Kelly April Tyrrell

A vacuum tube holds a blood-fed strain of Aedes aegypti mosquito in place under a microscope.
Between 2004 and 2016, the number of people who acquired diseases from mosquitoes, ticks and flea bites tripled in the United States. These include Lyme disease, West Nile and dengue fever. Nine new diseases spread by mosquitoes and ticks, including Zika virus, were discovered or appeared here during that time. These statistics were […]

Combating ticks and mosquitoes in the Midwest

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The following comes from Adityarup Chakravorty, a science writer at the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison: Pick a word. Any word. To be able to speak aloud the word you picked needs exquisite coordination between several parts of the body. The brain, lungs, throat, voice box, tongue and […]

Mining the cerebellum for its role in speech

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A glade with the regional endemic wildflower Ozark coneflower (Echinacea paradoxa) in bloom, with a gum Bumelia tree in the background. Native wildflowers such as this coneflower are threatened by woody encroachment of glades.
The following is a guest post from Jesse Miller, a former graduate student at UW–Madison in the lab of Ellen Damschen and a current postdoctoral researcher at the University of California-Davis. He summarizes a paper he and his research team recently co-authored in the journal Landscape Ecology: Grasslands are home to […]

Fire may help Ozarks grasslands

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A tree shines yellow near the UW–Madison Arboretum
Each year, as August fades into September here in southern Wisconsin, it always seems to take me by surprise to see the bright greens of spring and summer subtly transition to the goldens and burgundys of autumn. The trees and prairies slowly changing their attire. “But isn’t it too soon?” […]

Why do leaves change color in the fall?

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Today (yesterday, as you read this) we departed Johannesburg, headed toward Madison by way of Atlanta. As I type this sentence, we are 7,371 miles away, six miles above the Earth, soon to be over ocean. Our South African journey culminated as it began, in the Cradle of Humankind, in pursuit of […]

Gifts and serendipity

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