Tag: featured

MADISON – As the floodwaters recede in Houston following Hurricane Harvey, millions of mosquitoes have emerged to blanket southeastern Texas, hampering recovery efforts and raising public health concerns about mosquito-borne diseases.

Irma was spotted before it was a hurricane by satellites tracking it for UW-Madison’s Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies.

People generally think that editing human genes might be OK, but most think that there’s a clear line that shouldn’t be crossed when it comes to changing traits that would be passed down to new generations, according to a survey reported Thursday.

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.

Noted: A few years after retiring as an Air Force colonel in 1968, Haig came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to become executive director of the Space Science and Engineering Center, where he was instrumental in the development of the first global meteorological system.

If you’re a hungry caterpillar and you’ve got a choice between eating a plant or another caterpillar, which do you chose?

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.

Prairie dogs with a taste for peanut butter, scientists reported recently, can now be vaccinated against plague — the Black Death that killed much of Europe centuries ago.

New technology developed in part by UW-Madison researchers is speeding up the discovery time for new molecules from fungi.  We’ll find out how it works and why fungi are a potential-rich place to look for new disease-fighting agents.

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.