Sharing Science With Wisconsin
For September 19, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, When I was in graduate school at the University of Illinois I read “Arrowsmith”, Sinclair Lewis’s 1925 novel dwelling on the medical research enterprise. I was smitten by this pivotal passage early in the book. For me, there in one page were nearly all the bafflements of gradual …
For September 12, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Plants are stuck in one place, pretty much. Seeds & pollen & spores can move, and if you’re a roadside daylily or a chicory then corms and bulbs and roots can hitch a ride on the blade of a road grader. But mostly plants are sessile, …
For September 5, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, My Dad taught high school history, and our shelves at home included the Time Life series on Great Ages of Man. My internal timeline was already primed for the tomes on Mesopotamia and Egypt and Greece and Rome and all that—the kind of stuff that a good …
For August 29, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, In January 1610 Galileo turned his 20x telescope towards Jupiter and discovered moons in orbit around Jupiter—notably, the moons were not orbiting Earth. That was a big deal, and a dagger in the intellectual gut of the geocentric system. The discovery also is still a prime …
For August 22, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, In my hometown there’s a street called Artesian Place. It runs down a hill called Bootlegger’s Knob and meets with River Road that runs parallel to the Rock River. Near here an artesian spring once bubbled up and flowed into the Rock. Alas, the spring was …
For August 15, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Right after last week’s WN@TL by Dan Young on the Wisconsin Insect Research Collection, I drove over to Monona to visit my friend Ken Smith on the occasion of this 70th birthday. While sitting around the kitchen table, his wife Roberta asked me if I knew much about …
For August 8, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, In Fall 1977 I took Professor Harold Willis’s course in entomology at UW-Platteville. It was a lecture/lab class, but Dr. Willis also required each of us to gather, pin, label and identify a collection of insects. So off to the fields and ravines and rivers of …
For August 1, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, In February 1994 I moved in to 210 Campbell Street, about four blocks south of the UW campus and three blocks north of Henry Vilas Zoo. It’s next to 216 Campbell Street. I found out later that 216 Campbell is where Governor Doyle grew up. It’s …
For July 25, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Biochemists get to work with at least four types of polymers: proteins, carbohydrates (eg, starch, cellulose), lipids (eg, long chain fatty acids), and nucleic acids. Figuring out the order of the different monomers—the building blocks—of the polymer is a big deal. It’s like to learning to …
For July 18, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, It is High Summer. We drive through betasseled corn canyons and past wheat fields ready for the combine or spotted with golden bales worthy of Rumpelstiltskin. The alfalfa is busy working up the next cutting. Our cups runneth over in bucolic gemutlichkeit. It could be a good …