Tag: featured

MADISON—Nothing to worry about—really. But just to be sure, scientists will be collecting mosquito eggs in Rock, Walworth and other state-line counties this summer to make sure the Zika virus can’t creep north. They’ll set traps in June, said Susan M. Paskewitz, a professor of entomology at UW-Madison.

What’s two plus five? Three times nine? The square route of 16? Now name a vegetable. Chances are, you picked a carrot. Why? Because when we do math, we tend to think of the color orange. And which vegetable is indelibly linked to orange? The humble but ubiquitous carrot.

Government wildlife authorities and some conservation groups have for years argued that allowing some legal hunting can help reduce the illegal killing of threatened carnivores like wolves and grizzly bears.

Scientists unveiled the gene in carrots that gives rise to carotenoids, a critical source of Vitamin A and the pigment that turns some fruits and vegetables bright orange or red.

Yi Fuxian, one of the most vocal opponents of China’s birth control policies, says the government should scrap the remaining measures to address a looming demographic crisis that is pushing the nation into Japan’s path of economic stagnation.

Everyone seems to meditate: Coworkers plan to vacation at a meditation retreat, friends chat about favorite meditation apps and countless articles praise the practice. Does meditation live up to the hype?” The science is very much in an embryonic state,” says Richard Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, but adding “meditation plays an important part of the maintenance of well-being.”

Noted: “When mindfulness is combined with cognitive therapy, one of the things we see is people being trained to regard their thoughts as just thoughts and not to get ensnared by them,” said Richard Davidson, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study.

New research has found the Great Lakes may have a type of tsunami after all. They are not tsunamis caused by earthquakes. These tsunamis are caused by organized areas of thunderstorms.

University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers say a study performed on mice with fragile X syndrome shows a possible path to improving memory and learning for people with the condition. Fragile X is the most common cause of inherited intellectual disability.

University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists are looking into whether climate change may lead to the faster spread of diseases like the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus.

As more infections become resistant to antibiotics, a University of Wisconsin research team’s search for new ways to knock down bad bacteria and fungi has become increasingly urgent.

They may not wipe out entire cities or occur after earthquakes, but two University of Wisconsin researchers say the Great Lakes have tsunamis that can wreak havoc of their own.

People are less receptive to new information when they are offended. That was one of the key findings of a 2013 study by communication scientists at the University of Wisconsin. Researchers tested the effect of “uncivil” reader comments appended to online articles — remarks like, “You must be dumb if you think X.””The results were both surprising and disturbing,” study co-authors Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele wrote in a summary published by the New York Times. “Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.”They called this phenomenon the “nasty effect.”

A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have devised a cheap method to make impressively fast and flexible silicon-based transistors. Their technique involves using beams of electrons to create reusable molds of the patterns they want, as well as a very, very tiny knife to etch minuscule trenches into those patterns. The result is a small, bendy transistor — though not as small as a the Navy’s single-molecule design — that can transmit data wirelessly and has the potential to operate at a whopping 110 gigahertz. In other words, it’s capable of some extremely fast computing and could lead to wearables a lot more powerful than those available today.

The rusty-patched bumble bee used to be abundant, including in Wisconsin. This story starts at UW-Madison’s Arboretum.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine have developed lab mice that can be used for testing vaccines and antivirals against the Zika virus.