Category: Top Stories

When ecologist John Orrock of the University of Wisconsin–Madison squirted snail slime—a lubricating mucus the animals ooze as they slide along—into soil, nearby tomato plants appeared to notice.

“Venus had plenty of time to evolve life on its own,” said lead author Sanjay Limaye, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center, in a press release. In fact, previous research suggests that Venus could have once maintained a habitable climate with liquid water on its surface for as long as 2 billion years. “That’s much longer than is believed to have occurred on Mars,” he said.

Those tallies are particularly interesting given research released this week by Barry Burden of the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Yoshikuni Ono of Tohoku University in Japan. They analyzed the extent to which gender bias affected the underrepresentation of women in elected office using a survey that presented respondents with randomly generated fictional candidates.

But for all the planet’s seemingly inhospitable traits, “Venus has had plenty of time to evolve life on its own,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist Sanjay Limaye, who led the new study, in a press release. Limaye points to models that suggest Venus could have sustained a habitable climate with liquid water on its surface for as long as 2 billion years. “That’s much longer than is believed to have occurred on Mars,” says Limaye.

“Different smiles have different impacts on people’s bodies,” said Jared D. Martin, a doctoral student who led the study in the lab of University of Wisconsin–Madison psychology professor Paula Niedenthal. Along with poker players, psychologists have long known that our facial expressions can betray our emotions. But no one has demonstrated exactly how this works, Mr. Martin said.

But for all the planet’s seemingly inhospitable traits, “Venus has had plenty of time to evolve life on its own,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist Sanjay Limaye, who led the new study, in a press release. Limaye points to models that suggest Venus could have sustained a habitable climate with liquid water on its surface for as long as 2 billion years. “That’s much longer than is believed to have occurred on Mars,” says Limaye.

Jed Richardson, a scientist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and one of the researchers, said high-living costs, including tuition fees in some instances, might explain the results.

The effort to find Fazekas Sr. began in 2014, when University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers succeeded in returning the remains of another soldier to his family. That inspired them to reach out to Department of Defense officials the next year to propose a partnership to find the missing. It would become the university’s Missing in Action Recovery and Identification Project.

The two scientists arrived at the South Pole on November 1 and are part of a team of researchers from UW-Madison working at IceCube all year long. Associate Director of the program Albrecht Karle says the goal of IceCube is to, “Look for extremely energetic neutrinos which appear in energetic processes in the Universe.”

As the verdant hills of Wakanda are secretly enriched with the fictional metal vibranium in “Black Panther,” your average backyard also has hidden superpowers: Its soil can absorb and store a significant amount of carbon from the air, unexpectedly making such green spaces an important asset in the battle against climate change.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison knew the bald eagle population grew by leaps and bounds over the last 50 years. They just didn’t know why.