University of Wisconsin–Madison

Technology

From high-profile wildfires in the American West over the last several years, to visibly cleaner air during pandemic lock-downs, air quality is returning to the forefront of environmental concern. The air we breathe has direct impacts on human health and quality of life. Especially for people with respiratory concerns, sufficient […]

Air quality: from cities to space

December 8, 2021 by Emma Roberts

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

No matter where you are, you can’t help but notice the new buildings slowly rising above the streets of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s campus. These new spaces are poised to enrich campus life for both students and faculty by providing new opportunities for education, culture and recreation to all on campus […]

How the new UW buildings will transform campus

November 2, 2018 by Tyler Fox

It took only a few days of collecting X-rays from the distant Perseus galaxy cluster, 240 million light years away, for the Japanese Hitomi satellite observatory to conclude that the cluster contains proportions of elements that are nearly identical to our Sun, a new revelation that could tell us more […]

Resilience and discovery in decades-long satellite collaboration

February 1, 2018 by Mason Muerhoff

The documents of antiquity, ancient scrolls, pose all sorts of challenges for scholars trying to read them. This is especially true for the most fragile documents, those seared but not completely destroyed by fire, sometimes thousands of years ago. But now scholars have a new resource to non-invasively read ancient […]

Burned and crumbling scrolls read with help of UW alum

October 18, 2017 by Mason Muerhoff

Planetary nebula NGC 2818, a gaseous shroud of a dying, sun-like star in the southern constellation Pyxis. — Putting telescopes and astronomical instruments in space has long been a UW-Madison specialty. Since at least the early 1960s, when the late Wisconsin astronomer Arthur D. Code devised a cigar-box sized photometer for the X-15, the first rocket-powered plane to soar briefly in space, UW-Madison has been developing hardware – […]

Hubble and beyond

October 27, 2016 by trdevitt

Hurricane Matthew in the Caribbean on October 2, 2016 — On Tuesday night (Oct. 4) an unmanned drone called Global Hawk will fly into Hurricane Matthew, a category 4 storm currently aiming for the Caribbean. Global Hawk is a high-altitude drone capable of flying long-range missions into and above storm systems to gather a wealth of data on wind speeds, moisture, pressure and temperature, […]

Forecast uncertain, an unmanned drone will fly into Hurricane Matthew

October 3, 2016 by Kelly April Tyrrell

Fragile X gene — Waisman Center researchers Anita Bhattacharyya and Xinyu Zhao are looking to make stem cells glow. That glow will tell them whether they have successfully turned on a gene that is usually turned off in individuals with fragile X syndrome. Turning on this gene, FMR1, could be an important way to treat this syndrome. Fragile […]

Making stem cells glow for fragile X

September 22, 2016 by Kelly April Tyrrell

A side view of the Edmund Fitzgerald — For some under a certain age, the name Edmund Fitzgerald may conjure a Midwestern craft brew, or a haunting song their parents used to listen to by Gordon Lightfoot. But both pay homage to the Great Lakes freighter named Edmund Fitzgerald, which, 40-years-ago today (10 November 1975), disappeared on Lake Superior with all […]

Did a freak wave sink the Edmund Fitzgerald?

November 10, 2015 by Kelly April Tyrrell