New research (from UW–Madison’s Josh Pultorak and Catherine Marler) published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution shows that when these monogamous mice are separated from their mate and then reunited, the animals sometimes don’t handle it well—revealing a new side to their social lives and behavior.
“If you accept the arguments about water and life on Mars, then why shouldn’t we include Venus in that?” Sanjay Limaye, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, told Eos. “Venus had liquid water. It could have had the chance to evolve or sustain life that could be living in the habitable clouds.”
At a meeting here this week, convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM’s) Institute for Laboratory Animal Research, neuroscientist Jon Levine, who directs the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, likened the surge in demand to “a 10-alarm fire that’s about to be set.”
Primitive life might linger miles above, in murky Venusian clouds that drift through an orange sky. “A colony of microorganisms could survive and evolve in those clouds,” says Sanjay Limaye, senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
There’s a stigma linking violent crime with illegal immigrants and part of that has to do with the spotlight on MS-13 gang arrests across the country and specifically in Lake Worth. But, a state-by-state study says an increase in undocumented immigration actually makes communities safer. The study was conducted by sociologists Michael Light of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Ty Miller of Purdue University.
Paul Hutson, professor of pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin who has conducted psilocybin research, says he is wary of the drive for decriminalization. Psilocybin isn’t safe for some people — particularly those with paranoia or psychosis, he said.
It took biologist James Thomson, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison 14 years to achieve it in monkeys. Three years later, using donated embryos that had gone unused in fertility treatments, Thomson struck again, creating the world’s first human ES-cell line.
The Wisconsin Idea is a concept that university research can help stakeholders solve real world problems. The theory is more than a century old. UW–Madison biochemistry professor Mike Sussman says now is the time to rejuvenate the Idea and use innovation, collaboration, and passion to achieve Wisconsin’s full potential.
Five healthy chimpanzees in Uganda that died following a mysterious respiratory disease outbreak in 2013 were actually killed by a common human cold virus, scientists now say. The deaths in the small chimpanzee community followed an “explosive outbreak of severe coughing and sneezing,” according to study author Dr. Tony Goldberg, a professor with the University of Wisconsin’s School of Veterinary Medicine.
“This cropland expansion, driven in part by the ethanol mandate, has far-reaching impacts on the climate through its effects on the land and the carbon that it stores,” says Seth Spawn—lead author of the University of Wisconsin land use study and a graduate research assistant student at the Center for Sustainability and Global Environment at UW-Madison—adding that, “These impacts are significant and should be taken seriously.”
The 21st century has so far been a golden age of hominin discovery. New species like the 7-million-year-old Sahelanthropus tchadensis and the 300,000-year-old Homo naledi have added to our understanding of humanity’s past. And the finds will keep coming.“It doesn’t look like [we’re] sampling something that is running out,” says John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I think in part there’s a greater intensity of exploration right now.”
John Valley, a UW–Madison geoscientist, and UCLA paleobiologist William Schopf have analyzed 3.5-billion-year-old microscopic fossils encased in Australian rocks and found they do indeed represent ancient microbes — ones potentially so complex that life on our planet must have originated some 500 million years earlier.
UW–Madison pathobiological science professor Tony Goldberg a team of scientists working with chimps in Kibale National Park in Uganda have found that they can catch the common cold from humans — and don’t have any immunity. Many of the chimps developed respiratory problems, and some died.
The brains of young adults who had stressful childhoods from abuse, neglect or poverty respond poorly to signs of potential risks or rewards, according to a UW-Madison study that could provide a biological clue to harmful behavior.
University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor Seth Pollak worked with over 50 people around the age of 20, and found that those who had experienced extreme stress as kids were hampered in their ability to make good decisions as adults.
FactCheck.org examines claims made by Tennessee Sen. Rend Paul about research by psychology professor Kristin Shutts and a collaborator at Cornell on how children decide which foods are good and safe to eat.
Health care providers can protect babies by testing women of childbearing age for hepatitis C and curing those with the infection, said the research team led by Theresa Watts, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing.
There’s also the issue of false positives, which plague any prediction model aimed at identifying a minority group, said William T.L. Cox, a psychologist who studies stereotypes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As an infectious disease doctor, Nasia Safdar is a detective of sorts at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison.
