change. As part of our weeklong look at climate change, Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson talks with Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, about the public health impacts of global warming.
Donald Trump is a master in the use of traditional news outlets and social media, said Chris Wells, an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Government regulators have no idea how often laboratories working with some of the world’s most dangerous viruses and bacteria are failing to fully kill vials of specimens before sending them to other researchers who lack critical gear to protect them against infection, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.
Noted: While studies are underway and advocacy groups and others scramble for better answers, specialists with the University of Wisconsin-Madison have teamed up with their counterparts in Oregon, as well as with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and health care records software giant Epic Systems, to build a program that helps predict whether an older person will fall. It not only calculates the risk — it steers physicians to preventative treatments.
