Also: Come to the UW Science Expeditions Campus Open House April 14-16.
Plan your day and find your way with the schedules & maps and exhibit guide available at
https://science.wisc.edu/science-expeditions
“Wednesday Nite @ The Lab” Public Science Talks
Wednesdays at 7pm CT
Room 1111 Genetics Biotech Center, 425 Henry Mall, Madison WI,
or
Zoom at https://go.wisc.edu/240r59
or
Stream at https://www.youtube.com/@wednesdaynitethelab8948
For Wednesday, April 5, 2023
Hi WN@TL Fans,
I don’t keep many a Shakespeare sonnet beneath my bonnet, but I do seem to remember that in freshman English in 1971 Mr. Gibson had us read #73 that begins with an arboreal & avian image:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
Shakespeare would have known a lot about bare ruined choirs, having grown up when the wreckage of the monasteries of England were moldering if no longer smoldering in the wake of Henry VIII’s seizure of monastic lands a generation before Shakespeare’s birth. However, for imagery the poet went not with the stones but rather with the trees.
For his part, Mr. Gibson lived on a farm on US 52 southeast of Dixon on the way to Amboy, out on what Phil Keillor’s brother would call the Edge of the Prairie. The native trees on the Gibson place were likely oaks and cottonwood, trees that could withstand (and perhaps flourish with) fire, and whose branches bore leaves that were decidedly deciduous. The allusions in the sonnet to ageing probably resonated for a high-school teacher approaching retirement, but for the 14-year-old they fell on deaf ears. Now a half a century later the tone rings truer for the former student.
Restorations, whether of the landed wealth of the monasteries of England or of the wealth of the land of the savannah and woodland oaks of Wisconsin, take time and diligence. A keen-eyed patience will also help the forest restorer to peer over the years and decades and see what this week’s speaker refers to as the cascades: impacts, often beneficent, that flow down to the many creatures that live within and beneath the canopy of Quercus.
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For April 5 we get insights from the Baraboo Hills as Maia Persche of Forest & Wildlife Ecology will speak on “Cascading Effects of Open Oak Woodland Restoration on Forest Arthropods and Songbirds.”
Description: Woodland restoration offers an important opportunity for ensuring the persistence of native Wisconsin biodiversity. However, understanding how open woodland management treatments, such as prescribed fire and tree thinning, effect forest species can be challenging. In this talk, I will describe a muti-trophic field study in the Baraboo Hills (Sauk County, WI) aimed at understanding the effects of oak woodland management on understory microclimates, plant communities, forest arthropods, and insectivorous birds.
Results from the first two field seasons indicate that a wide variety of songbirds may be benefitting from increases in forest arthropod biomass due to woodland management. I am looking forward to discussing this unique habitat type and the rich biodiversity it supports, as well as highlighting how woodland restoration can play a part in bird conservation in southern Wisconsin.
Bio: Maia Persche is a PhD student in the SILVIS Lab, Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology. She has been studying bird ecology and conservation for the last ten years, as is also involved in land restoration work. Two years ago, she started five bird banding stations in Sauk County, which are the basis of a long-term ecological monitoring project focusing on the effects of climate change and land management on forest and woodland species.
Links:
https://silvis.forest.wisc.edu/staff/maia-persche/
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On April 12 Elizabeth Wright of Biochemistry will speak on Cryo-Electron Microscopy.
Description: Elizabeth Wright directs the UW-Madison Cryo-Electron Microscopy Research Center (CEMRC) research facility located in the Hector F. DeLuca Biochemical Sciences Complex on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. The UW-Madison CEMRC is dedicated to providing instrumentation, technical assistance, training, and access to cryo-EM for the UW-Madison research community.
The CEMRC manages and operates four cryo-microscopes for data collection by single particle, tomography, and micro-ED. The microscopes are overseen by experienced staff who offer consultation and training in negative-stain and vitrified sample preparation, single particle analysis, tomography, data processing and additional computational support.
The UW-Madison CEMRC welcomes investigators from other universities and industry.
