Marina E. Emborg, an associate professor of medical physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has won the 2016 Bernard Sanberg Memorial Award for Brain Repair.
Yi Fuxian, one of the most vocal opponents of China’s birth control policies, says the government should scrap the remaining measures to address a looming demographic crisis that is pushing the nation into Japan’s path of economic stagnation.
Everyone seems to meditate: Coworkers plan to vacation at a meditation retreat, friends chat about favorite meditation apps and countless articles praise the practice. Does meditation live up to the hype?” The science is very much in an embryonic state,” says Richard Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, but adding “meditation plays an important part of the maintenance of well-being.”
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.
Noted: “When mindfulness is combined with cognitive therapy, one of the things we see is people being trained to regard their thoughts as just thoughts and not to get ensnared by them,” said Richard Davidson, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study.
A group of researchers and students at UW-Madison have developed a technology that attaches to drones to detect explosive devices.
Dr. Gerald Kulcinski, Director of the Fusion Technology Institute at UW-Madison, along with his team of researchers, have found a way to take existing fusion technology and turn it in to a device that can detect materials from the air.
Noted: Author Jonathan Patz, M.D., M.P.H., is director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Richard Davidson had been studying the brain for more than a decade when he was asked a question that quite literally changed his life.
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.”
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.
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.
New research has found the Great Lakes may have a type of tsunami after all. They are not tsunamis caused by earthquakes. These tsunamis are caused by organized areas of thunderstorms.
Almost every winter, after Lake Suwa in the Japanese Alps freezes, the male Shinto god Takeminakata crosses the ice to visit the female god Yasakatome at her shrine, causing a ridge known as the omiwatari to form. At least, that’s what the priests living on the shores of the lake believed. When the water froze, they would conduct a purification ritual and celebration in honor of the ridge, using its direction and starting location to forecast the harvest and rainfall for the coming year.
?University of Wisconsin engineers have done it, devising a new and better way for military vehicles to communicate.?
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers say a study performed on mice with fragile X syndrome shows a possible path to improving memory and learning for people with the condition. Fragile X is the most common cause of inherited intellectual disability.
Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin- Madison have received a four-year, $5.5 million grant to better understand how communication between parts of the brain changes as the result of normal aging or of dementia.
University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists are looking into whether climate change may lead to the faster spread of diseases like the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus.
As more infections become resistant to antibiotics, a University of Wisconsin research team’s search for new ways to knock down bad bacteria and fungi has become increasingly urgent.
Wollersheim Winery will be releasing a new wine Wednesday in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison fermentation sciences program, according to a release.
They may not wipe out entire cities or occur after earthquakes, but two University of Wisconsin researchers say the Great Lakes have tsunamis that can wreak havoc of their own.
Drones may soon have the capability to save thousands of lives each year by detecting terrorists’ improvised explosive devices and active land mines from long-ago wars thanks to innovative technology developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Hyperloop is the name of a potential transport system, with the idea of shooting people in pods through a tube at speeds of over 700 mph. Does this sound like a pipe dream straight out of science fiction? Not for Elon Musk. You know him – he’s the owner and innovator of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. But for Hyperloop, he invited over 100 teams from around the world to a competition to present their ideas on how to make Hyperloop work. Well, a team from UW-Madison made the cut.
One of the biggest mysteries: H. naledi’s age. Efforts are under way to date the fossils and sediment from which they were excavated with a variety of techniques, said paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Noted: Currently the treatments for patients diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer do not offer an encouraging long-term prognosis.
“The goals of that treatment are to help patients live longer and live better but we wouldn’t be curing patients with that cure,” said Dr. Noelle LoConte, and oncologist with the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Wolff lost her battle with cancer on April 22, 2013, but three years to the day after her passing UW Health announced a phase I clinical trial of a treatment developed at the Carbone Cancer Center.
People are less receptive to new information when they are offended. That was one of the key findings of a 2013 study by communication scientists at the University of Wisconsin. Researchers tested the effect of “uncivil” reader comments appended to online articles — remarks like, “You must be dumb if you think X.””The results were both surprising and disturbing,” study co-authors Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele wrote in a summary published by the New York Times. “Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.”They called this phenomenon the “nasty effect.”
