Category: Research

Six-Legged Livestock Could Solve Food Shortages — Sustainably

In the Midwest, we’re used to seeing big fields dotted with cattle and steel barns bustling with broiler chickens. Beef, poultry, and pork are common in our daily meals, whether mixed in pasta or placed on a bun. But in many countries, where food shortages are common, such protein abundance is a luxury. To help …

Nelson Postdoc Coauthors Paper that Suggests Satellite Alerts May Reduce Deforestation in Africa

Research led by Fanny Moffette, a postdoctoral researcher in applied economics and an affiliate of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, gleans new insight into the efficacy of using the Global Land Analysis and Discovery system (GLAD) to reduce deforestation.  

Grad student helping organize PPE production, COVID response in developing countries

While her University of Wisconsin–Madison engineering classmates were landing jobs or applying to graduate school, Rebecca Alcock was preparing for a summer of volunteer work in a Guatemalan mountain town and trying to sort through her uncertainty about the future. During those three months at the Engineers Without Borders office in Joyabaj in Guatemala’s Western …

Chancellor speaks on COVID-19 research at Nanjing Tech Week 2020

“Chinese scientists are currently leading several of the most promising research projects at UW–Madison related to COVID-19,” said UW–Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank, as part of her recorded remarks at last week’s “Nanjing Tech Week 2020,” held in the city of Nanjing, capital of China’s Jiangsu Province. Chancellor Blank’s comments concluded the morning session of “Innovative …

Lessons from Kathmandu

Inside a restaurant at the foothills of the Himalayas, Elizabeth Sumiec danced to music with her new friends and her host family. A few days prior, those same people had been strangers, and she knew little about the place they lived. In the short time in between, Sumiec bonded with her Nepalese host family without …

Anthropology professor Karen Strier recognized as prominent primate conservationist in Brazil

Karen Strier, a Vilas research professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has been featured in the Women in Conservation series by National Geographic Brazil. For 38 years, Strier has maintained a long-term study site on a protected reserve in southeastern Brazil near the city of Caratinga, in the state of Minas Gerais, where she studies a species of …

Driven by Earth’s orbit, climate changes in Africa may have aided human migration

In 1961, John Kutzbach, then a recent college graduate, was stationed in France as an aviation weather forecaster for the U.S. Air Force. There, he found himself exploring the storied caves of Dordogne, including the prehistoric painted caves at Lascoux. Thinking about the ancient people and animals who would have gathered in these caves for …

Clinical trial for Ebola vaccine developed at UW–Madison underway in Japan

As of this week, a phase one clinical trial to test a potential new Ebola vaccine developed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison is underway in Japan. Fifteen healthy young men* will receive two doses of the experimental vaccine. If the first group tolerates the vaccine, an additional group of up to 20 volunteers …

Borneo and Papua New Guinea | The Sounds of Biodiversity

It’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words. To Zuzana Burivalova, an audio recording is worth a thousand pictures. That’s the beauty of bioacoustics, Burivalova’s area of focus as a new faculty member in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology. She’s using the methods of this emerging science to better understand biodiversity …

New Potato Helps Farmers Weather the Frost

In a country with more than 5,000 potato varieties, you might not expect the arrival of another one to be a big deal. But this is Peru, where the potato was first domesticated and still plays a vital role in national identity. In Spanish, you might call it patrimonio or orgullo; in English, it translates …