Skip to main content

Tag: featured

Your Smile Can Convey Much More Than Happiness

Wisconsin Public Radio

A smile is often associated with happiness, but experience, and new research, will show you that it can actually say much more. In a world in which facial expressions can often convey what is unsaid, people will often use different smiles in different scenarios.

An American Dialect Dictionary Is Dying Out. Here Are Some Of Its Best Words.

HuffPost

Bizmaroon, doodinkus and splo. For over 50 years, a group of intrepid lexicographers have been documenting words like these ? regional terms and phrases that were once popular in states like Wisconsin, Kansas and Tennessee. Collected together in the Dictionary of American Regional English, the words make up a fascinating repository for old-fashioned, funny-sounding and unmistakably local language quirks across the United States.

Science doesn’t explain tech’s diversity problem — history does

The Verge

All of this adds up to a perfectly good explanation for the bizarre gender skew in Silicon Valley. It might be a personally discomfiting one to some, but that’s not a good reason to dismiss the long history of women contributing to tech and instead turn to bad science. “It’s almost strange to have to rationally refute it, because it is just so wrong,” says tech historian Marie Hicks, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the book Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing

Behind the lens

Madison Magazine

Filming my third short documentary, “Voices,”was a transformative experience. “Voices” is a 10-minute documentary chronicling the inception of the first Afro-American Cultural Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1973 and the opening of the newly minted Black Cultural Center in 2017. It tells the erased narratives of black students at UW–Madison.

Coming full circle at UW-Madison

Madison Magazine

Jo Handelsman had numerous options when she changed jobs this past January. Part of that was because of the position she was leaving: advising former President Barack Obama on science. Not many jobs take you into the Oval Office.

UW-Madison researchers: Types of smiles send different messages in social situations

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A smile, like a picture, is worth a thousand words. Although most commonly associated with happiness, smiles can indicate nervousness, embarrassment and even misery. To add to their mystique and versatility, smiles can express sophisticated messages that influence the behavior of others in social situations.

The original TV chef

Madison Magazine

Ever since I can remember, food has fascinated me. When I was a young child, my parents frequently took me out to eat—to the kinds of places you didn’t take kids. I collected menus and received a subscription to Gourmet magazine on my 10th birthday. It was inevitable that I would want to learn how to cook. My father instigated it when he gave me a meat thermometer and a dollar and told me to take out the Sunday roast before my mother overcooked it. But what would become a lifelong passion began with Carson Gulley and his TV show.

Alumni Park opens this fall

Madison Magazine

University of Wisconsin–Madison graduates will have a space devoted to them on campus when Alumni Park officially opens on Oct. 6. The 1.3-acre green space, located between Memorial Union and the Red Gym, will contain more than 50 museum-like exhibits throughout the gardens.

Tomatoes Can Turn Plant-Eaters Into Cannibals, Study Shows

Newsweek

Plants are often seen as taking a passive role in their environments, just hanging out and soaking up the sunlight. But that impression is wrong—plants have many sophisticated ways of influencing their environment, and other plants and animals in it. And this includes leading herbivores down the garden path to cannibalism.

Summer Reading Books: The Ties That Bind Colleges

New York Times

At least four schools, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have chosen a best seller written by a young conservative: J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” which explores issues of social breakdown among working-class whites, such as drug use and child neglect.

The committee that chose “Hillbilly Elegy” had a “vigorous discussion” about it, said Sheila Stoeckel, director for teaching and learning programs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison libraries. “We’re picking books there are not easy answers for. If we picked a book that there was an easy answer for, it wouldn’t be as lively of a discussion or exploration.”

America’s urban-rural divides

The Economist

Noted: Kathy Cramer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison followed the same groups of voters in Wisconsin from 2007 to 2012 and wrote about her findings in “The Politics of Resentment”. This is how she describes the atmosphere during a heated recall referendum that was won by Governor Scott Walker: “People stole yard signs from each other. They stopped talking to one another. They spat on each other. They even tried to run each other over, even if they were married to one another. I am not kidding.”

