Whether you’re planning a weekend hike, deciding what to wear to work or preparing your home for severe storms, the weather forecast is essential. You might instinctively grab your smartphone and check an app for an instant weather update.
Growing demand for energy — particularly from clean, low-cost sources like solar — are putting pressure on farmland. The Interdisciplinary Professions Program in the College of Engineering interviewed WEI education manager and sustainable systems engineering instructor Scott Williams about one potential solution: agrivoltaics.
Researchers tested a bioreactor system to process aromatics from poplar trees with a modified strain of Novosphingobium aromaticivorans that releases a chemical known as PDC while accumulating two other products inside the cells: a natural pigment and a vitamin-like substance found in most human cells. PDC can be used to make plastics, while the other products are used in nutritional supplements, cosmetics, and animal feed.
McKellar took data collected by Wisconet and rounded data values to wholenotes on the C-major scale, then used a programming language called Python to translate these notes into a compositional score that could be understood by musicians. “It was a little bit of a learning curve because I honestly wasn’t all that familiar with sonification,” says McKellar. “Our main goal was to be able to communicate weather to the public. We knew we should include cold fronts, but we felt it was important to talk about rain, sunlight and wind as well.”
Wisconsin Energy Institute investigator Holly Gibbs is among five University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty members elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. As a geographer, she studies how and why people use land around the world and what these changes mean for the future of our planet.
The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering recognized Brian Pfleger for his pioneering contribution to the metabolic engineering of microorganisms for sustainable chemical production and outstanding leadership to the biotechnology community.
Fong Liew is a graduate student in Brian Fox’s biochemistry lab, where she works in collaboration with Tim Donohue’s bacteriology lab on converting lignin, one of the main components of plant cell walls, into valuable industrial chemicals.