Category: Research

Musician David Teie composed music inspired by cats’ vocalizations and matching purr frequencies. “An independent study conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and published in Applied Animal Behavior verified that Music for Cats resonates conclusively with its audience,” Music for Cats says on its site.

During the 2014-15 flu season, the poor match between the virus used to make the world’s vaccine stocks and the circulating seasonal virus yielded a vaccine that was less than 20 percent effective.

Editor’s note: The Water Sustainability and Climate project at the University of Wisconsin–Madison collaborated with other groups to launch the Our Waters, Our Future Writing Contest in January. The group—including the UW–Madison Center for Limnology, Sustain Dane and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters—sought short stories reflecting visions for positive futures for the watershed. This is the winning piece. To read the entry chosen as the runner-up, see the June tablet edition of Madison Magazine.

Like some humans, giant pandas struggle with digestion due to changes in diet – an affliction that could be interrupting their reproduction, according to a new study.

A stomachache can put a real damper on your love life — especially if you’re a giant panda. One minute it’s breeding season and you’re happily dining on fresh bamboo leaves, the next you’re left clutching your stomach while your gastrointestinal lining passes through your system. This is exactly what seems to happen to captive giant pandas, and the researchers behind a new study are beginning to suspect it may play a role in their struggles to reproduce.

Who would you call if you had a wood-related question? The Forest Products Laboratory, of course. But, did you even know of its existence?

A collaboration of NASA, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Snapshot Wisconsin aims to provide one of the richest and most comprehensive caches of wildlife data for any spot on our planet.

In a special column for the paper, Katie Hustad, Waisman Center professor of communication sciences and disorders, writes about her work studying how communication develops in children with cerebral palsy.

Wildlife authorities around the world have long turned to culls — a polite word for hunting — to reduce the populations of wild animals living too close to people or livestock.

Hunters in Finland took to the forests this year to kill nearly 20 percent of that country’s 250 or so wolves. They did so as part of a controversial, government-approved “cull” that officials said was intended to prevent illegal poaching of the wolves.

Governments often take on the job of killing problem wolves that attack livestock in order to increase public tolerance for the predators and, in theory, to reduce poaching by frustrated citizens.

A new study challenges the notion of government hunts as a conservation tactic to limit poaching of large carnivores such as wolves, big cats, and bears.

Listen: the US has had bad policies when it comes to wolves, and a very earnest French man would like to explain why, using what appear to be Playmobil figurines.

Dane County has rich farmland, dedicated farmers and gardeners, and some of the best homegrown food in the country. But not everybody is able to enjoy the region’s bounty.

The findings of a new study co-authored by a UW-Madison researcher challenge the conventional wisdom that hunting is an effective tool for the conservation of predators. It could have implications for Wisconsin’s wolf hunt as well as wildlife management efforts around the world. The authors anticipate a backlash.

A team of researchers at University of Wisconsin has developed a noninvasive method to track brain development in children using two different brain imaging techniques.

Emergency room doctors are inclined to see you quickly if you have a simple problem such as an ankle injury or allergic reaction, but they may take longer if you have a complex complaint like numbness or vaginal bleeding, a study at UW Hospital’s ER found.

But what if you could effectively enlarge antenna size by using the vehicle itself as an antenna? That’s what University of Wisconsin–Madison engineers are seeking to do as part of a project supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR).

In Madison, there are more than 160 years of records on the freezing and thawing dates of lakes Monona and Mendota. But it was centuries of data on a lake in Japan and a river in Finland that helped a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus and a team of researchers show climate change trends since the Industrial Revolution.John J. Magnuson, the former director of the UW’s Center for Limnology, co-led the study into how records of freezing and thawing dates have changed. The results, published Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports, showed that “global processes including climate change and variability are driving the long-term changes in ice seasonality.”

You wouldn’t think that a Japanese monk and a merchant from Finland would have much in common, but it turns out they do: Climate change.

An inherited learning disability similar to autism – called Fragile X – could one day be treated with a pill, a new study suggests.