The CEMRC is a cross-campus initiative led by a coalition of partners including the Department of Biochemistry, the School of Medicine and Public Health, the Morgridge Institute for Research, the UW Carbone Cancer Center, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education, and the College of Engineering Nanoscale Imaging and Analysis Center.
Bio: Elizabeth Wright received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Emory University. She engineered elastin-mimetic materials that are used for drug delivery and tissue engineering applications. She was a postdoctoral research associate in materials science at the University of Southern California. She was a postdoctoral scholar with Professor Grant Jensen at Caltech where she developed cryo-ET technologies and used cryo-ET to study HIV-1 maturation. She joined Emory University as an Assistant Professor in 2008 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2016. She moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a full Professor in 2018. Her research program focuses on the development and use of cryo-EM and correlative light and electron microscopy (CLEM) imaging technologies to determine the native-state structures of several bacterial species, bacteriophages, HIV-1, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), measles virus (MeV), and other host-pathogen systems.
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On Friday April 14 Amy Rosebrough, staff archeologist with the Wisconsin Historical Society, will give a Special Friday Night Edition of Wednesday Nite @ The Lab, starting at 7:00 pm CT. This is part of UW Science Expeditions Campus Open House April 14-16.
Special Location: We’ll have the talk in the Auditorium of the Wisconsin Historical Society on Library Mall.
Title: “Fire, Shipwreck, and Cheese—Wisconsin’s Lost Coastal Communities”
Description: In the mid to late 19th centuries, dozens of small communities sprang up along the eastern shores of Wisconsin, each with its own lake pier and general store. The owners of the piers shipped forest and farm products to Chicago, and supplied incoming settlers with the income and goods they needed to survive.
A Wisconsin Historical Society initiative is exploring the submerged and onshore remains of these lost ports, and tracing the histories of the people and ships that called them home. In the process, a forgotten chapter of Great Lakes history is coming to light. The lost ports tell stories of catastrophic fires, dangerous shoals, runaway horses, gossip columnists, eavesdropping clerks, and lots and lots of cheese. Most importantly, the story of Wisconsin’s lost coastal communities is the story of how Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan’s shoreline was transformed from timberland to today’s farms and cities.
Bio: Dr. Amy Rosebrough is a Staff Archaeologist with the Office of the State Archaeologist at the Wisconsin Historical Society. A native of the Missouri Ozarks, she has long had an interest in burial monuments and archaeology. She is an alum of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and she received her doctorate for region-wide re-analysis of Wisconsin’s effigy mounds and mound builders. She has worked as an archaeologist in the academic, private, and public sectors. In her current position at the Wisconsin Historical Society, she manages archaeological and burial sites data, assists Wisconsin’s citizens with archaeological questions, and serves as a subject matter expert.
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Hope to see you soon—in person, by YouTube livestream or by Zoom —at Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.
Tom ZinnenBiotechnology Center & Division of Extension, Wisconsin 4-H
Please share this missive with your friends & neighbors.
If you’ll be watching the Zoom for the first time, please register for the WN@TL Zoom at go.wisc.edu/240r59.
If you’ve already registered for a previous WN@TL zoom this year, you’re good—you don’t have to register again.
Continue to use the link found in the confirmation message Zoom sent you when you first registered.
WN@TL begins at 7:00pm Central.
You can also watch the web stream at the WN@TL YouTube channel.
UW-Madison: 5.9 million owners, one pretty good public land-grant teaching, research and extension university.
Visit UW-Madison’s science outreach portal at science.wisc.edu for information on the people, places & programs on campus that welcome you to come experience science as exploring the unknown, all year round.
Here are the components of the WN@TL User’s Guide:
1. The live WN@TL seminar, every Wednesday night, 50 times a year, at 7pm CT in Room 1111 Genetics Biotech Center and on Zoom at go.wisc.edu/240r59
2. The WN@TL YouTube channel
3. WN@TL on the University Place broadcast channel of PBS Wisconsin
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Park for a small fee in Lot 20, 1390 University Avenue, Madison, WI