UW-Madison

March 22, 2022

The developing human body will eventually grow from a tiny two-celled zygote to a massively complex system comprising more than 37 trillion cells. If a single cell represented one second in time, all of our cells combined would span 1.8 million years. James Thomson helped the scientific world turn its attention to the shape-shifting stem […]

March 18, 2022

University of Wisconsin–Madison engineers have created a nanofiber material that outperforms its widely used counterparts — including steel plates and Kevlar fabric — in protecting against high-speed projectile impacts. Basically, it’s better than bulletproof. “Our nanofiber mats exhibit protective properties that far surpass other material systems at much lighter weight,” says Ramathasan Thevamaran, a UW–Madison […]

March 8, 2022

University of Wisconsin–Madison physicists have made one of the highest performance atomic clocks ever, they announced Feb. 16 in the journal Nature. Their instrument, known as an optical lattice atomic clock, can measure differences in time to a precision equivalent to losing just one second every 300 billion years and is the first example of […]

March 1, 2022

Fog and low stratus clouds over airports can create dangerous travel conditions that result in costly delays and disrupted travel plans. The US National Weather Service offices monitor and issue warnings when conditions are favorable for the formation of fog and low-level clouds. These warnings are used by the airlines to anticipate conditions, avoid delays and […]

February 15, 2022

UW–Madison researchers teamed with New England conservation nonprofit Mass Audubon to create an online learning game that lets players model how different zoning choices would affect the environment, jobs, housing and other real-world factors for any location in the contiguous U.S. Built using a variety of state and federal data sets, the free game, known as iPlan, lets […]

February 4, 2022

The Great Lakes contain 95 percent of all the fresh surface water in the United States, and Wisconsin is fortunate that two of those lakes make up its northern and eastern borders — 1,000 miles in all, supporting 105 Great Lakes communities. Stewardship of the lakes is critical for the entire state, which benefits from […]

December 21, 2021

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health are partnering with the National Football League (NFL) to study how on-field head impacts can inform injury reduction efforts at the professional and collegiate levels. Researchers will collect data from high-tech mouthguard sensors currently being used by the football team at University of Wisconsin–Madison […]

December 14, 2021

When she was young, Gesangyangji would stare at the peaks on the mountains surrounding Lhasa, her birthplace in the Tibetan Plateau. They were covered in snow. But as she grew up she noticed the snow disappearing, the white lines chased up the mountain by gray and green rock. “I was wondering,” she said, “Why is […]

November 30, 2021

On a sunny afternoon in late September, a group of undergraduate students boarded Limnos II, UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology (CFL) pontoon boat, for a field trip on Lake Mendota with CFL director, Jake Vander Zanden. Onboard, they learned about the formation of Wisconsin’s lakes, tried their hand at using limnological tools like Secchi disks and zooplankton […]

November 29, 2021

As Ji Hyun Nam slowly tosses a stuffed cat toy into the air, a real-time video captures the playful scene at a 20th century webcam clip — a mere five frames per second. The twist? Nam is hidden around the corner from the camera. The video of the stuffed animal was created by capturing light […]