Category: UW-Madison Related

To watch the evolution of Hurricane Alex between January 6 and 14, click on the screenshot above. That will launch an animation of false-color imagery acquired by the GOES-13 weather satellite showing water vapor in the atmosphere. Blue, white and green colors show where water vapor is highest. (The animation is from the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, which runs the ever-awesome CIMSS Satellite Blog.)

(Video) For the first time, an international competition is being held on American soil. The competition judges the quality of sausages and ham, and is being held at the UW’s Institutes for Discovery hosted by the UW Meat Sciences Extension. Over 2,500 sausages and hams were submitted for evaluation.

Noted: Patrick Nowlin won $41 million in 2007. He admits he’s proudest, though, of his contribution to end diabetes.

“We were able to set up a $2 million trust fund to research diabetes right up here at the UW, basically paying for a researcher’s salary for the past couple of years,” he said.

A brief period of lake-effect snow was spotted Monday morning by the UW’s Atmospheric Oceanic Space Sciences rooftop camera.

The lake-effect snow event was reported over Lake Mendota, which is quite unusual, according to News 3 meteorologist Karin Swanson.

Gloria Ladson-Billings leads a list of five UW-Madison professors who are ranked in the top 200 nationally for their influence on education policy and practice … Ladson-Billings ranked 5th; Sara Goldrick-Rab 13th; Adam Gamoran tied for 69th; John Witte 138th and Geoffrey Borman tied for the 150 spot.

Kahala Brands announced that Dr. Maya Warren will join the company as tastemaster and food scientist for portfolio brands Cold Stone Creamery and Pinkberry. Says Michael Serruya, chairman and chief executive officer of Kahala Brands: “Maya, who received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Food Science, has vast knowledge of frozen aerated products, so we are really excited to have her on board.”

The UW-Madison law professor who helped free Steven Avery after a wrongful conviction in the 1980s says “Making a Murderer,” the popular Netflix documentary about his 2007 homicide trial, illustrates problems in the criminal justice system that affect many cases beyond Avery’s. Professor Keith Findley, a co-director of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, said his organization is not currently representing Avery, whose supporters say he was wrongfully convicted in the 2005 death of 25-year-old photographer Teresa Halbach.

For over four years, scientists have been arguing over whether or not to do experiments that could make more dangerous forms of certain viruses — influenza, SARS, or MERS — that could potentially start a pandemic in people if those creations got out of the lab.

CIMSS total precipitable water product is shown, with logo, around 47 seconds into the video. You can find it hovering over Minnesota and the Dakotas.

Noted: It wasn’t until 1988 — after working in the Legislature as a budget analyst and aide, among other jobs — that he graduated from the UW-Madison in history and secondary education.

Noted: In December, Faulkner and Epic set up an endowment to fund three faculty associate positions in the UW-Madison’s computer sciences department, where student enrollment has nearly doubled over the last five years.

An effort by a UW campus group is helping a group of people that probably didn’t expect it. “Love Your Melon” is selling hats–for each one purchased, another hat went to a child with cancer. Through the program, some area police officers are helping those kids and other needy people in the community.

At least for today, officers Jessica McLay and Emily Samson are fashion experts. They’re handing out these knitted hats, to the city’s homeless.

“Not only did we get to help a child at UW but we got to help UW Madison Love Your Melon crew, someone in the community who needs some help staying warm,” said officer Samson.

There were so many things about Bo Ryan that made him a great head basketball coach. From the day he was hired at UW-Madison in 2001, Ryan was a coach with confidence.

He said at the time, “People have expectations. We hope their expectations are met, but we have expectations also and the funny part about that is they might be higher than anybody else’s in this room.”

Noted: Rifelj earned both his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the latter in 2003. He lives in Wauwatosa.

Noted: Laugen said the service, owned by Trek, worked with city and UW officials to come up with a network of bike stations that would serve riders but not interfere with snow removal operations.

A UW-Madison graduate has received a big honor for helping discover a drug that’s saved tens of millions of lives worldwide.

