Focus: Hidden - Wisconsin

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Variety of topics available for media registration

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Co-D Therapeutics, a University of Wisconsin-Madison spinoff, is developing a three-drug cocktail to battle a wide range of cancers. The first target for Co-D is angiosarcoma, a rare and lethal cancer that arises from blood vessels.

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Flooring can be made from any number of sustainable materials, making it, generally, an eco-friendly feature in homes and businesses alike. Now, flooring could be even more "green," thanks to an inexpensive, simple method developed by University of Wisconsin-Madison materials engineers that allows them to convert footsteps into usable electricity.

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Federal designation would help expand services for growing population of Latino students.

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In Canada, growing industrial hemp was legalized in 1998. Eighteen years later, producers still face many challenges.

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Soil management and crop productivity closely tied

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Of the many elusive grails of agricultural biotechnology, the ability to confer nitrogen fixation into non-leguminous plants such as cereals ranks near the very top.

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Scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) have found a way to nearly double the efficiency with which a commonly used industrial yeast strain converts plant sugars to biofuel. The newly engineered “super yeast” could boost the economics of making ethanol, specialty biofuels and bioproducts.

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Florida may be famous for its beaches, but its soil is much more complex. The Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) October 15th Soils Matter blog post explains there’s more to this state than white sand.

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When scientists reported in 2014 that they had successfully engineered a poplar plant “designed for deconstruction,” the finding made international news. The highly degradable poplar, the first of its kind, could substantially reduce the energy use and cost of converting biomass to a number of products, including biofuels, pulp and paper. Now, some of those same researchers are reporting a surprising new revelation.

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University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have described in great detail how to fabricate and use transparent graphene neural electrode arrays in applications in electrophysiology, fluorescent microscopy, optical coherence tomography, and optogenetics.

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Symposium summarizes USAID’s Feed the Future gains, goals

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Five University of Wisconsin campuses have worked together to create a model online program for nurses to earn bachelor's degrees.

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In a new study, researchers at the USDA-Agricultural Research Service have calculated how much chicken litter farmers need to apply to cotton crops to maximize profits.

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Assessing multiple biophysical and socioeconomic outcomes

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A proposal by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to seek endangered status for the rusty-patched bumblebee has focused renewed attention on bumblebees living at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. This 1,200-acre natural area in Madison still has wild populations of the rare insect, which was fairly common until about 20 years ago.

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Spring is beginning earlier than its historical average in three-quarters of United States’ national parks studied in new research that employed models created by UWM climatologist Mark Schwartz.

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International Year of Pulses highlights role of sustainable crops, nutritious foods

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The health of upriver streams, or headwaters, is vital to the function and biodiversity of downstream waters. By 1990, farm pollution in Northern Ireland had damaged over half of these small tributaries. Reforms started in 1990 have made progress.

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Conference tour tells story of desert resilience

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Soil is all around us and easy to ignore. However, locked inside is a dynamic ecosystem of amazing complexity. The Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) October 1st Soils Matter blog post explains how soil’s physical, chemical, and biological activities make soil more than dirt.

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The research identifies 17 rare human genetic variations associated with risk factors for diseases.

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"Rockd" serves both amateur rock lovers and professional geologists. For amateurs, "the goal is to help people discover the natural history that is recorded all around them. People see rocks at highway cuts, and some may wonder what they are and when they formed. The answers to many of these questions exist in the databases that we tap into."

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Anne Basting of UW-Milwaukee's Peck School of the Arts has been named a MacArthur Fellow for her work in encouraging the elderly to become involved with the arts.

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Agriculture and soil science fit with environmental health

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Wastewater from oil drilling and hydraulic fracturing – or fracking – is often laden with salts and can spill, contaminating soils. In a recent study, researchers at North Dakota State University tested a method that extracted a large percentage of the salt present in soils contaminated by brine spills.

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As many as half of people are blind to motion in some part of their field of vision, but the deficit doesn’t have anything to do with the eyes. In a new study, University of Wisconsin–Madison psychology Professor Bas Rokers and collaborators in the Netherlands have shown that motion blindness is a failure of the brain to properly interpret sensory information — a type of deficit called agnosia.

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High value cropping systems to be discussed

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As scientists continue finding evidence for life in the ocean more than 3 billion years ago, those ancient fossils pose a paradox that raises questions about whether there was more land mass than previously thought.

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To fill in the blanks on mitochondria, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison deleted 174 genes, one by one, in yeast. They then subjected the yeast to high-intensity mass spectrometry to measure unprecedented detail on thousands of metabolic products, including proteins, intermediate chemicals called metabolites, and lipids.

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Several solutions adaptable by agricultural systems to be discussed

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As solar cells produce a greater proportion of total electric power, a fundamental limitation remains: the dark of night when solar cells go to sleep. Lithium-ion batteries are too expensive a solution to use on something as massive as the electric grid. Song Jin, a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a better idea: integrating the solar cell with a large-capacity battery.

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New frontiers of soil and plant sciences may grow crops in space

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The promise of stem cells to treat cardiovascular disease may soon be a step closer to clinical application as scientists from three institutions seek to perfect and test three-dimensional “heart patches” in a large animal model — the last big hurdle before trials in human patients.

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Plant diversity in intercropping leads to more diversity below ground too. Researchers work to find the right combination for optimal crop and soil performance.

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New research published Monday (Sept. 19) in the journal Nature Climate Change by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and the University of Wisconsin–Madison illuminates where and why novel species combinations are likely to emerge due to recent changes in temperature and precipitation.

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Although small in acreage planted, they have high nutritional and environmental value

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Unleashing the creativity of farmers and agroecologists

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Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found a switch that redirects helper cells in the peripheral nervous system into "repair" mode, a form that restores damaged axons.

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Millions of years ago, the ancestor of modern rattlesnakes was endowed with a genetic arsenal of toxic weaponry. But in a relatively short period of evolutionary time, different types of snakes kept different types of toxin genes, and shed others.

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MADISON, Wis. — The University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Engineering is the new home of a unique machine capable of milling in three dimensions with nanometer precision. The machine, called the ROBONANO α-0iB, is the first of its kind in North America.

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Underneath our feet, soil’s complex system of tiny channels has huge implications for water. The Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) September 15th Soils Matter blog post explains how water’s movement through soil affects us all.

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Farmers have been using a mix-and-match approach to practices for growing their organic veggies. Which combination of practices was best, however, was uncertain. Recent research sheds light on long-term effects of different combinations to productivity and soil.

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Milwaukee-based artist Jan Serr and her husband, John Shannon, have committed $1 million to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts for the creation and operation of a multidisciplinary arts studio in a former Ford Model T plant.

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Understanding root zone-soil interaction key to increasing sustainability

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Separating evaporation measurements from transpiration could be a key to better management practices

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MADISON, Wis. - Computer chip makers continuously strive to pack more transistors in less space, yet as the size of those transistors approaches the atomic scale, there are physical limits on how small they are able to make the patterns for the circuitry.

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New research from the University of Wisconsin–Madison shows that Asian jumping worms, an invasive species first found in Wisconsin in 2013, may do their work too well, speeding up the exit of nutrients from the soil before plants can process them.