How scientists modeled a deadly tornado with an insanely powerful computer

Popular Science

Supercell thunderstorms are giant tempests with powerful rotating updrafts at their cores—and one out of every four or five spawn tornadoes. Most of these twisters are little, but some can grow fierce. To predict the rare killers, and thus give more targeted warnings, meteorologists need to better understand how tornadoes form. But simulating a supercell thunderstorm and the tornado it produces involves hundreds of terabytes of data—an amount so vast that Leigh Orf, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, had to use a supercomputer to make it happen.

What’s Next For The Democrats?

Wisconsin Public Radio

Following Democratic candidate Jonathan Ossoff’s loss for Georgia’s 6th congressional seat, party members are trying to regain their footings and figure out what’s next for the party. University of Wisconsin’s Barry Burden joins us to talk about what the future could hold for the Democrats.

Lyme Disease: Inside America’s Mysterious Epidemic

Rolling Stone

Noted: And of course, climate change plays a role. “Any insect-borne disease is very sensitive to climate conditions,” says Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute University of Wisconsin. “Warmer temperatures speed up the development of tick larvae and nymphs, and that can influence transmission dynamics. Modeling studies of climate change effects on Lyme disease show a northward expansion of the disease,” says Patz. “Lyme is already moving north into Canada.”

Holy cow! Moo-Day Brunch features feasts, facts

Portage Daily Register

There are about 300 agriculture-related research projects going on at the Arlington Agricultural Research Facility, a part of the University of Wisconsin’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

But only one of them – the dairy research facility, opened in 2008 – was a focus of Saturday’s event.

UW-Madison student’s Food Shed idea to offer fresh produce while cutting food waste

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Every day while working in a research lab, Hannah DePorter sees produce wasting away in compost piles. “There were just hundreds of pounds (of vegetables) left there,” DePorter said. “I would just come home with a ton of vegetables and my friends would take it within three seconds and it would all be gone.” That put the University of Wisconsin-Madison student’s wheels in motion to develop Food Shed, an initiative to support local farmers and reduce food waste.

A Wisconsin grad is using art to educate about the school’s prairie past

Big Ten Network

A native of the Midwest, Liz Anna Kozik spent much of her childhood surrounded by prairies. Yet it wasn’t until Kozik left her home in Naperville, Illinois, for her undergrad studies in Rhode Island that she began to appreciate their beauty. She opted to go to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin – not just so she could be close to the prairie again, but also to study the grassy habitat’s history.

Pardeeville twins carry on family legacy in Marines

Portage Daily Register

For twin brothers Cogan and Cole Kirchenwitz, joining the U.S. Marine Corps continues a family legacy, but the road ahead is the result of decisions they made entirely on their own.The Pardeeville brothers, 22, received their commissioning certificates in May in a ceremony after graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Reserve Officers Training Corps. They were among 35 graduates who completed ROTC training, and in the military they will follow in the footsteps of their father and grandfather.

The science behind a perfectly-toasted marshmallow

The Verge

Noted: But take the marshmallow out of the heat, and it’ll deflate — although the stretched out gelatin doesn’t bounce back. “It shrinks to a shriveled mass,” Richard Hartel, a food scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells The Verge in an email. “Don’t get me started on Peeps jousting.”

UW-Madison Professor Archiving Podcasts For Future Generations

Wisconsin Public Radio

Jeremy Morris is a futuristic thinker. While some are heralding podcasts as a trendy new medium, Morris is worrying about what will become of them in the future when we may not use iPhones, iPods or MP3s. Morris, an assistant professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, founded PodcastRE, a project that aims to archive podcasts.

Lawmakers Show Sympathy for Trump Plan to Squeeze Research Costs

Chronicle of Higher Education

As talk of extreme budget-cutting is again in vogue in Washington, that argument appears to have resonance. But an attempt to reduce research overhead could pose the most serious threat not to well-endowed institutions like Harvard, but to state research universities and cash-strapped private colleges.

At issue are grant payments known as indirect-cost reimbursements. Those are the additional amounts that agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation provide to universities that win research grants, to help cover administrative and facilities costs.