Scientists today disclosed a new method to convert lignin, a biomass waste product, into simple chemicals. The innovation is an important step toward replacing petroleum-based fuels and chemicals with biorenewable materials, says Shannon Stahl, an expert in “green chemistry” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Applying a similar approach to the 3-D printer, a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison students are commercializing a device that adds color to a printer that now dominates the market. Their business idea was one of two student projects to receive an Igniter grant from the university’s Discovery to Product (D2P) office.
Hollow coring drills designed and managed by UW-Madison’s Ice Drilling Design and Operations (IDDO) program are used to extract ice cores that can analyze the past atmosphere. Shaun Marcott, an assistant professor of geoscience at UW-Madison, was the first author of a paper published today in the journal Nature documenting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere between 23,000 and 9,000 years ago, based on data from an 11,000-foot hole in Antarctica.
For the first time, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Florida Atlantic University (FAU), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have measured the forces that act on a swimming animal and the energy the animal must expend to move through the water.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has been awarded an $8.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to create a research center focused on urological health. The George O’Brien Center at UW-Madison is a collaboration with the University of Massachusetts-Boston to enhance the diagnosis and treatment of male urinary symptoms associated with hormones, aging, obesity and benign prostate enlargement.
In a new study published this month in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers highlight the urban heat island effect in Madison: The city’s concentrated asphalt, brick and concrete lead to higher temperatures than its nonurban surroundings.
Developing invisible implantable medical sensor arrays, a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers has overcome a major technological hurdle in researchers’ efforts to understand the brain. The team described its technology, which has applications in fields ranging from neuroscience to cardiac care and even contact lenses, in the Oct. 20 issue of the online journal Nature Communications.
Francis Halzen, the University of Wisconsin-Madison physicist who was the driving force behind the giant neutrino telescope known as IceCube at the South Pole, has been named a winner of the 2014 American Ingenuity Award.
Over the past two decades, the resident communities of birds that attend eastern North America’s backyard bird feeders in winter have quietly been remade, most likely as a result of a warming climate.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Minnesota and Argonne National Laboratory will explore ways to produce renewable plastic precursors and other substances from biomass with a recently announced $3.3 million grant from the United States Department of Energy.
Breast cancer may inspire more public discussion, advocacy and charitable giving than almost any other disease besides HIV and AIDS. But people rarely talk about the specific experiences to which cancer patients are subjected. Especially the localization wire. For a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers and clinicians, that presented an opportunity to develop a solution that is technologically elegant, precise and patient-centric.
In a new study, scientists examined whether corn and grassland fields could provide both biomass for bioenergy production and bountiful bird habitat. The research team found that grasslands supported more bird species than cornfields did, and new findings indicate grassland fields may represent an acceptable tradeoff between creating biomass for bioenergy and providing habitat for grassland birds.
Tracey Holloway was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University in 2002, Ph.D. from Princeton University freshly in hand, when she and five colleagues teamed up to create an informal support network for other women in their field. Today, the Earth Science Women’s Network (ESWN) is a diverse group of more than 2,000 women across the globe
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Yoshihiro Kawaoka has been recognized as a 2014 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award recipient for his efforts to understand and prevent pandemic influenza.
A new smartphone app developed by Justin Vandenbroucke, a UW-Madison assistant professor of physics, can essentially turn Android phones into pocket cosmic ray detectors. The app, DECO, uses the phone's camera to capture energetic subatomic light particles and log data. The project, which is primarily educational, is supported by grants from the American Physical Society as well as the Knight Foundation and the Simon-Strauss Foundation.
New research led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Washington State Department of Natural Resources provides some of the first rigorous field data to test whether fires that burn in areas impacted by mountain pine beetles are more ecologically severe than in those not attacked by the native bug. In a study published this week, UW-Madison zoology professor Monica Turner and her graduate student, Brian Harvey, show pine beetle outbreaks contributed little to the severity of six wildfires in 2011.
