Sunday, 26 May, 2013

“Wisconsin bears in zoos may not be in an environment as extreme as something like a tropical zoo,” says Kurt Sladky, assistant professor of and section head of the special species health service in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Even in Alaska and northern Canada, the temperature can get up [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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,” [...]

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 [...]

Yes, says Linda Roberts, a professor of human development and family studies at UW-Madison. Roberts, who studies couples, says evidence supports this folk wisdom. People are generally attracted to those of similar social class, age and ethnicity. To illustrate the point in her class on couple relationships, she chooses someone in a long-term relationship and [...]

Plucked from his own time in the autumn of 1621 and deposited at a “traditional” Thanksgiving dinner today, a Plymouth, Mass. Pilgrim would have gawked at the foodstuffs, says UW-Madison historian Stanley Schultz. “He would not have recognized mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, bread stuffing of any composition, green beans (alone or in some noxious casserole), [...]

The essential skills of bird migration are orientation — knowing north from south, and east from west — and navigation, having some sort of “map” to establish the location you’re aiming for, says Stanley Temple, emeritus professor of conservation. Birds usually orient themselves by observing the sun and the stars – although some can also [...]

This year’s influenza vaccine in the United States contains three strains of the influenza virus. Last March, experts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization chose those strains based on the varieties of flu virus that were present at the end of North America’s flu season. The [...]