Sharing Science With Wisconsin
For May 2, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, My quick-fire list of model organisms would include E. coli, brewer’s yeast, C. elegans, the fruit fly, the zebrafish, the rat, the mouse, and the monkey. Given more time, I’d add lambda phage, Paramecium, tobacco, corn, Arabidopsis, Xenopus, and of course the guinea pig. But the pig itself, sui generis, …
For April 25, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, “It is written” are three of the most momentous words in English. Something powerful, authoritative, and permanent happens when the spoken word is conjured by pen with ink on papyrus, vellum, or paper. Spoken words are here and heard, and then they are gone with the wind. …
For April 18, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, “Cows are people, too,” proclaimed Radar O’Reilly of Iowa, in one of scores of philosophical gambits played on the small screen by the writers of M*A*S*H. If Radar had grown up in Oconto instead of Ottumwa, he may have had a tougher proposition to parse: what’s the bioethical status of the sea …
Hi WN@TL Fans, As you know, WN@TL is always on, unless the chancellor closes the university. That has happened only once on a Wednesday, back on February 2, 2011, when David Gamm was our scheduled speaker. We’re on tonight, as usual, every Wednesday night, at 7pm. Tonight: The Environmental Fate of Lampricides in Tributaries of …
For April 11, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Few places are geographically outlined and culturally defined by its freshwater as Wisconsin is by its Great Lakes, its boundary rivers, its inland lakes & streams. Even the etymological source of Wisconsin is in its water: the word comes from a Miami Indian phrase meaning “a river running through a …
For April 4, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Try to imagine a chemistry lab without glassware. Picture a lab decked out only with porcelain mortars, stone pestles, ceramic jars, copper tubing and stills, iron pots and ovens and cauldrons. See if you can conjure a lab with no beakers, no Erlenmeyer flasks, no graduated cylinders, no …
For March 28, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, When my wife was in the third day of her prodromal labor in delivering our first-born, when the days of pain and the nights of sleeplessness had drained her out, her doc decided to give Kristen a shot of morphine to let her rest before inducing labor. I had …
For March 21, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, On March 13, two days after the NCAA announced the brackets for the men’s basketball tournament, Tom Oates of the Wisconsin State Journal gave this advice for building a better bracket: “Pick no seed worse than a No. 12 in the first round: Don’t touch the No. 16 seeds; they …
For March 14, 2018 Pi Day Hi WN@TL Fans, Yesterday I enjoyed a stroke of serendipity: the latest survey from the National Science Foundation reported that in 2016 UW–Madison ranked #2 in the number of earned PhD’s awarded. We clocked in with 823, only 4 ahead of Michigan and 26 behind the University of Texas at Austin. …
March 7, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Geographers and cartographers divide the world into northern hemisphere and southern. The dividing line is the unseen equator.Brains are among the few other objects with hemispheres, left and right. The dividing line is a clear cleft right down the middle. This coming week is Brain Awareness Week. It is a …