Sharing Science With Wisconsin
For February 13, 2019 Hi WN@TL Fans, Two hundred and ten years ago Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day (February 12) an ocean apart — and a mere nine days after Felix Mendelssohn. Lincoln went on to become an innovator of, among other things, a method for “buoying vessels …
For February 6, 2019 Hi WN@TL Fans, Twas a memorable Wednesday last week, with the mercury down to at least 28 below zero, and with the windchill a score or more degrees lower. As far as I know, it was the first time the university had ever closed for extreme cold …
For January 30, 2019 Hi WN@TL Fans, As Jack London nearly said, “Discretion is the better part of frostbite.” With projections of -60F windchills on Wednesday, and with the approval of Robert Lemanske, I have cancelled Wednesday Nite @ The Lab for January 30. Prof. Lemanske’s talk on “The Childhood Origins of Asthma” …
For January 23, 2019 Hi WN@TL Fans, Ice is civilization, as Paul Theroux oted, but glaciers are the sculptors of the face of the Earth. An advancing glacier is not just a tongue or a lobe; it is a chisel to rock and a gouge upon the land. Glacial ice flows—sometimes until …
For January 16, 2019 Hi WN@TL Fans, From the Psalmist to the Beatitudes, from Charles Dickens to John Steinbeck, from the Framers to the newborn Congress, the poor have always among us, with us, of us, or just plain us. We celebrate as public heroes characters like Ronald Reagan or Horatio Alger who bootstrap themselves up out of poverty. We reserve a …
For January 9, 2019 Hi WN@TL Fans, I’m hard pressed to come up with three words that have spawned more intellectual bar brawls than “Nature versus Nurture.” The phrase is red meat for social scientists, behavioral scientists, and biologists alike. But even when a field can arrive at a Hegelian synthesis, researchers …
For December 26, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, A reminder: WN@TL goes dark tonight as we take a break, a respite, a hiatus, a breather. It’s Peanut Butter & Jelly Time, as the Sergeant would call out every hour. We join Janus in looking back and looking ahead, with some retrospection …
or December 19, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, It’s a long, long way from the 5th Century to the 15th. Entire centuries can stretch between milestone years in western European history: 410, 732, 1066, 1215, 1347, 1453. When I was a kid the era was routinely called The Dark Ages. The moniker …
For December 12, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Humans seem to admire bees. Humans stick bees with multiple analogies. They are anthropomorphic metaphors, mostly favorable. Bees have queens and workers and drones. Bees live in colonies, they build combs, upon which they wax on. A select few dine on royal jelly. Bees dance, …
For December 5, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, The motorcycle is a surprisingly pervasive player in the movies, music and mindset of America. The movies go back at least to Charlie Chaplin in Mabel at the Wheel in 1914, and to Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr. in 1924. Here in Wisconsin, UW Cooperative Extension is still mighty proud of the photo from 1912 …