University of Wisconsin–Madison

Biology

One thing Ryan Bushong noticed about winter in Madison was the silence. An enthusiastic birder, he hadn’t seen or heard any birds in months. “So when I looked out my dorm window … and saw a large, white bird race past, I was shocked,” Bushong says. He rushed out of […]

Anyone can get involved in scientific discovery – and you ...

June 9, 2022 by rlee47

Hawaiian bobtail squid typically grow to around a golf ball in size, and have no outer protection from predators besides counter-illumination. — Imagine you’re a plucky, golf ball-sized squid swimming in the clear blue ocean on a moonlit night. Your round shape means a distinctive shadow casts on the ocean floor thanks to the light of the moon, and predators are looking for prey by night. How do you, a small piece […]

How charming squid and glowing bacteria make a match in ...

May 1, 2019 by Tyler Fox

Students examine their bacterial cultures as they check on how their variables affect the development of antibiotic stimuli. — More and more bacteria are becoming resistant to traditional antibiotics, and this resistance has become a focal point of research at many universities. Common infections like pneumonia, tuberculosis and salmonellosis are becoming harder to treat with today’s antibiotic medicines – creating an urgent need for new antibiotics. Tiny Earth was […]

Tiny Earth: Advancing antibiotic discoveries through undergraduate research

March 27, 2019 by Tyler Fox

A greyscale electron microscopy image of a plant cell is shown on the left, the false-color rendering of the features in the EM image is shown on the right — Give most kids a basic microscope and a leaf or a drop of pond water, and they are in awe of the, well, microscopic patterns and organisms they can now see. Give a cell biologist a transmission electron microscope (TEM), and they can understand how structures within cells are organized […]

Seeing things more clearly, thanks to campus-wide microscopy effort

February 20, 2019 by Sarah Perdue

Waisman Center senior scientist Alexander Converse and colleagues from several international universities recently published a rhesus macaque brain atlas aligned to a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) template. — This post was contributed by Mason Muerhoff, who is the Associate University Relations Specialist for the Waisman Center. In search of a way to improve how scientists analyze brain images, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Waisman Center decided to build a brain. Or at least, a brain model. Waisman […]

How to make an open-source, computerized map of the brain

November 9, 2018 by Tyler Fox

These lymphocytes, called monocytes, are partly how infectious mononucleosis got its name. — This summer, I started running. Partly because it seemed healthier than lifting, but also because summer gym memberships are expensive. However, being an inexperienced runner, and balancing multiple jobs, I often went for runs at odd times, like at night or on days where the heat index topped 100 degrees. […]

As a new semester starts, UW faculty discuss a common ...

October 1, 2018 by Tyler Fox

Memes are hot right now — but where do they come from? Internet memes started with, well, the internet. But memes are a part of evolutionary biology history.

On the Origin of Memes

April 20, 2018 by Eric Hamilton

It is winter in the Northern Hemisphere. The vicious cold has transformed the scattered blue lakes of the North Woods into white disks — barren wastelands of ice. The harsh winds rushing across the icy plains combined with average air temperatures that are just above freezing seem to offer a […]

Do you ever wonder what happens to the fish in ...

February 27, 2018 by Mason Muerhoff

This year the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison is celebrating the centennial of two major achievements: the discoveries of vitamin B and the link between goiter and iodine. These two important scientific achievements, as well as the stories, personalities, and controversies that accompanied them changed the field of […]

Looking back 100 years at two major biochemistry discoveries

November 10, 2017 by Mason Muerhoff