UW In The News

To help cranberry growers, UW researchers prototype crop-scanning technology

As a University of Wisconsin-Madison computer and electrical engineering professor, Susan Hagness doesn’t typically field emails about cranberry farming. Her background is in cancer detection, not agriculture.

University Research Park wants to add coffee shops, companies and camaraderie

Change is afoot at University Research Park — at least, if the park’s leaders and tenants have their way — and it could urbanize the sprawling tech-transfer center into a place where you can buy a cup of coffee, grab lunch or play a game of racquetball.

Cold Temperatures Are Not All Bad News: 3 Reasons to Be Thankful for Frigid Weather

Susan Paskewitz, the chair of the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Popular Science that cold is a limiting factor for the Asian tiger mosquito, which can carry the Zika virus.

UW-Madison introduces new sexual harassment and sexual violence policy

University of Wisconsin campuses are updating or introducing new sexual harassment and sexual violence policies, following a mandate from the regents in December 2016 saying each campus needed its own, set guidelines.

The future of nuclear power? Think small

“The NuScale reactor has crossed a very important safety threshold,” said Todd Allen, professor of nuclear engineering at University of Wisconsin. “It’s an inflection point for advanced reactor designs. The question we can’t answer yet is, will they make it work in the market?”

Discovery of ancient stone tools rewrites the history of technology in India

“These data show that was wrong,” says John Hawks, an anthropology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study. Today’s findings reveal that Levallois tools emerged in India roughly 385,000 years ago — right around the same time they started showing up in Africa and Europe. That means “India is part of this network of cultural innovation that included Neanderthals and Africans,” Hawks says. Michael Petraglia, a professor of human evolution at the Max Planck Institute in Germany who also did not participate in the research, agrees that the discovery is a key piece of the puzzle. “It fills an important gap in our knowledge of an important crossroads,” he says.

Super Bowl 2018: Undrafted rookie Corey Clement could be the X-factor for Eagles

ST. PAUL, Minn. — The underdog theme has been embraced like no other by the Super Bowl-bound Philadelphia Eagles, and that continued into Monday’s Opening Night at St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center, where a handful of rubber dog masks surfaced among media and players.

What should I take for flu? Remedies that do and don’t help

Cough medicines that contain opioids like codeine should never be given to children, the Food and Drug Administration warned in early January.“Children should not take any cough or cold medications,” said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at the University of Wisconsin Health. “They are not beneficial and might be harmful.”

Be ready to fight if a pet insurer, like a people insurer, denies a valid claim

“These are very different cancers,” he told me. “It’s like saying a dog had an infection and then got another infection years later, so it’s a preexisting condition.”Dr. David Vail, an oncologist at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine, said he “would tend to agree that the two are unlikely to be related.”

In Cave in Israel, Scientists Find Jawbone Fossil From Oldest Modern Human Out of Africa

“This would be the earliest modern human anyone has found outside of Africa, ever,” said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Wisconsin, Madison who was not involved in the study.

Jaw fossil discovered in Israel looks human, but it’s much older than it should be

This new find adds another important clue towards solving the mystery of this earlier spread of humans out of Africa, write the authors of a commentary published with the study. “I think that’s pretty cool,” agrees John Hawks, an paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “You have a modern-looking upper jaw in Israel that was there much earlier than it was supposed to have been.” He cautions, however, against getting too attached to the label Homo sapiens: with only a small chunk of bone to go on, it’s hard to say for certain. It’s possible that it could be from another, unnamed relative of modern day people, for example.

The Lovely Tale of an Adorable Squid and Its Glowing Partner

A few years ago, in a laboratory at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, I walked into a mostly dark room, with a single light illuminating a plastic cup. Within the cup were dozens of tiny white blobs, each smaller than a pea. They were baby Hawaiian bobtail squid, and they were adorable. Their diminutive arms trailed behind them as they bobbed in the water, and the pigment cells that would eventually allow their adult selves to change color gave their infant faces a freckled appearance.

UW-Madison School of Social Work conference reaches out to community

Protein Plight: Brazil Steals U.S. Soybean Share in China

Another study – conducted by the University of Wisconsin and paid for by the Illinois Soybean Association and the U.S. Soybean Export Council – suggests that farmers can better compete with synthetic alternatives by planting beans with a specific amino acid balance.

A Push To Get Older Adults In Better Shape For Surgery

The Patient Preferences Project at University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health has developed and is testing a list of useful questions for older patients. Even if your local hospital doesn’t have a program like those at Duke, Michigan Medicine or UCSF, you can ask your surgeon to address these questions.