The proven detection technology that also can detect chemical and nuclear weapons and drugs was successfully miniaturized and designed to fly on small unmanned aircraft by Fusion Technology Lab graduate students about five months ago, according to Jerry Kulcinski, an emeritus professor of nuclear engineering and the lab’s director.
Do you text while watching TV, or listen to music while reading? Media multitasking is known to distract people not only when they are doing it, but when they aren’t consuming media – which is detrimental to performance at school or work, for maintaining relationships and for general well-being. A new study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States shows that a short meditation exercise involving counting one’s breath – inhaling and exhaling nine times – can sharpen one’s focus, and especially so for heavy media multitaskers.
So are the soaring costs of college keeping millennials from starting households of their own? Not according to a new paper from Jason Houle of Dartmouth and Lawrence Berger of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Using longitudinal data on college-going Americans who were aged between 12 and 17 in 1997, the authors found that student-loan debtors were in fact more likely than non-debtors to own a house by the age of 30. But this was mostly because debtors tended to be older, employed, married and with children, and the debt was largely irrelevant.
The rusty-patched bumble bee used to be abundant, including in Wisconsin. This story starts at UW-Madison’s Arboretum. A nature photographer from South Carolina was searching far and wide for the Rusty-patched – and finally observed his first here.
A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have devised a cheap method to make impressively fast and flexible silicon-based transistors. Their technique involves using beams of electrons to create reusable molds of the patterns they want, as well as a very, very tiny knife to etch minuscule trenches into those patterns. The result is a small, bendy transistor — though not as small as a the Navy’s single-molecule design — that can transmit data wirelessly and has the potential to operate at a whopping 110 gigahertz. In other words, it’s capable of some extremely fast computing and could lead to wearables a lot more powerful than those available today.
The rusty-patched bumble bee used to be abundant, including in Wisconsin. This story starts at UW-Madison’s Arboretum.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine have developed lab mice that can be used for testing vaccines and antivirals against the Zika virus.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine have found a way to simulate the Zika virus in mice, a step that should help researchers better understand the disease and even gain a foothold in the effort to develop vaccines and antivirals.
According to new research by the University of Michigan, the Kellogg School of Management, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, you may be a riskier investor if you’ve got fewer “romantic prospects” in your area.
Last week, the director of the National Weather Service (NWS), Louis W. Uccellini, visited his alma mater as the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences inaugural Distinguished Alumni Award winner. Uccellini presented the story of the intellectual and professional journey that led him to the leadership of this extraordinarily important government agency … Uccellini’s visit reminded us all, we strive to do great things at Wisconsin and we usually succeed.
UW-Madison researchers continue to study Zika in rhesus macaque monkeys. Since February, they’ve infected 11 monkeys with the virus to examine three questions: how long Zika persists in blood, urine and saliva; if infection protects against future exposure; and whether the stage of pregnancy in which infection occurs impacts the effects on offspring.The bodies of nine non-pregnant monkeys have gotten rid of the virus in an average of about 10 days, said David O’Connor, a UW-Madison pathology professor who is part of the research team. But two pregnant monkeys infected in the first trimester have retained the virus so far for two weeks and more than a month, O’Connor said.
If you don’t already, odds are that someday you’ll hold a newspaper at arm’s length to read it more clearly. This incredibly common eye condition, called presbyopia, generally affects those in their 50s and older. It occurs when eye muscles begin to age and harden, making it more difficult to focus on nearby objects.
If you were told that nearly half of the people on the planet had a higher risk of developing a mental health disorder, what would you do?
University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists have developed a way for New Yorker magazine to use crowd-sourcing to judge captions in its weekly cartoon caption contest.
Noted: Different recovery times. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, has spent decades studying the relationship between our emotions and various brain structures and neurological systems. In his 2012 book The Emotional Life of Your Brain, Davidson notes that people vary widely with regard to the speed with which we recover from adverse experiences. (Davidson calls this quality “resilience,” but I prefer “recovery time,” as I use the former term more broadly when discussing our overall response to stress and challenges.) Davidson’s research demonstrates that people with different recovery times even show different patterns of activity in their brains.
