L&S News  Author: David Tenenbaum

“Stories from the Flood,” a collaboration involving UW–Madison English students, has gathered over 70 written, audio, and video interviews with people who experienced what some call a “thousand-year” flood along the Kickapoo River and nearby Coon Creek.

"Big data" and "analytics" have overturned fields ranging from astrophysics to online retail. Now, American Family Insurance, a major multi-line insurer with 4,800 employees in Wisconsin, has entered a formal research collaborative with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to apply big data analytics to the company's datastream.

EatStreet, a Madison tech startup that enables online delivery orders at more than 15,000 restaurants in 250-plus cities nationwide, continues to build on an offer that a restaurant can’t refuse.

Four projects created by computer-science students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison won a total of $12,000 in prizes in the computer science department's NEST competition on April 6.

"I'm excited for two reasons," said organizer Jignesh Patel, professor of computer science. "The first-prize winner, Moonshot Learning, already has made sales - indicating that it's answering a real need in the marketplace. And second, two of the four winners were headed by women, who have been traditionally under-represented in our field."

Nine hundred students from 26 high schools in Wisconsin gathered on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus April 9 to complete an intensive study of Silent Spring, a 1962 classic of popular science literature that helped launch modern environmentalism later in the decade.

"The best picture yet of magnetic reconnection in space” offer insight into the role of magnetic reconnection in celestial explosions, eruptions and extraordinary emissions of energy.

Electrons can be a persuasive bunch, or at least, a talkative bunch, according to new work from John Berry's lab at UW-Madison. The spins of unpaired electrons are the root of permanent magnetism, and after 10 years of design and re-design, Berry's lab has made a molecule that gains magnetic strength through an unusual way of controlling those spins.

Here’s a rule of geoscience: The past heralds the future. So it’s not just morbid curiosity that attracts geoscientists to places like Long Valley, California, where a super-eruption occured 765,000 years ago. It’s an ardent desire to understand why super-eruptions happen, ultimately to understand where and when they are likely to occur again.

The three recipients, now teaching science in Monona, Rhinelander and Wauwatosa, are members of the 2017 class at the Knowles Teacher Initiative, whose purpose is “to increase the number of high-quality high school science and mathematics teachers."