A new process triples the fraction of biomass converted to high-value products to nearly 80 percent, also tripling the expected rate of return for an investment in the technology from roughly 10 percent (for one end product) to 30 percent.
A team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles have used the cells of AHDS patients to recreate not only the disease, but a mimic of the patient’s blood-brain barrier in the laboratory dish using induced pluripotent stem cell technology.
Probing deeper into the South African cave system known as Rising Star, which last year yielded the largest cache of hominin fossils known to science, an international team of researchers has discovered another chamber with more remains of a newfound human relative, Homo naledi. The discovery of the new fossils representing the remains of at least three juvenile and adult specimens includes a “wonderfully complete skull,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks.
A new University of Wisconsin-Madison study shows that the electricity production associated with air conditioning causes emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide to increase by hundreds to thousands of metric tons, or 3 to 4 percent per degree Celsius (or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).
Using radioactive elements trapped in crystallized, cream-colored “veins” in New Mexican rock, geologists have peered back in time more than 400,000 years to illuminate a record of earthquakes along the Loma Blanca fault in the Rio Grande rift. It is the longest record of earthquakes ever documented on a fault.
An analysis just published online has broken new ground by finding gender differences in both symptoms and diagnoses of depression appearing at age 12.
UW-Madison researchers are part of an effort to develop a low-cost, easy-to-use system that aims to accelerate learning by stimulating nerves in the head and neck to boost neural activity in the brain.
After a 29-year quest, Ian Duncan, a professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has finally pinpointed the cause of a serious neurologic disease in a colony of rats.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of bacteriology has shown the first proof that a certain group of amoeba called dictyostelids can penetrate biofilms and eat the bacteria within.
Pokemon Go people are happy people. That’s the finding of media researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison who leapt to study the wildly popular mobile game shortly after its release in July 2016. Their work, newly published in the journal Media Psychology, shows that Pokemon Go users were more likely to be positive, friendly and physically active.
Despite the internet-dependent nature of our world, a thorough understanding of the internet’s physical makeup has only recently emerged, thanks to painstaking work by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers and their collaborators.
Building on efforts to tease out a new and mostly hidden feature of our galaxy, a team from UW-Madison’s astronomy department developed WHAM, a spectrometer capable of detecting the faint, diffuse light emanating from the space between the stars.
Combining theory with experiment, University of Wisconsin–Madison scientists are trying to understand how life can arise from non-life. Researchers at the UW–Madison Wisconsin Institute for Discovery are conducting experiments to test the idea that lifelike chemical reactions might develop readily under the right conditions. The work addresses some of the deepest mysteries in biology, and has implications for understanding how common life might be in the universe.
A study that used a new digital library and machine reading system to suck the factual marrow from millions of geologic publications dating back decades has unraveled a longstanding mystery of ancient life: Why did easy-to-see and once-common structures called stromatolites essentially cease forming over the long arc of earth history?
Ten images and two videos by University of Wisconsin–Madison students, faculty and staff have been named winners of the university's 2017 Cool Science Image Contest.
In a publication in the journal Nature released today (March 27, 2017), scientists from the Department of Biochemistry and Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have solved the structure of an enzyme caught in the act of attacking toluene — a chemical derived from wood and oil.
A new study by Waisman Center researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison looks at the daily experiences of the parents of children with autism spectrum disorder to provide a more detailed picture of the strengths and vulnerabilities of couples raising a child with ASD.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are using the decellularized husks of plants such as parsley, vanilla and orchids to form three-dimensional scaffolds that can then be primed and seeded with human stem cells to optimize their growth in the lab dish and, ultimately, create novel biomedical implants.
Ecologists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison are trying to understand why the midge population at an Icelandic lake can fluctuate by 100,000-fold across a decade, and what impact these massive swarms have on the surrounding landscape.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have made a surprising and potentially crucial discovery about Alexander disease, a rare and fatal neurological disorder with no known cure.
For decades, phosphorous has accumulated in Wisconsin soils. Though farmers have taken steps to reduce the quantity of the agricultural nutrient applied to and running off their fields, a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison reveals that a "legacy" of abundant soil phosphorus in the Yahara watershed of Southern Wisconsin has a large, direct and long-lasting impact on water quality.
Peter Krsko hauled 800 feet of hosing through the woods, drilled holes into the trees on his property in Wonewoc, Wisconsin, and for the first time, tapped his maples for the sap that will ultimately become maple syrup. While he was laboring, Krsko began to contemplate how trees fight gravity and move fluid from their roots deep in the ground to leaves and buds in the sky. That got him thinking about cells, the basic conduits of those fluids, and how they pack together to build the tissues and organs found in living things.
In an abandoned gold mine one mile beneath Lead, South Dakota, the cosmos quiets down enough to potentially hear the faint whispers of the universe’s most elusive material — dark matter. Shielded from the deluge of cosmic rays constantly showering the Earth’s surface, the mine, scientists think, will be the ideal setting for the most sensitive dark matter experiment to date.
The regenerative biology team at the Morgridge Institute for Research, led by stem cell pioneer and University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor James Thomson, is studying whether stem cell differentiation rates can be accelerated in the lab and made available to patients faster.
Plumbing a 90 million-year-old layer cake of sedimentary rock in Colorado, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University has found evidence confirming a critical theory of how the planets in our solar system behave in their orbits around the sun. The finding, published Feb. 23, 2017 in the journal Nature, is important because it provides the first hard proof for what scientists call the “chaotic solar system.”