A study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that was recently awarded a two-year $300,000 grant by the National Science Foundation is exploring questions confronting the legal profession in its effort to improve access to justice for low-income unrepresented civil litigants.
A multidisciplinary team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Morgridge Institute for Research is creating a faster, more affordable way to screen for neural toxins, helping flag chemicals that may harm human development.
The number of extremely hot days in Eastern and Midwestern U.S. cities is projected to triple by mid-century, according to a new study. In presenting their synthesis, the study authors seek to encourage efforts that benefit both the health of the planet and the health of people.
Ultrasound is a safe, affordable and noninvasive way to see internal structures, including the developing fetus. Ultrasound can also “see” other soft tissue — including tendons, which attach muscles to bone, and ligaments, which attach bone to bone. Ray Vanderby, a professor of biomedical engineering and orthopedics and rehabilitation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is commercializing an ultrasound method to analyze the condition of soft tissue.
Rising temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns may get the lion’s share of our climate change attention, but predators may want to give some thought to wind, according to a University of Wisconsin Madison zoologist’s study, which is among the first to demonstrate the way “global stilling” may alter predator-prey relationships.
No matter how many times it’s demonstrated, it’s still hard to envision bacteria as social, communicating creatures. But by using a signaling system called “quorum sensing,” these single-celled organisms radically alter their behavior to suit their population. Helen Blackwell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been making artificial compounds that mimic the natural quorum-sensing signals.
The link between a protein typically associated with Alzheimer’s disease and its impact on memory and cognition may not be as clear as once thought, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Waisman Center. The researchers looked at the role of the brain protein amyloid-β in adults living with Down syndrome, a genetic condition that leaves people more susceptible to developing Alzheimer’s.
William Aylward, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of classics, recently completed a synthesis of the epic archaeological rescue excavation of Zeugma before its inundation beneath the waters of a reservoir. “Excavations at Zeugma,” the three-volume work edited by Aylward, gathers the descriptions and interpretations of nearly 30 scholars involved in either the rescue work or the decade-long analysis of the objects and buildings unearthed at the city.
The Wisconsin State Herbarium, director Kenneth Cameron is spearheading a project to “digitize” images and data on invasive species from the Great Lakes basin. The $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation will also be disbursed to other natural history museums. Together, these institutions expect to digitize 1.73 million specimens.
A new study from the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison offers hope for those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Researchers there have shown that a breathing-based meditation practice called Sudarshan Kriya Yoga can be an effective treatment for PTSD.
In a new study published today, Sept. 8, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has added a new wrinkle to the cell differentiation equation, showing that the stiffness of the surfaces on which stem cells are grown can exert a profound influence on cell fate.
A tabletop motor using an entirely new driving principle is under development at the headquarters of C-Motive Technologies, a startup business that is commercializing technology from the College of Engineering at UW-Madison.
The mechanical force that a single fungal cell or bacterial colony exerts on a plant cell may seem vanishingly small, but it plays a heavy role in setting up some of the most fundamental symbiotic relationships in biology, according to a new study led by Jean-Michel Ané, a professor of agronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Cloud computing, which allows users of technology to tap into remote, shared infrastructure and services, is a major facet of today’s world. The University of Wisconsin-Madison has been chosen to be part of a National Science Foundation-funded project called CloudLab — a joint effort of university and industry teams for the development of cloud infrastructure and fostering the high-level research that it supports.
As brain surgeons test new procedures and drugs to treat conditions ranging from psychiatric disorders to brain cancer, accuracy is becoming an ever-greater issue. In treating the brain, the state of the art today starts with images from a magnetic resonance (MR) scanner, usually made a few days before surgery. To bring the full promise of MR into the operating room, UW-Madison professor Walter Block has formed a company called InseRT MRI to develop software that allows surgeons to observe the brain in real time on an MR machine during surgery.
As climate change alters habitats for birds and bees and everything in between, so too does the way humans decide to use land. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Aarhus University in Denmark have, for the first time, found a way to determine the potential combined impacts of both climate and land-use change on plants, animals and ecosystems across the country.