The ‘Ice Road Truckers of science’ and why we need them

Government money applied to things that we as a society think are important — from space travel to the internet — produces major results in every area, in the medical, mechanical, electric, and even retail space.To stay competitive in this global economy, we must value and support basic research. And that means allowing the “Ice Road Truckers of science” to pursue their curiosity in order to drive discovery.

Rebecca Blank is chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Brad Schwartz is CEO of the biomedical Morgridge Institute for Research in Madison.

GOP Rigs Elections: Gerrymandering, Voter-ID Laws, Dark Money

African-Americans, who voted for Clinton over Trump by an 88-to-8 margin, were three times more likely than whites to be kept from the polls. “Thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of otherwise eligible people were deterred from voting by the ID law,” said University of Wisconsin political scientist Kenneth Mayer.

Lunar eclipse 2018: how to watch this “super” blue moon turn red

A supermoon is when these two cycles match up and we have a full moon that’s near its perigee. The result is that the full “super” moon appears slightly larger and slightly brighter to us in the sky. This occurs about one in every 14 full moons, Jim Lattis, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin Madison, notes.

New Developments in Eagle Protection

The bald eagle population is still rebounding in the United States. But a new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the National Park Service and the U.S. Geological Survey found that protecting eagle nests from humans can help aid in their reproduction. We talk with one of the researchers about what this means.

Fossil Discoveries Challenge Ideas About Earth’s Start

Last month, researchers lobbed another salvo in the decades-long debate about the nature of these forms. They are indeed fossil life, and they date to 3.465 billion years ago, according to John Valley, a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin. If Valley and his team are right, the fossils imply that life diversified remarkably early in the planet’s tumultuous youth.

A Proust-Apocalyptic Story

I perfectly understand that I live in a fantasy world, but I hold out hope that, as John Keating desires in “Dead Poets Society,” culture will again teach people to think for themselves, take agency, and carpe diem. If a missile alert came in on my phone, I’d keep doing what I already am: reading a good book and listening to Robert Schumann’s “Träumerei.”

-Mr. Schmiege teaches Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Counting cranberries gets easier with new technology developed at UW-Madison

With annual harvests of more than 5 million barrels — each barrel is 100 pounds of fruit — Wisconsin grows more than half of all commercial cranberries on the planet.

U.S. government to shield health workers under ‘religious freedom’

Professionals take an oath to serve people who are sick, Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison explained. They are also the only ones licensed to provide those services and must do so without discrimination, she said.

A California City’s Plan to Turn Indebted Millennials Into Local Doctors

Riverside’s death rates from cancer, liver disease, and heart disease are well above the state average, for example. In 2016, the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ranked each California county by overall health outcomes, and pegged Riverside at 40th out of 57. (Fellow Inland Empire counties San Bernardino and Imperial counties fared even worse.)

Maps As Storytelling

A new startup project out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Discovery to Product program sees maps as storytelling. We speak with LifeMapping founder and UW-Madison grad Dean Olsen about how the twists and turns in his own life inspired him to create the software.

UW Botany Professor Grows Plants In Space

Since the 1960s, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been studying how plants will grow in space. We talk with a Professor of Botany at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who has been leading a research team to study the effects of growing plants in a zero gravity environment.

Why Lupita Nyong’o’s upcoming children’s book is a major step for kids, authors, book publishers and basically everyone

The push for more diverse characters in children’s book has been a slow climb. Only 14% of kids books published in the US had black, Latino, Asian or Native American main characters featured, according to a 2015 study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What’s more, around 80% of the people in editorial — authors, illustrators, editors — are white, according to industry data from publisher Lee and Low.

The Ad Industry Keeps Selling An American Dream That Most Aren’t Living

Would you consider yourself middle class? Chances are, whether you’re wealthy, lower income, or actually somewhere in the middle, you still identify as middle class. There are plenty of reasons why that is–“middle class” might be the most used word in modern politics–but a new University of Wisconsin study posits that it could also be because ads are telling us we’re middle class.

Case of 13 California kids allegedly tortured ‘fits this pattern we’ve been tracking for a long time’

A 2014 study by University of Wisconsin pediatrician Barbara Knox and colleagues found that in 38 cases of severe child abuse, 47 percent of parents had never enrolled their children in school or pulled their youngsters out when abuse was suspected and told authorities they were home schooling.

Ready for an anti-Trump wave in November? Look at Wisconsin.

Democrats won Wisconsin in every presidential election from 1988 to 2012, but Hillary Clinton’s strategists made the mistake of taking the state for granted in 2016. What they missed were trends brilliantly analyzed by Katherine J. Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, in her prophetic book, “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.” It was published eight months before the 2016 vote.