Category: Research

Professor Ive Hermans has a different philosophy when it comes to running a research group and laboratory full of brilliant students.

A UW-Madison assistant professor is challenging the notion that blame for the “skills gap” falls solely upon higher education. Matthew T. Hora, research scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and author of “Beyond the Skills Gap,’’ addressed about 60 people at the UW-Madison Education Building today for the launch of the new book.

WASHINGTON — The Senate approved complex health care legislation on Wednesday that would increase funding for disease research, address weaknesses in the nation’s mental health systems and vastly alter the regulatory system for drugs and medical devices. The vote sealed a final legislative victory for President Obama, who strongly supported the bill against objections from many liberal Democrats and consumer groups.

Every step you take has the ability to generate energy — if you’re walking on the right kind of floor.

Among the nearly 1000 pages of the 21st Century Cures Act—approved by the House of Representatives last Wednesday and being considered in the Senate today—is a section focused on what the National Institutes of Health (NIH) should do to encourage earlier independence and improve opportunities for junior biomedical researchers.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a novel strategy to reprogram cells from one type to another in a more efficient and less biased manner than previous methods.

By mimicking natural molecular pathways in the human body, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison developed molecular tools that could regulate gene expression.

Neuroscientist Nathan Rose and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin recently lost track of a memory.

It’s almost a good thing that we’ve never been entirely able to figure out how human memory works, because if we did, we’d probably just forget. Memory has always been that kind of meta-mystery, and one of its greatest puzzles is the question of what’s known as working memory: information we hold in short-term storage, like a phone number we’ll need to call or a face we’ll need to recognize at a meeting, and can then forget.

The study (by cognitive neuroscientist Nathan Rose and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin in Madison) suggests that information can somehow be held among the synapses that connect neurons, even after conventional working memory has faded.

Now, in a paper published today (December 1) in Science, researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and their colleagues provide evidence for a different theory, in which information can be stored in working memory in an inactive neuronal state.

It’s being hailed as the next big thing in weather forecasting and researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are taking part. A satellite now in space will hopefully collect and transmit critical weather information faster, which will mean more accurate forecasts for people back on Earth.

“The gut microbiome influences the host epigenome on a global scale,” said coauthor John Denu, an epigeneticist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “We discovered key communicators, or key molecules that communicate this information, to the host.”

The Wisconsin Pork Association has recently made a donation of $10,000 to the new University of Wisconsin Madison meat science lab.  In addition, the WPA Board challenged members to make individual contributions, resulting in an additional $5,000 raised.

The pain and frustration of not being able to conceive is one Katie Brenner knows all too well. “When my husband and I first decided to have kids we were just so excited,” says Brenner, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It took a while and then it took even longer. As we got more and more worried and more and more stressed, each month would just stretch out.”

The National Science Foundation last week released its annual report on the top universities in total research and development expenditures.

Cited as a reason to be thankful: Researchers at UW-Madison and elsewhere continue to advance treatments and drugs.

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?

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.

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.