Whether it’s a stretchy mozzarella or an easy-to-slice Swiss, cheesemakers aim to provide consumers with high quality, consistent products. To this end, they often try to improve texture and flavor by controlling for factors like acidity and the breakdown of milk proteins by enzymes. However, the key to better Cheddar may lie in undissolved calcium salts, according to a report by UW-Madison cheese scientists published recently in the International Dairy Journal.
Health care is something that most people working in Wisconsin’s offices, factories, stores and other places of employment don’t have to worry about. For Wisconsin farm operators, the story is different.
Wildlife managers stunned Wisconsin’s conservation community in 2002 when they announced that three whitetail deer shot near Mt. Horeb had tested positive for Chronic Wasting Disease. This was the first time CWD had been found in the wild east of the Mississippi River . Unchecked, the incurable brain-wasting disease could seriously disrupt Wisconsin ‘s much-loved (and hunted) deer herd.
Maximizing crop yields is fairly simple — good soil, cooperative weather, a productive hybrid with plenty of fertilizer. But we’re no longer living in a simple world. Fifty years ago, most farmers — and many university researchers — worked to maximize yields. Today, the big challenge is to minimize environmental impacts while maintaining farm profits.
Patents and business plans were far from Jiwan Palta’s mind when he joined the faculty of the College of Agricultural and Life Science’s horticulture department in 1982. Twenty-three years later, he’s well acquainted with both.
Dairy farmers wear a lot of hats during a typical day – mechanic, nutritionist, agronomist, accountant, and veterinarian. They do those jobs well, but sometimes a fresh look at a farm operation can come in handy – like when potential profits are slipping away and none of the usual tricks seem to staunch the flow.
Hundreds of UW-Madison students head to Mexico each spring. Almost all of them spend their time at beach resorts, shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of other U.S. students. They return with great suntans. UW-Madison students Chad Staudinger and Kristin Noeldner also went to Mexico. They spent their time in central Mexico, shoulder to shoulder with Mexican farm crews and hundreds of cows.
By merging the latest principles of lithography and self-assembly block-copolymer techniques, researchers at UW-Madison and the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland developed a hybrid approach that maximizes the benefits and minimizes the limitations of each approach to nanomanufacturing.
College of Engineering researchers have discovered a new way to make a diesel-like liquid fuel from carbohydrates commonly found in plants. “It’s a very efficient process,” says researcher George Huber. “The fuel produced contains 90 percent of the energy found in the carbohydrate and hydrogen feed. If you look at a carbohydrate source such as corn, our new process has the potential to create twice the energy as is created in using corn to make ethanol.”
Addressing a persistent debate in the field of dyslexia research, scientists at UW-Madison and the University of Southern California have disproved the popular theory that deficits in certain visual processes cause the spelling and reading woes commonly suffered by dyslexics.
A study by John DeLamater of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Morgan Sill of the University of Michigan, published in the May 2005 issue of The Journal of Sex Research, found that the sexual desire of older people is influenced more by attitudes toward sex than by biological factors such as medication.
When the long-awaited Highway 151 bypass around Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, opens later this year, vehicles traveling northbound will cross DeNeveu Creek on a bridge like no other in the country.
With the twin forces of summer travel and road construction poised for their annual collision, reporters may be interested in projects at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that focus on the safety and reliability of America’s highways. UW-Madison is a national leader in transportation research and is home to an interdisciplinary program on transportation engineering and urban planning.
What if the speed of light is a constant only most of the time? What if gravity sometimes pushed instead of pulled? Scientists are increasingly asking what would seem like far-out questions regarding the laws and rules of physics after discovering conditions and materials where the rules don’t quite apply.
For a young child whose mother is imprisoned, life’s prospects are predictably grim. But a new study, the first empirical examination of the attachment relationships of young children whose mothers are in prison, suggests that simple interventions may prevent a downward social spiral for a rapidly growing and vulnerable population.
Although University of Wisconsin-Madison professors Wesley Smith and David Schwartz operate in completely different scientific spheres – one seeking to explore the fundamental properties of matter and the other trying to wrest free the secrets of the human genome – both have the same dilemma: They are awash in a sea of data.
By bringing together a diverse group of scientific interests to share a large, distributed computing resource, the Grid Laboratory of Wisconsin (GLOW) itself has become an important subject of research.
The scientist who played a pivotal role in the discovery of ivermectin — the drug that combats river blindness in humans, heartworm in dogs and a broad spectrum of parasites in horses and other livestock — will receive an honorary degree from UW-Madison on Friday, May 13.
“Podcasting” is the new buzzword for sending audio over the Internet, and faculty and staff on campus are looking at it as an outreach vehicle and an academic tool.
Compounds that occur naturally in cranberries may be good for the heart, researchers at UW-Madison have found.