2009 has been a big year for food recalls, largely because salmonella-contaminated dried milk, pistachio nuts and peanut products affected thousands of items in a wide variety of food products, says Kathleen Glass, associate director of the Food Research Institute. “If you have a single whole food, from one manufacturing plant or one farm, the [...]

Space is probably infinite, but we can see only the part that contains stars or galaxies whose light has been able to reach us, says Francis Halzen, a professor of physics.
The universe originated about 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang, so light cannot have been traveling for more than 13.7 billion years. “Since [...]

Bacteria have vastly different survival abilities, says Jeri Barak, an assistant professor of plant pathology at UW-Madison. Many species normally live in soil or water, but some of those that live in the human intestinal tract display extreme longevity outside the body.
Salmonella, which causes what we sometimes call “food poisoning,” can live more than 400 [...]

“We don’t know,” says Ed Churchwell, professor of astronomy. “We know it’s a very large number.”
It’s in the hundreds of billions, Churchwell says. In contrast, there are but 4 billion stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way — and the number will keep growing for some time before we run out of galaxies to [...]

The external color does not significantly affect how much the inside of a car heats up in the sun, says Sanford Klein, director of the UW-Madison Solar Energy Laboratory and professor of mechanical engineering.
Cars warm up in the sun due to the greenhouse effect: Sunlight passing through the windows into the car is mostly absorbed [...]

Because we teach them to hate it.
There are plenty of cats that love water, according to Sandi Sawchuk, a clinical instructor at the School of Veterinary Medicine.
Big, wild cats, especially those that live in hot, arid areas, often love to swim. An Asian species known as the fishing cat uses webbed paws to dive for [...]

Chopping onions unleashes a “chemical defense that onion plants have to protect themselves against insects and microbes,” says UW-Madison horticulture professor Irwin Goldman. We’re just innocent bystanders, it seems.
Goldman explains that one compartment inside onion cells contains an enzyme, called allinase, while another compartment holds the enzyme’s substrate: a suite of sulfur compounds known as [...]

The number of Canada geese in Wisconsin is very much on the rise, increasing exponentially since standardized bird counts began in 1966, according to Stan Temple, professor of wildlife ecology at UW-Madison.
“If you go to any park or golf course in Madison, you have to watch where you step for all the goose poop,” Temple [...]

Cats may devour some plants but ignore others as a simple matter of taste, says Sandra Sawchuk, a clinical instructor at the School of Veterinary Medicine. “It’s each to his own. I like romaine lettuce over iceberg; cats can have their own desires.” Although cats are carnivores, they may have grown accustomed to eating plant [...]

The “official” arbiter of recessions is the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private, nonprofit research organization, comprising a number of top economists, according to Stephen Malpezzi, Lorin and Marjorie Tiefenthaler Professor of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics at the Wisconsin School of Business.
Actually, NBER doesn’t officially use the word “recession” as such, [...]