Listeria, a common food-borne bacterium, may pose a greater risk of miscarriage in the early stages of pregnancy than appreciated, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Veterinary Medicine studying how pathogens affect fetal development and change the outcome of pregnancy.
The community of microorganisms that resides in the gut, known as the microbiome, has been shown to work in tandem with the genes of a host organism to regulate insulin secretion, a key variable in the onset of the metabolic disease diabetes. That is the primary finding of a study published this week by a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.
The National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine issued a report Tuesday focused on human genome editing. It lays out principles and recommendations for governments grappling with how to handle rapid advances in human genome-editing technology as it applies to human health and disease. Two University of Wisconsin–Madison experts served on the 22-member international committee that compiled the report.
Striking electron microscope pictures from inside the brains of mice suggest what happens in our own brain every day: Our synapses – the junctions between nerve cells - grow strong and large during the stimulation of daytime, then shrink by nearly 20 percent while we sleep, creating room for more growth and learning the next day.
The prospect of regenerating bone lost to cancer or trauma is a step closer to the clinic as University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists have identified two proteins found in bone marrow as key regulators of the master cells responsible for making new bone.
MADISON, Wis. — University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers have developed methods to observe gene editing in action, and they’re putting those capabilities to work to improve genetic engineering techniques.
Settling a persistent scientific controversy, a long-awaited report shows that restricting calories does indeed help rhesus monkeys live longer, healthier lives.
Writing this week (Jan. 10, 2017) in the journal eLife, a team led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Caitlin Pepperell and McMaster University's Hendrik Poinar provides insight into the everyday hazards of life in the late Byzantine Empire, sometime around the early 13th century, as well as the evolution of Staphylococcus saprophyticus, a common bacterial pathogen.
Active Atlantic hurricane periods, like the one we are in now, are not necessarily a harbinger of more, rapidly intensifying hurricanes along the U.S. coast, according to new research performed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
For the development of animals, nothing — with the exception of DNA — may be more important than oxygen in the atmosphere. A study now online in the February issue of Earth and Planetary Science Letters links the rise in oxygen to a rapid increase in the burial of sediment containing large amounts of carbon-rich organic matter.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a novel strategy to reprogram cells from one type to another in a more efficient and less biased manner than previous methods.
A team of researchers led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, professor of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, has developed technology that could improve the production of vaccines that protect people from influenza B.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison lab is challenging the idea that working memory remembers things through sustained brain activity. They caught brains tucking less-important information away somewhere beyond the reach of the tools that typically monitor brain activity.
A study of more than 5,000 Wisconsin lakes shows that nearly a quarter of them have become murkier in the past two decades. It also shows this trend could get worse as a changing climate leads to increased precipitation.
In a study published this month in the journal Child Development, UW-Madison researcher Hilary Miller shows preschool age kids often skip location words and lean on other relevant information to describe important spatial details.
OnLume Inc., a medical device company developing novel surgical lighting technology in collaboration with researchers led by Kevin Eliceiri at the Morgridge Institute for Research and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, today announced support from the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program to accelerate work on a fluorescence image-guided surgery (FIGS) system.
UW-Madison Professor James Steele’s new company, Lactic Solutions, is using genetic engineering to, instead of killing lactic acid bacteria with antibiotics, splicing in genes for ethanol production so these organisms produce ethanol, not lactic acid.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and Carbone Cancer Center have better defined a pro-growth signaling pathway common to many cancers that, when blocked, kills cancer cells but leaves healthy cells comparatively unharmed. The study, published Nov. 21 in the journal Nature Cell Biology, could establish new avenues of therapeutic treatments for many types of solid tumors.
Writing online this week (Nov. 23, 2016) in the journal Molecular Cell, a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison describes new research helping tease out the mechanics of how the gut microbiome communicates with the cells of its host to switch genes on and off. The upshot of the study, another indictment of the so-called Western diet (high in saturated fats, sugar and red meat), reveals how the metabolites produced by the bacteria in the stomach chemically communicate with cells, including cells far beyond the colon, to dictate gene expression and health in its host.
MADISON, Wis. – New insights into the mechanism behind how plants age may help scientists better understand crop yields, nutrient allocation, and even the timing and duration of fall leaf color.
MADISON, Wis. — Computer chips in development at the University of Wisconsin–Madison could make future computers more efficient and powerful by combining tasks usually kept separate by design.
The prospect of creating artery “banks” available for cardiovascular surgery, bypassing the need to harvest vessels from the patient, could transform treatment of many common heart and vascular ailments. But it’s a big leap from concept to reality.
The design is confidential, but essentially the device substitutes for the second hand, producing a bulge that holds the insulin needle stable in the subcutaneous fat.
NASA, Space.com, Sky & Telescope magazine, observatories everywhere — just about any entity with a stake in the night sky — have been busy telling us how great the full moon will be Nov. 14 because the satellite will be closer to Earth than it’s been for almost 70 years. But to the casual observer, the moon will look little different from any other full moon.
Biochemists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have created the first atlas that maps where molecular tools that can switch genes on and off will bind to the human genome. It is a development they say could enable these tools to be targeted to specific parts of an individual’s genome for use in precision medicine, developing therapies and treating disease.
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