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article Fall 2016

Physical Instruments in a Digital Age of Music

By Brandon Grill Music has changed drastically throughout the decades, perhaps more in the past century than in any other time in history. While genres and styles have been in constant development and evolution prior to the widespread use of electricity, the instruments being used by composers and performers were largely the same ones that had […]

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article Fall 2016

Astronomical Advances

By Chris Hanko Astronomy is a place where curious minds thrive, and are often rewarded with amazing, seemingly improbable discoveries. While we have come so far in terms of knowledge and technology, there is still so much for us to learn about our surroundings and even our very existence. In this article, I will guide […]

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article Fall 2016

The Idea That Inspired a Nation

By Morgan Adkins When you say Wisconsin, you’ve said it all: Home of Titletown and Cheese Days, America’s Dairyland, Land of the Bratwurst, and leading exporter of cranberries, sweet corn and more. Wisconsin is known for a lot of things, but perhaps its greatest claim to fame is the Wisconsin Idea. Providing a vision for the […]

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article Fall 2016

Moore No More: A Paradigm Shift in Computer Architecture

By Stephen Eick Computers drive the world, it seems, and with the rise of applications like self-driving vehicles, this is true more so than ever before. The intricacies involved in their development are vast and numerous. A modern computer processor can have more transistors (the basic building blocks of computer chips) than the number of blades […]

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article Fall 2016

HIV: The Master of Mutation

By Edwin Neumann Viruses have been around for eons — possibly close to 3.5 billion years, according to many scientists. Some viral proteins even predate the divergence of life into the three domains: bacteria, archaea (ancient bacteria), and eukarya (plant, animal, and fungus cells). These ubiquitous microbes, which are not classified under any of the domains, have […]

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article Fall 2016

Voting: There’s Not an App for That

By Eric Fleming Today, most people expect to be able to do anything and everything on their smartphone. Apple’s famous 2009 refrain “There’s an app for that” has quickly transformed from a selling point into an expectation. Almost every conceivable task has been moved to the internet, and subsequently to the mobile phone. People use […]

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article Fall 2016

The Twenty Percent

By Anastasia Montgomery Walking into an engineering class on the first day of a semester, I find it amusing to do a quick survey of my class, and without fail I find that only about 1 in 5 people are female. Depending on the class, that proportion can be much worse, as is the case […]

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article Fall 2016

One Thing “Lead” to Another: An Origin Story

By Mark Bodnar During childhood, just about everyone received an unfortunate nickname or two that they are quite glad to have left firmly in the past; and fortunately, time does have a certain knack for erasing things from memory. Today most people know Illinois as the Prairie State and Wisconsin as the Badger State. But […]

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article Fall 2016

A Closer Look at Optics

By Alex Chay On campus, professors are doing many different types of research. Some of these topics are consistent with what one thinks of when hearing the word “research”: mixing chemicals in test tubes or observing bacteria cells under a microscope. On the other hand, some professors are delving into topics that may baffle a […]

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article Fall 2016

Laser-Aided Machining: The Future of Manufacturing

By Chris Hanko There is definitely no shortage of groundbreaking research being done at UW-Madison, and the next breakthrough could happen in the heart of Mechanical Engineering. In Associate Professor Frank Pfefforkorn’s Laser-Assisted Multi-Scale Manufacturing Lab, major research is being done in the fields of materials science, manufacturing, welding and many others to ultimately grow […]