If you’ve ever tried to grill a medium-rare steak and ended up with an expensive piece of rubber, you know it’s not easy to gauge the temperature of an object just by measuring its surface.

Many of us fastidiously clean and sort our yogurt containers, milk jugs and mountains of other plastic waste each week, getting that packaging ready for the recycling bin.

Media coverage of WEI this month focused on solving the issue of water contamination, creating yeast that is more equipped to produce biofuels, and employing more sustainable methods of agriculture. 

At Bert Paris’s dairy farm in Belleville, Wisconsin, the morning chores are done. The cows have been milked and led —with some effort through the cold December mud —to the day’s pasture. Some 80 cows munch incessantly on the grass and clover.

When most people think of ceramics, they might envision their favorite mug or a flowerpot. But modern technology is full of advanced ceramics, from silicon solar panels to ceramic superconductors and biomedical implants.

Research projects featuring several WEI energy experts and affiliates have been chosen for Round 6 of the UW2020: WARF Discovery Initiative. These projects were among 92 proposals submitted from across campus. The initiative is funded by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

The awardees span the four divisions — arts and humanities, physical sciences, social sciences, and biological sciences — on campus.