Nineteen student teams from across Illinois and Wisconsin gathered at UW–Madison's Discovery Building for the seventh annual Wisconsin KidWind Challenge on March 2. The KidWind Challenge is an opportunity for teams to test the wind or solar device they've designed, receive expert feedback, and participate in instant engineering challenges. Five teams of elementary, middle, and high school students will go on to participate in the World KidWind Challenge in Minneapolis this May.

With its streamlined genome, environmental versatility, and a single-minded focus on fermenting sugar into alcohol, Zymomonas mobilis could be a star player in the quest to replace fossil fuels with plant-based alternatives. UW–Madison scientists are working to understand what makes this microbe tick.

Zymomonas naturally produces ethanol, but with genetic modifications researchers have found ways to trick the microbe into making more valuable products like isobutanol, a form of alcohol that holds more energy and can more easily replace gasoline and jet fuel. There’s one big hurdle, though: While Zymomonas tolerates high levels of ethanol, even a little bit of isobutanol will stunt its growth. 

In the quest to combat climate change, the idea of using agricultural landscapes in the Midwest to support renewable energy production has focused primarily on building wind farms and growing plant feedstocks for biofuels. Another option, called agrivoltaics, represents a new opportunity to support farmers, increase diversity in agricultural landscapes, and facilitate energy production. Here’s how.

In today’s story, we spoke with Parisa Sazaeim, a postdoctoral research associate at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Before she arrived in Madison, Sazaeim’s education in water resources engineering took her from her hometown University of Tehran to the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Read on to learn about how growing up in an arid region shaped her passion for water and water accessibility.

Muconic acid is a chemical building block that can be used to make plastics such as those used in food and drink packaging, which are typically made from fossil fuels. Here, scientists genetically modified strains of the soil bacterium Novosphingobium aromaticivorans that produce muconic acid from an underused but abundant type of plant fiber called lignin.

UW–Madison’s team, known as WiscWind, is one of 12 selected for the third round of the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2024 Collegiate Wind Competition, which aims to prepare college students for jobs in the wind energy workforce through hands-on experience.