Kelly April Tyrrell

Today is Mandela Day. It is a worldwide event to celebrate the life of Nelson Mandela, a once-political prisoner in South Africa who went on to become the president of that nation and help it cast aside its system of racial oppression called apartheid. Mandela passed away in 2013 but […]

In Madison, honoring Nelson Mandela

by
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

by
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

by
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

by
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?

by