While Hurricane Harvey washed through neighborhoods in and around Houston last week, a small group of University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists noticed something unusual off the coast of Africa.
Atlantic hurricane seasons over the years have been shaped by many complex factors, explained Jim Kossin, a hurricane scientist with NOAA and the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Those include large scale ocean currents, air pollution — which tends to cool the ocean down — and climate change, which does the opposite.
Hurricane Harvey was a 1-in-1,000-year flood event, according to new calculations by the University of Wisconsin’s Space Science and Engineering Center at UW-Madison. The research scientist who mapped this calculation explains why Harvey’s record shattering rainfall over Southeast Texas and Louisiana was so devastating.
With just one parking space for every five people, on a campus of roughly 65,000, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has one of the lowest parking ratios of any major university in the country.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s American Family Children’s Hospital will be one of 20 sites to offer one of the most promising and expensive new cancer drugs, one that will come with what amounts to a limited warranty.
Noted: Jihae Shin, Professor at the University of Wisconsin, designed an experiment to prove the most creative ideas come after procrastination. She asked people to come up with business ideas: one group shared ideas immediately, while another group was asked to play a simple computer game for 5 minutes before sharing their idea.
Startup accelerator gener8tor is launching a new program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to help students build products and start companies.
John Hall, a military historian from UW-Madison has been tapped to write the on-going history of United States counter-terrorism efforts for the Pentagon. We’ll talk with him about his new task and what it means to act as an official record of history.
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.
As an undergraduate nursing student at UW-Madison, Maichou Lor tried three ways of getting information about cancer screening from Hmong adults: using written surveys with true-false or check-box answers, and reading questions out loud.
Andy Mendez, who will be a junior at McFarland High School this fall and is interested in becoming a pharmacist, said his eyes were opened when he attended the UW-Madison Pharmacy Summer Program.
One innovative program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health aims to reverse the trend by training obstetrician/gynecologists in rural areas with the goal of having them practice in the area.
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.
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
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.
Although officials from Wisconsin and Notre Dame began talking more than a decade ago about seeing their football programs meet on the field, the final push toward a successful two-game agreement was UW’s 2016 opener against LSU at Lambeau Field.
When an opening for a historian for the Joint Chiefs of Staff opened a few months ago, applicants needed a unique set of qualifications.
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.
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.
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.
Derrick Tindal loves comic book superheroes.
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.
College students notoriously rely on cheap, easy food like ramen noodles. But a new program on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is trying change that by making fresh produce an easy option for students, too. It’s called the UW Campus Food Shed.
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.
When Bud Selig steps to the podium next Sunday in Cooperstown, N.Y., to deliver his acceptance speech during induction ceremonies for the Baseball Hall of Fame, there will be many familiar faces in what is expected to be an enormous crowd.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a big-idea powerhouse.
The U.S. Department of Energy announced Monday the University of Wisconsin-Madison will receive a new, five-year round of funding for its energy research center that has produced 160 patents and spawned five start-up companies in its 10-year history.
A chunk of ice the size of Delaware broke off from the Antarctic Peninsula this week. We’ll learn about why this happened and what it means for climate change around the world and close to home in Wisconsin.
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.
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.”
There is a little room at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that is filled with the eyeballs of animals — everything from the duck-billed platypus to the two-toed sloth to the boa constrictor.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
One of the most prominent citizens of Wisconsin’s early history continues to recognize excellence in education today.
Noted: Heat kills ten times more people in the U.S. than tornados or other extreme weather events, says Richard Keller, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of medical history.
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.
It’s no secret Donald Trump benefited from rural voters. But Democrat or Republican, they usually tell Katherine Cramer – who has spent a decade visiting residents of small-town Wisconsin – the same thing: it’s the cities that get all the breaks, and then have the gall to look down on them, too
When Hannah DePorter’s plant breeding and genetics lab at UW-Madison grows beets, only a fraction of what the students harvest winds up being used for research.
Every summer, about 60 graduate students with diverse backgrounds and interests come together at the UW-Madison School of Business for a week of intensive schooling about what it takes to start a tech-based company.
Every day while working in a university lab, biology student Hannah DePorter sees produce grown for research wasting away in compost piles.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are using oil that comes from a gland on chickens’ tails to improve survival at fish farms. The discovery could have global implications for the Atlantic salmon industry.
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.
The state’s retirement system was one of the things that brought me to Wisconsin.
There’s an online dating site for nearly everybody, but can too many choices be problematic? Live at Four talks with professor Catalina Toma, one of the authors of a recent University of Wisconsin study, that reveals choice overload can raise the stakes.
Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are seeking to do what has only become possible in recent years: use imaging technologies to illuminate the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease and its effect on the still-living brain.
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.
“It’s always exciting to be here,” said Schroeder as she watched members of her team check the measurements on the westernmost pit. “This is the third consecutive summer on this project to discover and explore what daily life at Aztalan was like 900 to 1,000 years ago.”
A UW-Madison professor says it’s the golden age for podcasts, but he’s worried some of those podcasts may soon disappear.
Interviewed: Susan Paskewitz talks about the upcoming tick season, and ways we can protect ourselves from getting bitten.
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.
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.”
Noted: “The idea is, if you hear a word, does that help you see something?” said Gary Lupyan, a researcher and psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The price to buy nothing has gone up over the last 10 years, and an exclusive group of donors is very interested in finding out what the next 10 will bring.
A pre-college program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that partners with schools to help prepare minority and low-income students for college is narrowing its focus to Milwaukee and Madison public schools, the university announced Monday.