“It turns out, if you look at all of the things that are associated with blue, they’re mostly positive,” explains Karen Schloss, an assistant professor of psychology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s really hard to think of negative blue things. A lot of things that we kind of think of as blue and bad aren’t really that blue.”
“If passing the virus by casual contact were easy, I think we would see a lot more of what we would call secondary transmission in a place like the United States,” said lead researcher Tom Friedrich, from the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
There are three distinct types of smile, a new study has revealed. People switch between ’reward’, ’affiliation’ and ’dominance’ smiles, using different facial muscle combinations to make them, according to researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In contrast, the University of Wisconsin in Madison offers a website with a long, easy reading list of its animal research highlights. It includes scores of findings with relevance to human or animal health, including the 2012 discovery in a rat model showing that iron deficiency worsens fetal alcohol syndrome, and the use of pigs to learn that Tasers can send the heart into an often-fatal abnormal rhythm.
The DNR began working on the study in 2014 with help from the UW-Madison, and financial support from NASA and the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Program.
[Spontaneous speech] “is too hard to score,” said neuropsychologist Sterling Johnson, of the University of Wisconsin, who studies brain function in Alzheimer’s disease. “But everyday speech is definitely a way of measuring cognitive decline. If people are noticing [a change in Trump’s language agility], that’s meaningful.”
According to two sources within the NIH who were briefed on the issue, the administration may pursue a new strategy in its quest for cuts, by proposing a 10 percent cap on the NIH’s indirect costs—the money it gives to grantees to support administration, equipment, libraries, IT, lighting, heating, electricity, and other overhead.
New research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests not only are Pokémon Go players walking more, they’re happy people.
“Deer are affecting understory communities in many different ways,” explains Autumn Sabo, a University of Wisconsin-Madison plant ecologist and the lead author of a new study that teases out some of the secondary impacts of white-tailed deer on forest ecosystems. “It is only in recent years that scientists have started to look at factors beyond herbivory.”
Researchers could reduce experiments on nonhuman primates by studying data that have already been collected to answer new questions, says David O’Connor, a pathologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Mother-of-pearl is an iridescent material that’s found in mollusk shells. It forms in layers, which allows it to reflect light and shimmer. But these layers could be useful in another way, according to Pupa Gilbert, a professor with the University of Wisconsin, Madison: They provide a good estimation of the temperatures they grow in.
Includes an interactive map—created by three students at the University of Wisconsin– Madison—that explores the maritime world of the colonial era.
The study (by cognitive neuroscientist Nathan Rose and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin in Madison) suggests that information can somehow be held among the synapses that connect neurons, even after conventional working memory has faded.
Now, in a paper published today (December 1) in Science, researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and their colleagues provide evidence for a different theory, in which information can be stored in working memory in an inactive neuronal state.
“The gut microbiome influences the host epigenome on a global scale,” said coauthor John Denu, an epigeneticist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “We discovered key communicators, or key molecules that communicate this information, to the host.”
Jumping worms, consisting of various non-native species from multiple genera, have become established in a number of eastern and southeastern states. In 2013, species from the genus Amynthas were confirmed for the first time in the Upper Midwest, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.
There have been developments in Miami and just this week the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control recently updates its guidelines. Dr. Katie Anthony, who is a Maternal Fetal Medicine Doctor at UW Health talks about the latest developments.
“Earthworms are the kind of organisms we call ecosystem engineers. They change the physical and chemical properties of the ecosystem as they dig and feed,” University of Wisconsin-Madison zoologist Monica Turner said in a statement. “But nobody really understood if these Asian worms would have the same effect as the European worms we have had here for many years.”
Jaime Martindale, librarian at UW–Madison’s Arthur H. Robinson Map Library, helped find the exact site in northern Wisconsin of the 1966 crash of an Air Force B-52 bomber.
In one study at University of Wisconsin-Madison, 90 people with knee osteoarthritis received either dextrose jabs, saline jabs or exercise therapy.
UW-Madison plans to study the academic effects of concussions in 200 Madison-area high school athletes.
