Category Science & Technology
Curiosities: Why are yellow jackets most noticeable in late summer?
Often mistaken for bees, German yellow jackets are social wasps that cooperate to build their nests and support their queen, and they…
Curiosities: Why do sharks have to swim constantly?
For two reasons, says James Kitchell, professor of zoology at UW–Madison. First, sharks lack the swim bladder that most fish use to adjust their buoyancy.
Plants give up some deep secrets of drought resistance
In a study that promises to fill in the fine details of the plant world's blueprint for surviving drought, a team of Wisconsin researchers has identified in living plants the set of proteins that help them withstand water stress.
Renewed partnership keeps $60 million satellite center in Madison
It was a deep history in satellite meteorology that first got the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration interested in Madison in the 1970s.
Curiosities: Is it safe to reuse plastic knives and forks?
Single-use kitchen plastics — such things as plastic eating utensils, cups and containers from cottage cheese, sour cream, chip dip, margarine, and milk — are…
Native pollinators: Key to sustainable fruit production?
As a group of students ogles wild flowers on a sunny day at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum, the blooming dotted mint, iron weed and black-eyed susans are certainly glorious. But these adult students are not concentrating on the flowers. Instead, they are focusing on the insects busily pollinating those blooms.
H1N1 flu virus used new biochemical trick to cause pandemic
The influenza virus, scientists well know, is a crafty, shape-shifting organism, constantly changing form to evade host immune systems and jump from one species, like birds, to another, mammals.
Curiosities: Is it true that cell phone use can cause health problems?
The major concern with the electromagnetic radiation from cell phones is brain cancer, but most studies find “nothing definitive,” says Bruce Thomadsen, a professor…
Students size up seismic sensor sites
University of Wisconsin–Madison students Matthew Kogle and Kelly Hoehn logged thousands of miles this summer driving rural Wisconsin roads, scanning the landscape. When they found a promising spot, they knocked on the door of the nearest farmhouse and tried to interest the owners in their cause.
IceCube spies unexplained pattern of cosmic rays
Though still under construction, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole is already delivering scientific results - including an early finding about a phenomenon the telescope was not even designed to study.
Curiosities: What’s the difference between dishwasher detergent, laundry detergent and dish soap? Why aren’t they interchangeable?
All detergents — whether intended for hands, hair, clothes or dishes — work on the same principles: Break up oils and dirt and wash them…
Curiosities: Why do people sometimes develop late in life an allergy that never bothered them before?
Most allergies — especially to airborne allergens associated with runny noses and itchy eyes — come on in the teenage years or early twenties, according…
Global grassroots lake science network has roots in Wisconsin
Inspired and led by freshwater scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, researchers eager to understand global ecosystems from end to end are now monitoring a series of buoys in lakes on every continent except Africa. Each buoy carries instruments to measure fundamental data on the weather above the water and the temperature and chemistry below it.