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What teens find important on social media is a better measure of how they interact with technology than how many minutes they spend using social media, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Emily Kumlien 608-265-8199 608-516-9154 ekumlien [at] uwhealth (p) org Researchers at UW have designed a scale, The Adolescents' Digital Technology Interactions and Importance, that measures the importance of social media interactions.

A small amount of electricity delivered at a specific frequency to a particular point in the brain will snap a monkey out of even deep anesthesia, pointing to a circuit of brain activity key to consciousness and suggesting potential treatments for debilitating brain disorders.

The 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), portrayed in an illustration created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Alissa Eckert, MS; Dan Higgins, MAM Back in 2016, when Zika virus first began to cause infections in the Americas, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers pulled together a coalition of scientists to study the virus and openly share their data for others.

The magnetic, conductive and optical properties of complex oxides make them key to components of next-generation electronics used for data storage, sensing, energy technologies, biomedical devices and many other applications. Stacking ultrathin complex oxide single-crystal layers - those composed of geometrically arranged atoms - allows researchers to create new structures with hybrid properties and multiple functions.

Ice calving from the front of Thurston Island off of western Antarctica on Nov. The image was taken as part of NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne science mission to study Earth's polar ice. Photo by NASA/Jim Yungel A new study suggests the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet is less stable than researchers once thought.

Assistant Professor Jacob Notbohm (left) and doctoral student Aashrith Saraswathibhatla observe cells in Notbohm's Lab. Photo by UW-Madison College of Engineering When we cut our skin, groups of cells rush en masse to the site to heal the wound. But the complicated mechanics of this collective cell movement - which are facilitated by rearrangements between each cell and its neighbors - have made it challenging for researchers to decipher what's actually driving it.

Access to Medicare significantly impacts detection of certain cancers and life expectancy following cancer diagnosis, according to a new study from the UW School of Medicine and Public Health that was recently published online in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management .

A new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that the young children of parents who take part in a compassion-based training program develop lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol over time.

Children and teens with bipolar depression responded better to an antipsychotic medicine if they had increased markers of inflammation in their blood, a new University of Wisconsin-Madison study shows. The study suggests that C-reactive protein, a sign of systemic inflammation in the body that shows up in a readily available blood test, could be a predictive biomarker for identifying which patients with depression in the context of pediatric bipolar disorder will respond to medication.

With an estimated 97 percent of adolescents playing video games in their free time, there is growing potential to design games as tools for attention-building instead of attention-busting. A research team at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, Irvine, designed a video game to improve mindfulness in middle schoolers and found that when young people played the game, they showed changes in areas of their brains that underlie attention.

Drawing inspiration from nature, University of Wisconsin-Madison chemists have discovered an efficient way to wrangle long, snaking molecules to form large rings - rings that form the backbone of many pharmaceuticals but are difficult to produce in the lab. The work may represent preliminary progress toward deciphering just how enzymes, honed by evolution, so efficiently produce natural compounds.

An ultrathin coating developed by University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers upends a ubiquitous physics phenomenon of materials related to thermal radiation: The hotter an object gets, the brighter it glows. The new coating - engineered from samarium nickel oxide, a unique tunable material - employs a bit of temperature trickery.

This transition, from solid bedrock to pulverized rock in subsoil, probably occurs on land around the globe. A new study from UW-Madison scientists shows bacteria's critical role at the beginning of soil formation. Image courtesy of Stephanie Napieralski Research published this week by University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists shows how bacteria can degrade solid bedrock, jump-starting a long process of alteration that creates the mineral portion of soil.

Measuring changes in the speed of electrical signals along nerves connecting the eyes to the brain may accurately reflect recovery from myelin loss in multiple sclerosis (MS), according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and could be used to evaluate new treatments for the disease.

A recent study shows that people at low genetic risk for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are not only less likely to have the disorder, they also have better than expected economic, health and behavioral outcomes in later life. The results, published in the journal Psychological Medicine, "capture far more than just the risk and the absence of risk for a psychiatric outcome," says study author James Li, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of psychology and investigator at the UW's Waisman Center.

As of this week, a phase one clinical trial to test a potential new Ebola vaccine developed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is underway in Japan. Fifteen healthy young men* will receive two doses of the experimental vaccine. If the first group tolerates the vaccine, an additional group of up to 20 volunteers will receive a higher dose of the vaccine.

University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have developed a computational tool that can accurately predict the three-dimensional interactions between regions of human chromosomes. The predictive tool is a boon for researchers studying how cells control the activity of genes. The fine-tuned interaction between regulatory signals and the three-dimensional architecture of chromosomes helps explain how cells achieve their key functions, and how they go haywire, as happens in diseases such as cancer.

In a new study published today [Dec. 5, 2019] in the journal Brain, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health have discovered that delirium following severe surgery may be associated with brain injury. "For a long time it has been thought that delirium, a state of confusion that can arise in sick patients, may lead to dementia and long-term cognitive problems," says study leader Robert Sanders, assistant professor of anesthesiology at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.

Last year, scientists announced that a human jawbone and prehistoric tools found in 2002 in Misliya Cave, on the western edge of Israel, were between 177,000 and 194,000 years old. The finding suggested that modern humans, who originated in Africa, began migrating out of the continent at least 40,000 years earlier than scientists previously thought.

Geoscience Professor John Valley at work in the Wisconsin Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer Lab (WiscSIMS) in Weeks Hall. Photo: Jeff Miller "Old" is a subjective term. Ask a five-year-old, and you might hear 'teenage." A mid-lifer might say '80." To University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of geosciences John Valley, age 71, "old" is 4-billion years plus.