Astronomers have measured magnetic fields in a galaxy 4.6 billion light-years away — a big clue to understanding how magnetic fields formed and evolved over cosmic time. In an article published in Nature Astronomy, a collaboration led by Sui Ann Mao, the Minerva Research Group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and a former postdoctoral Jansky Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, reports the discover...

Friday through Sunday, Aug. 25-27, a team of University of Wisconsin–Madison students hopes it can clock the highest speed on the one-mile SpaceX Hyperloop test track during the Hyperloop Competition Weekend II at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The UW–Madison team, known as Badgerloop, has excelled in all phases of the competition, which is sponsored by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

Sitting down with Katie Zutter the day a Google engineer was fired for writing that women are biologically less fit to work in tech — the latest flare-up involving issues of gender bias in the industry — could have been awkward. But the controversy didn’t throw the senior majoring in computer sciences and Spanish. To the contrary, inequities in tech only fuel her to push for change. By Katie Vaughn, University of...

'At Play in the Cosmos', an educational video game developed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is the winner of the Third Annual Mashable + Games for Change People’s Choice Award. The educational resource for introductory college astronomy received the highest number of online votes among the 11 games nominated in the category. Gear Learning, part of the School of Education’s Wisconsin Center for Education Research, d...

  Satellites, drones and other technologies are fueling a surge in detailed information about the atmosphere, oceans, land and wildlife. A new University of Wisconsin–Madison professional master’s degree will train students to put this wealth of data to work solving the world’s most pressing environmental problems.

A team of engineers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University at Buffalo have developed a nanoscale photodetector that combines a unique fabrication method and light-trapping structures. The researchers — electrical engineering professors Zhenqiang (Jack) Ma and Zongfu Yu at UW–Madison and Qiaoqiang Gan at UB — described their device, a single-crystalline germanium nano-membrane photodetector on a na...

  Taking a hint from archaeology, where centuries-old bones and teeth have been found to harbor intact biological proteins, a team of Wisconsin scientists has devised a way to deliver drugs and other therapeutic agents by coating medical devices with a nanostructured mineral sheath that mimics bone.

This summer, the University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Engineering added a new way for students to navigate the skies: a course on drones. The first of its kind at UW–Madison, the class will teach students how to fly unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), or drones, and the practical applications of the technology, said Chris Johnson, instructor of the new course.

In a new study published in Scientific Reports, the researchers used machine learning to analyse hundreds of voice recordings and accurately identify individuals with a genetic condition known as fragile X premutation, which increases the risk of developing neurodegenerative disorders, infertility or having a child with fragile X syndrome.

The Milky Way and its immediate neighborhood are in the boondocks. In a 2013 observational study, University of Wisconsin–Madison astronomer Amy Barger and her then-student Ryan Keenan showed that our galaxy, in the context of the large-scale structure of the universe, resides in an enormous void — a region of space containing far fewer galaxies, stars and planets than expected.

Wastewater treatment plants have a PR problem: People don’t like to think about what happens to the waste they flush down their toilets. But for many engineers and microbiologists, these plants are a hotbed of scientific advances, prompting their trade organisation to propose a name change to “water resource recovery facility.”

In the average adult human, there are an estimated 100,000 miles of capillaries, veins and arteries — the plumbing that carries life-sustaining blood to every part of the body, including vital organs such as the heart and the brain. When things go wrong with vasculature, the result can be a heart attack, stroke or other life-threatening or chronic condition.

A UW–Madison research team was selected as one of seven finalists in Harvard’s Innovation in American Government competition, for its work in creating a smartphone application that helps people recover from addiction to alcohol and other substances. The app, called Addiction CHESS (A-CHESS), was created by the Center for Health Enhancement Systems Studies.

  The blood-brain barrier is biology's proverbial double-edged sword. An impermeable shield of endothelial cells that protects our brains from toxins and other threats that may lurk in circulating blood, the barrier can also exclude therapeutic drugs and, at times, essential biomolecules required for healthy brain development.

The adage “put your thinking caps on” might evoke visions of an elementary classroom, where a teacher has just admonished cherubic little learners about to embark on a particularly difficult academic adventure. In today’s high-stakes world, where we all need to think, learn or act quickly, the adage still rings true: Mastering a new task, skill or information often takes the right environment, mindset, sharp focus and lots of ha...

In the face of growing crises related to antibiotic resistance and hospital-acquired infections, a UW–Madison spinoff called Isomark is working to introduce a new infection-detection technology into hospital intensive care units. Isomark’s system measures carbon isotopes in exhaled breath. Without even touching the patient, it can offer the earliest warning of severe bacterial infection, says founder Mark Cook, a professor of ani...

  What do you get by marrying an asthma inhaler to a wireless monitor and a smartphone app? Plenty, says David Van Sickle, a medical anthropologist who specialises in respiratory disease. In 2011, Van Sickle created a spinoff called Propeller Health while he was working on respiratory disease prevention at UW Health in Madison.

  After a 29-year quest, Ian Duncan, a professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has finally pinpointed the cause of a serious neurologic disease in a colony of rats. His new study, now online in the journal Annals of Neurology, is more than the conclusion of a personal and intellectual odyssey, however.

A team of chemical and biological engineers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has found a way to produce from biomass a valuable compound used in plastic production that they estimate could lower the cost of ethanol produced from plant material by more than two dollars per gallon. The development is the latest in an ongoing effort at UW–Madison to create commodity chemicals currently derived from petroleum out of biomass.

With about 100 lines of code, a Morgridge Institute for Research team has unleashed a fast, simple and predictive text-mining tool that may turbocharge big biomedical pursuits such as drug repurposing and stem cell treatments. The algorithm, named “KinderMiner” by its inventors, has been put to use exploring one of the largest single archives of research journal papers, Europe PubMed Central.