William Campbell received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine during a Nobel Day ceremony on Thursday in Stockholm, Sweden.

The squash, corn, peppers, carrots, kale — just about all of the ingredients that went into the dishes — were some of the early results of a UW-Madison program that has brought professors, plant breeders, organic farmers and some of the city’s top chefs together with the goal of creating more flavorful fruits and vegetables for local agriculture.

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has extended the deadline to fill its managing director position until June, a WARF spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Noted: Dr. Richard Ralston, professor emeritus in African and Caribbean History in the Department of Afro-American Studies and Integrated Liberal Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles when Kwanzaa’s origins developed in southern California. Ralston heard about the celebration after the Watts rebellion and understood that something wonderful and positive had come out of the destructive event.

Live from Paris, researchers and leaders from UW-Madison and Wisconsin will report from COP21, the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

It’s not easy for U.W. Rheumatologist Dr. Abdul Halabi to talk about Syria.

“That’s how I visit nowadays,” Dr. Halabi points to pictures he finds from Google Earth of his home.

“It’s basically how you see your place of birth.”

Noted: The Village of Shorewood Hills received $22,400 for the University Avenue Trail extension connection between City of Middleton’s and UW-Madison’s trail system.

Trumbo’s fight against the blacklist comes to life in a new movie, “Trumbo,” opening Wednesday at Point Cinemas, and starring Bryan Cranston (“Breaking Bad”) as the author. The film, which is already getting some Oscar buzz, may also draw attention to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Trumbo donated 45 boxes of his materials, including screenplays, drafts, personal letters and photographs.

With general safety protocols set in place for students abroad, the University of Wisconsin IAP office was put to the test in wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris.

To ensure the safety of UW students, the university has many security measures in place for students traveling abroad.

Noted: Driving home to Wisconsin, he realized “I really was a Woodland Indian,” says seventy-one-year-old Truman Lowe, professor emeritus at UW–Madison and an internationally renowned artist whose work has been shown in the White House garden. “There’s a certain aroma about the water and the land.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Lowe’s former project assistant, Janice Rice, a Ho-Chunk who retired in 2015 from her longtime position as an outreach librarian at UW–Madison.

Noted: The list of scientists calling for delisting includes former or current University of Wisconsin professors Scott Craven, Tom Heberlein and Tim Van Deelen, as well as Scott Hygnstrom of UW-Stevens Point, Ed Bangs of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Montana, and Gary Alt, former deer and bear ecologist in Pennsylvania.

Science has learned that the letters, sent by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), targeted U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins and NIH researcher Stephen Suomi, revealing their home addresses and phone numbers and urging their neighbors to call and visit them. The tactic is the latest attempt by the animal rights group to shut down monkey behavioral experiments at Suomi’s Poolesville, Maryland, laboratory, and critics say it crosses the line.

University of Wisconsin graduate students Chris and Katie Hardwick’s love story began when she saw him blindfolded, solving a Rubik’s cube.

The two met at a Mensa Convention — an event put on by the world’s largest high IQ society, Mensa International — in Orlando, Florida in 2006. Geographic Information Systems Capstone Certificate Program student Katie Hardwick said Chris Hardwick was delivering a talk on the process of blindfolded Rubik’s cube solving.

Q&A with John Young, UW-Madison meteorology professor for 49 years and former chair of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department.

Noted: Gruener is a student at University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying abroad and living in Britain. He was visiting Henken over the weekend when the attacks occurred.

“We Gotta Get Out Of This Place,” written by Craig Werner (who teaches literature, music and culture in the Department of Afro-American Studies) and Doug Bradley (retired academic staff member and distinguished lecturer), suggests that popular protest songs included in depictions of the war — like Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” — weren’t the only music on the mixtapes service members played to lift their spirits in the face of isolation from loved ones and physical danger.

Noted: In a telling article Click wrote for a University of Wisconsin publication, The Antenna, in 2010, she discusses her feelings about the role of television newscasters during a crisis.