UW Housing

The UW’s newest residence hall has been named in honor of Aldo Leopold. The former professor was the author of pioneering works in the field of conservation, such as A Sand County Almanac. The res hall, formerly known as “32 Hall,” is located next to the Allen Centennial Gardens and Kronshage Residence Hall.

Time magazine’s Harry McCracken has named journalism professor Deb Blum one of the top twenty-five bloggers in the country for 2013. Blum’s blog, which can be found on the site wiredscience.com, is called Elemental.

Anxiety makes you think everything stinks — literally, it turns out. A team of UW researchers led by Wen Li conducted a study in which they discovered that stress and anxiety temporarily rewire the brain so that people perceive even neutral smells as malodorous.

Andrew Bernard

Tony Goldberg discovered a new tick species where he could not have wanted to: in his own nose. The veterinary medicine professor was studying chimps in Uganda when his guest latched on. DNA sequencing showed it was previously unknown. The discovery was serendipitous at best. “When you first realize you have a tick up your nose, it takes a lot of willpower not to claw your face off,” he says.

The UW has created the nation’s first tenure-track faculty position in Hmong-American studies. Yang Sao Xiong will fill the assistant professorship and teach within the School of Social Work’s Asian American program. Xiong’s work will focus on contemporary Hmong topics such as race relations, education, health, gender, oral and family history, and religious adaptations since the Hmong arrived in the United States.

Matthew Jensen

Matthew Jensen, an assistant professor of neurology, was one of 15 winners of a video-creating competition sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges and the Khan Academy. Jensen’s ten-minute video explains the basics of the nervous system. It can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOWMWYPzKfI.

Steven Krauth, curator of the Wisconsin Insect Research Collection, holds a ghost walker ground beetle, one of the larger specimens in the Young Coleoptera Collection. (The ghost walker ground beetle is native to Sumatra, so no, you didn’t see one in your room in Barnard.) Photo: Andy Manis.

The Young Coleoptera Collection brings the UW bunches of beetles.

You know who really bugs the UW? Daniel Young bugs the UW. And he’s been bugging the UW for years, largely with his own bugs.

Young is a professor of entomology, and he’s also the director of the university’s Wisconsin Insect Research Collection (WIRC). Over the course of seventeen decades, the collection has brought together nearly 3 million curated insect specimens — and nearly 5 million more un-curated specimens and project samples. But Young is also an avid bug collector himself. For the past several years, he’s been donating his own collection to the university: the Daniel Young Coleoptera Collection.

Coleoptera are beetles, the largest order of animals on the globe. (But they don’t include “true bugs” — those are in the order Hemiptera. So Young may bug the UW, but he doesn’t truly bug it.)

“There are more than 300,000 species of beetles,” Young says. “By comparison, there are only about 4,000 species of mammals, and yet that’s what most people think of when they think of animals.”

Young began collecting insects when he was an undergraduate at Michigan State University. “I’d always been interested in them,” he says. “I grew up in Michigan, and I did a lot of fishing — a lot of fly-fishing. That got me interested in taxonomy, in learning what various insects are.”

While still an undergraduate, he worked one summer for a graduate student, who gave him the challenge of organizing a collection of beetle specimens. From there, he just kept collecting. Over the course of his four-decade career, he’s accumulated more than 200,000 specimens of his own. He began donating them to UW–Madison in part to provide an added dimension of worldwide diversity to the WIRC.

“If you’re a Sherlock Holmes-type who likes investigating, insects are perfect,” Young says. “That whole world of the Victorian era, where new species and new genera were being discovered — it’s still available in beetles.”

The Young Coleoptera Collection, as well as the rest of the Wisconsin Insect Research Collection, is housed in two locations: with the Department of Entomology in Russell Laboratories and an annex on the third floor of the Stock Pavilion.