Seventeen cutting-edge projects at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are beneficiaries of the first round of awards by the Discovery to Product program. The grants will support innovations in many fields of research at the university, and all projects will enter an “accelerator” process that will offer guidance toward reaching marketability.
In research to be published in the journal Ecology — and currently posted online as a preprint — Thomas Givnish, a professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, attempts to resolve a debate as to which factors actually set maximum tree height, and how their relative importance varies in different parts of the world.
When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently requested a figure on global temperature trends for its annual report, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Zhengyu Liu knew that was going to be a problem. Liu and his colleagues describe a consistent global warming trend over the course of the Holocene counter to a study published last year.
A multi-institutional team has resolved a long-unanswered question about how two of the world’s most common substances interact. In a paper published recently in the journal Nature Communications, Manos Mavrikakis, professor of chemical and biological engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his collaborators report fundamental discoveries about how water reacts with metal oxides.
A fundamental chemical pathway that all plants use to create an essential amino acid needed by all animals to make proteins has now been traced to two groups of ancient bacteria.
Between 2002 and 2013, rip currents were involved in 85 deaths and 256 rescues in the Great Lakes. But this still hasn’t changed the common misperception that rip currents are only a threat in the ocean. Currently, the lakes’ only safety measures against rip currents rely on observation of factors like wave heights and water levels. UW-Madison professor Chin Wu says it's possible to anticipate them based on possible causes in weather, the current’s interaction with structures along the shore, and formations in the sea floor and sandbars.
A team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has identified the genes and enzymes that create a promising compound — the 19 carbon furan-containing fatty acid (19Fu-FA). The compound has a variety of potential uses as a biological alternative for compounds currently derived from fossil fuels.
As production of shale gas soars, the industry's effects on nature and wildlife remain largely unexplored, according to a study by a group of conservation biologists published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment on Aug. 1.
Copious corn growing in tiny backyard plots? Roses blooming in December? Thanks to technology that the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Richard Vierstra has been developing for years, these things may soon be possible. And now, new findings out of the genetics professor’s lab promise to advance that technology even further.
A multi-institutional team of researchers has developed a new nanoscale agent for imaging the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. This safe, noninvasive method for assessing the function and properties of the GI tract in real time could lead to better diagnosis and treatment of gut diseases.
To share is human. And the means to share personal news — good and bad — have exploded over the last decade, particularly social media and texting. But until now, all research about what is known as “social sharing,” or the act of telling others about the important events in our lives, has been restricted to face-to-face interactions.
Wisconsin’s newest invasive species has done its best to stay underground, but the voracious, numerous and mysterious Asian crazy worm has emerged for the first time in the state on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
The one-cylinder test engine in the basement of a University of Wisconsin-Madison lab is connected to a life-support system of pipes, tubes, ducts and cables. You might think that the engine resembles a patient in intensive care, but in this case, the patient is not sick. Instead, the elaborate monitoring system shows that the engine can convert 59.5 percent of the chemical energy in its fuel into motion — significantly better than the 52 percent maximum in modern diesel truck engines.
The ability to reliably and safely make in the laboratory all of the different types of cells in human blood is one key step closer to reality.
Secure Decisions, a leading provider of assessment tools to enhance software security, is partnering with the Software Assurance Marketplace (SWAMP) to build a powerful and publicly accessible resource to improve the software that drives everyday life.
When it comes to science, socioeconomic status may widen confidence gaps among the least and most educated groups in society, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Science, Media and the Public research group.
Mindfulness practice in the classroom may be one way to help students improve their academic performance, nurture their emotional well-being and bolster their behavior.
It was Aldo Leopold — the 20th century conservationist, father of wildlife management and former University of Wisconsin faculty member, who once said, “There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other and the relation of people to the land.”
RSS
Medicine keyboard_arrow_right
Sciencekeyboard_arrow_right
Life keyboard_arrow_right
Business keyboard_arrow_right
Journal News keyboard_arrow_right
By Location keyboard_arrow_right
Meetings, Grants, and Events keyboard_arrow_right