University of Wisconsin–Madison

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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

This post was written by student science writer Rachael Lee. A singer or a violinist’s performance produces sound waves that echo across a concert hall. A painter may mix different paint colors to create a new hue. Dancers use forces like gravity and inertia to produce stunning displays. At first […]

Blending the rules: how physics helps paint a new picture ...

March 7, 2022 by Eric Hamilton

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

researcher in protective clothing in flu lab — This post is by student science writer Rachael Lee. When Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers announced he’d tested positive for COVID-19, the news shocked football fans everywhere, in part because Rodgers had told the public he was “immunized.” Most people took that to mean he’d been “vaccinated.” However, Rodgers […]

“Immunized” or “Vaccinated”: What’s the difference?

November 30, 2021 by Eric Hamilton

This post to us comes from Dr. Jim Lattis, director of UW Space Place. On December 21, Jupiter and Saturn, now in our evening sky as they have been for months, will appear very close together — so close that, depending on your visual acuity, you might need binoculars or […]

Planetary rendezvous: The grand conjunction of 2020

December 18, 2020 by Eric Hamilton

This post was written by student science writer Mary Magnuson The morning of December 2, the Madison skyline looked considerably different — as if the city had been transported out west, where mountains and mesas tower. In an image captured by Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies atmospheric scientist Tim […]

Rare mirage dominates Madison skyline

December 4, 2020 by Eric Hamilton

This is the first blog post by student science writer Mary Magnuson. It’s easy for anyone monitoring the pandemic through months of 24-hour news cycles to pick up on false information or conspiracy theories. We talked to University of Wisconsin–Madison experts to figure out why global events like the COVID-19 […]

Keep your distance from COVID-19 misinformation

July 10, 2020 by Chris Barncard

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

This is a guest post by Amelia Liberatore, a marketing intern with the UW–Madison Department of Food Science. The human gut is a complex ecosystem dominated by bacteria that help digest food and keep one’s gastrointestinal tract in check. One population that lives in the gut are so-called lysogenic bacteria, […]

Fructose can trigger viruses in the gut’s microbiome

February 6, 2019 by Eric Hamilton