Ask Ms. Scientist: crunchy food and dogs
By Jordan Gaal and Maggie Liu | Sep. 11, 2017Why do we crave crunchy foods? Is my dog really color blind?
Why do we crave crunchy foods? Is my dog really color blind?
The human genome is like a blueprint which lays out how each of us are built, how we function in society and sometimes even how we die.
In a week, one of the summer’s most hotly anticipated events will arrive, as Americans everywhere finalize plans to travel to a 70 mile wide strip of land stretching from Oregon to South Carolina. “It’s the return of the corona after one hundred years,” said Jim Lattis, director and co-founder of the UW Space Place.
Where did the moon come from? Why is it hard to focus while using our cell phones?
Like an inoperable tumor inside a patient’s brain, cancer has rooted itself deep within our society.
The Badgerloop team unveiled their latest pod on June 17 in the Engineering Hall to the public. This coming August, they will take their pod and travel to Hawthorne, California to compete in the SpaceX Hyperloop Competition II. Sponsors and community members got up close to the pod and talked with Badgerloop members who worked on different aspects of the pod, including electrical systems, virtual reality, propulsion, feasibility and more. Badgerloop is a student organization at UW-Madison comprising of mostly undergraduate students.
Drug discovery and fungi have gone hand in hand since pharmacology emerged as a relevant science.
Where do beaches come from? What’s the difference between a sun tan and a sun burn?
Scientists and engineers at UW-Madison developed an economically feasible process to synthesize a possible substitute for petroleum-derived chemicals from non-edible biomass. This substitute, called 1,5-pentanediol, is a type of alpha, omega-diol that has two alcohol groups attached at the beginning and the end of a long carbon chain, which is mostly synthesized as a byproduct of other commercially produced diols. The research was published this April in the journal, ChemSusChem. “We hope to be able to make larger quantities and volumes and be able to put it in the applications that are currently used for other molecules,” said Zachary Brentzel, a graduate research assistant in college of engineering at UW-Madison and the first author of this paper.
How did we get here? This is one of the most deep-seated questions in the human race. It is also David Baum’s, exobiologist in the department of botany at UW Madison, research. Life must have started at some moment when the “soupy mixture” of chemicals and minerals stopped being random and became alive. But what does it mean to be alive?
Erik Vance had always loved the ocean, but he couldn’t find a way to create a lasting impact on ocean health. That changed after he began his career as a science writer.
In the fourth episode of Sciencecast: Energy Series, Paul Wilson, Grainger professor of Nuclear engineering in the Department of Engineering Physics, discusses nuclear energy.
What gives a diamond its shine? What is a “superbug”?
Previous research explained the trademark protein accumulation by assuming an Alexander disease patient had a reduced ability to degrade and clear the protein. However, a recent study discovered the rate of GFAP protein degradation is actually increased in the pathology of the disease.
Those who experience an emotional trauma are at a greater risk for revictimization due in part to an onset of post traumatic stress disorder.
Four billion years ago, Earth was a hostile place with a thin atmosphere made mainly of carbon dioxide, volcanoes everywhere and oxygen levels too low to support air-breathing organisms. Nonetheless, a recent discovery of 4.28—3.75 billion-year-old microfossils suggests life existed under such conditions.
Researchers at the UW-Madison recently found that listeriosis, the infection caused by the foodborne bacteria called Listeria, damages the placenta and results in miscarriages during the early stages of pregnancy in non-human primates.
Two UW-Madison School of Nursing faculty members earned awards from the Midwest Nursing Research Society for their research on gerontological nursing.
In the third episode of Sciencecast: Energy Series, Tim Donohue, the director of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, explains biofuels and his ideal "George Jetson" future of clean fuels using biomass.
Although genetically engineered foods made their first appearance on grocery store shelves back in 1994, they still remain a topic of contention in today’s society. While some believe GE foods are the key to feeding Earth’s growing population, others see them as a threat to human and environmental health. These attitudes are shaped by a myriad of different stakeholders. The consensus of a National Academy of Sciences committee, as noted in their recent report on GE crops, is that no GE food created to date poses a threat to environmental or human health.