New University of Wisconsin-Madison research shows that the snowshoe hare’s habitat in northern Wisconsin is shrinking, in part due to shifts in climate.
University of Wisconsin-Madison officials have chosen 14 research projects to receive an average of about $300,000 each over the next two years as part of its UW2020: WARF Discovery Initiative.
Tiny particles that struck Antarctica years ago came from outside our galaxy, puzzling scientists hoping to unlock clues about the universe. Now, scientists think the source might be the center of a bright, violent galaxy some 9 billion light years away.
Humans have played a key role in moving species to new locations, resulting in an exponential spread of species over the last century. Many of these nonnative species never become invasive – that is, damaging – and a few may even have positive effects on ecology or human economy. However, many, such as Asian carp in North American rivers and Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades, cause enormous ecological and economic damage.
The discovery of gravitational waves, the last piece of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity to be proved, certainly amounts to the biggest discovery in physics since the discovery of the Higgs boson a few years ago. So, the Perpetual Notion Machine invited UW-Madison astrophysicist Peter Timbie on the show this week to explain gravitational waves and what this discovery means for future research. And not only that, it appears that gravitational waves have a sound all its own, which we heard on the show.
At the South Pole, a giant, underground block of crystal clear ice, picks up signals from the cosmos – signals that could ultimately help scientists better understand the universe.
The cause of autism remains largely unclear, but some scientists hypothesize the condition could be caused by the irregular production of neurons.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist says much work is ahead for the UW’s neutrino project at the South Pole now that it’s won a $35 million grant to continue detecting high-energy cosmic particles.
Habitat loss as humans reshape landscapes has loomed for decades as the main conservation problem for a lot of wildlife. It’s still important, says climate change ecologist Benjamin Zuckerberg of the University of Wisconsin?Madison. But along the southern boundary of the snowshoe hares’ range, climate change bringing skimpy snow covers has surpassed direct habitat loss as a threat, Zuckerberg and his colleagues say March 30 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists monitoring a neutrino telescope at the South Pole are celebrating a $35 million commitment from the National Science Foundation to keep the project going for five more years.
Chill the champagne, IceCube will stay frozen for another five years.
Even as mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus advance northward, lawmakers in 18 states are trying to block the fetal tissue research that might reveal the keys to unlocking the disease and preventing the massive birth defects associated with it.
Wisconsin deer hunters will be fashion trailblazers this fall: The state recently became the first to legalize blaze pink hunting gear. Most states require that all hunters wear blaze orange, also known as hunter orange, during deer hunting season to maximize their visibility to fellow hunters wielding firearms. Lawmakers say that approving blaze pink is an effort to provide hunters with another safe color option—and to recruit more women into hunting.
Two UW-Madison professors are helping analyze data on American science and health literacy with the National Academy of Sciences panel for a report to be released in 2017.
Dominique Brossard, a life sciences communication professor, and Noah Feinstein, a School of Education professor, serve as two of 12 members on the committee. The group observes what the average individual knows and does not know about science, given that members of the general scientific community have expressed concern over Americans’ knowledge of science compared to those in other countries.
A new study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison highlights the hefty cost of controlling aquatic invasive species in the state’s lakes.
The study found that the estimated cost of controlling a single invasive species, the spiny waterflea, in just one lake could range from $86.5 million to $163 million over 20 years. Researchers say the study’s results show that a broader measure of the costs of controlling aquatic invasive species should be taken into account.
At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, infectious disease researcher David O’Connor — who described the reaction among scientists when Zika first made news as, “Oh my gosh, we know nothing about this” — started infecting macaques last month and has been sharing his data online as it arrives.
A new study of a tiny organism that has infiltrated nearly two dozen Wisconsin lakes is the latest example of the expensive fight Great Lakes states are facing with the spread of aquatic invasive species.
A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that the economic and ecological impact of invasive species in the state’s inland lakes has been greatly underestimated.