Smokers may worry that trying to quit will alienate them from other smokers, said coauthor Megan E. Piper of the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But in practice, people who quit actually gain nonsmoking friends, she told Reuters Health by phone.
Toddlers who spend a lot of time in a noisy environment may have a harder time learning to speak, a small study suggests. That’s because background noise – especially the kind that comes from voices on the television or radio – can make it tough for young children to learn new words, said study co-author Brianna McMillan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Rhesus macaque monkeys make a good model for studying how Zika infects people, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison concluded Tuesday in Nature Communications.
“A sustained [Zika] infection during pregnancy is completely different from a normal infection,” study senior author David O’Connor of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told BuzzFeed News. The monkey results make sense, he said, given that other research has shown that the virus prefers the fetal brain and placenta over other tissue types.
In another advance, researchers at the University of Wisconsin reported on Tuesday that they have successfully infected rhesus macaques with an Asian strain of the Zika virus that is currently circulating in the Americas. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, shows that monkeys – which have immune responses similar to humans – can be used to study Zika.
Monkeys infected with Zika virus are protected from future infection, and pregnancy dramatically prolongs infection in monkeys, findings that could help in fighting the virus in people, UW-Madison researchers said Tuesday.
Scientists have developed a nonhuman primate model of Zika virus infection to better understand its course in humans, especially in pregnant women. David O’Connor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues injected eight rhesus macaques—two of them pregnant—with the Asian strain of the virus currently circulating in South and Central America.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Duke University found the virus persisted in the blood of pregnant monkeys for much longer — up to 70 days — compared to the 10 days it lasted in males and non-pregnant female monkeys.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers say this is good news for vaccine developers. Lead researcher Prof David O’Connor said: “It suggests the sort of immunity that occurs naturally is sufficient. If you can mimic that in a vaccine, you’ll likely have a very successful vaccine.”
A collaboration of NASA, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Snapshot Wisconsin aims to provide one of the richest and most comprehensive caches of wildlife data for any spot on our planet.
“We decided that the best thing for the community was that information be made available as widely as possible and freely available,” says David O’Connor, whose group at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is furthest along in studying Zika infection of pregnant monkeys.
But what if you could effectively enlarge antenna size by using the vehicle itself as an antenna? That’s what University of Wisconsin–Madison engineers are seeking to do as part of a project supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR).
One of the biggest mysteries: H. naledi’s age. Efforts are under way to date the fossils and sediment from which they were excavated with a variety of techniques, said paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
However, Dr. Scott Hebbring, an associate research scientist at Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation and a clinical adjunct Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, points out that the study findings are limited.
Craig Berridge, a neurobiologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, points out that this method only measures dopamine in real time, so wouldn’t help scientists track disorders linked to high or low levels of dopamine over a long period. “It’s probably going to be most useful in animal studies where we’re trying to understand the role of dopamine in various neural processes,” he says.
Habitat loss as humans reshape landscapes has loomed for decades as the main conservation problem for a lot of wildlife. It’s still important, says climate change ecologist Benjamin Zuckerberg of the University of Wisconsin?Madison. But along the southern boundary of the snowshoe hares’ range, climate change bringing skimpy snow covers has surpassed direct habitat loss as a threat, Zuckerberg and his colleagues say March 30 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Freelancers get flexibility in their schedules, the freedom to travel when necessary and the ability to choose projects they care about. But they also face a constant hustle, all-too-frequent low pay and countless business decisions — from setting prices to filing taxes. Freelance is now a commonly chosen path for journalism students (like freelance photographer Jake Naughton, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s undergraduate journalism program). Unfortunately, it’s not as commonly a part of teaching in journalism schools.
Anyone can follow the pregnancy of a monkey infected with Zika virus in real time, thanks to a University of Wisconsin–Madison experiment in data sharing that’s unusual for biology.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is about to take a closer look at the use of nonhuman primates in all federally funded U.S. research labs. ScienceInsider has learned that, in response to a congressional mandate, the agency will convene a workshop this summer to review the ethical policies and procedures surrounding work on monkeys, baboons, and related animals.
A new study from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Minnesota found lithium ion batteries used to power laptops and cell phones can be harmful to important microorganisms in soil.
