Waukesha County was chosen as a pilot site because of its location, diversity of populations and the relatively high number of births recorded here. Other pilot sites are in California, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Utah.
Local plans for the project are being coordinated jointly by researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
To pay for highways, buildings and environmental programs, state government slid 87% deeper in long-term debt over the past 10 years.
WHATEVER HAPPENS on the basketball court Saturday when the University of Georgia Bulldogs play the Badgers at the Kohl Center, it can’t possibly be as dramatic as the circumstances that brought the Georgia coach, Dennis Felton, to Madison the first time.
It was in 2001, and Felton was then the basketball coach at Western Kentucky. It was football season and it happened that Western Kentucky was scheduled to play Wisconsin at Camp Randall. Felton hitched a ride on the football team plane because for the past two months he had been corresponding by e-mail and speaking on the telephone with a longtime Madison resident named Nancy Klatt.
One of the oldest homes in the wooded Highlands neighborhood on Madison’s west side — a Swiss-style chalet built for a UW English literature professor — is slated for the wrecking ball unless a buyer can surface.
The Madison Plan Commission Monday night approved demolition of the “Pyre House” at 1015 Hillside Ave., pending a one-year waiting period.
Dear Editor: Thank you for publishing the minimum amount that the University of Wisconsin will receive as a result of its broadcasting agreement with the Big Ten Network. Everybody knew the deal was all about the money. Until your article nobody knew exactly how much money was involved.
The minimum amount of $6.1 million that UW will receive is a lot of cash! At least Chancellor John Wiley has “generously” allowed non-athletic departments to share 30 percent of the financial windfall. I wonder how much the academic staff was involved in the decision on how to distribute that money. I think there would have been a lot more money made available for academics if they had an equal say in the distribution.
….As long as there are cheaper apartments for rent in the older houses around campus, however, there will be students living in substandard housing. The city must increase housing inspections, and landlords must take responsibility that their houses meet fire codes.
If not, we risk more tragic deaths, as history repeats itself.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Would two college hockey conferences be willing to scale back their schedules to accommodate more nonconference games between members who also happen to belong to the Big Ten Conference?
It may not be as far-fetched as you think.
Seeing a growing market for games between Big Ten schools, Western Collegiate Hockey Association commissioner Bruce McLeod and his counterpart in the Central Collegiate Hockey Association, Tom Anastos, are in the early stages of exploring options to make it happen.
NEW YORK — For all the excitement, big questions remain about how to turn this week’s stem cell breakthrough into new treatments for the sick. And it’s not clear when they’ll be answered.
Scientists have to learn more about the new kind of cell the landmark research produced. They have to find a different way to make it, to avoid a risk of cancer. And even after that, there are plenty of steps needed to harness this laboratory advance for therapy. So if you ask when doctors and patients will see new treatments, scientists can only hedge.
“I just can’t tell you dates,” says the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s James Thomson, one of the scientists in the U.S. and Japan who announced the breakthrough on Tuesday.
The UW System will conduct a statewide listening session on Tuesday to gain input about a strategic framework being developed to help the state’s universities strengthen Wisconsin’s economy and its communities.
As part of the “Advantage Wisconsin” strategic initiative, the UW System will hold public listening sessions from 2 to 4 p.m. Tuesday at about 50 sites around the state, mostly Cooperative Extension offices.
Wisconsin Public Radio has asked federal communication regulators for permission to establish eight new stations.
Weâ??re all well aware of the naming-rights phenomenon at colleges and universities: Donors give big gifts and get their names on big buildings.
When it comes to giving and rewards, size matters.
So imagine the consternation that ensued at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when the dean of the business school proposed soliciting donors who would pledge not to have their names on a building.
Call it fundraising unplugged.
The Green Bay Packers’ search for a new president has been trimmed to 10 candidates, including two potential frontrunners – Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany and Northwestern University athletic director Mark H. Murphy.
Quoted: Ken Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin political science professor.
Dogged and determined scientists appear to have given mankind a remarkable gift: a method for creating personalized medical repair kits using skin cells from a patient’s own body.
Frances L. Murphy II, 85, publisher emeritus of the longest-running African American family-owned newspaper in the United States, died yesterday of cancer-related illnesses at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore.
Frances Louise Murphy II was raised in the newspaper business. The granddaughter of the founder of The Afro-American Newspapers chain, she learned the trade in classrooms and newsrooms, working as a reporter, editor and eventually publisher as she pushed to improve quality.
When blacks could not be admitted to the University of Maryland, the state paid for her to attend the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a journalism degree in 1944.
Research teams at two prestigious universities announced a major feat of biological alchemy this week: They’ve taken ordinary human cells and turned them into cells with all the characteristics and promise of embryonic stem cells.
Two papers published this week, one in Cell by Dr Yamanaka and one in Science by Junying Yu of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have shown how to do the trick in human cells. Dr Wilmut is so impressed with their data that he has said he is now going to concentrate his efforts on this alternative technique.
Tuesday’s announcement that scientists had found a noncontroversial way to make cells equivalent to human embryonic stem cells did not just change the scientific and ethical landscape. It generated economic and geopolitical tremors through California, New York and about half a dozen other states that have invested — in some cases heavily — in embryonic stem cell programs and research centers.
For almost a decade now, embryonic stem cells (ESCs) have been heralded as a panacea for a range of ailments — from neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s to failing organs in cancer patients. These remarkable cells do have the potential to bring medical advances: They can turn into every cell type of the body, and can provide a potentially unlimited supply of transplantable cells.
If the stem cell wars are indeed nearly over, no one will savor the peace more than James A. Thomson.
The breakthrough by researchers who’ve found a way to turn ordinary skin cells into embryonic stem cells is great news. It’s a rare case of a scientific leap defusing an ethical debate, rather than creating new ones.
Twenty-five days. That’s how long it took Dr. Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University to undo more than 30 years of exquisitely programmed biology packed into a woman’s cheek cell â?? and just maybe change the world. In a procedure that some scientists thought could take decades to discover, Yamanaka tricked the cheek cell into acting like an embryonic stem cell â?? capable of dividing, developing and maturing into any of the body’s more than 200 different cell types. And he wasn’t alone: on the same day that he published his milestone in the journal Cell, James Thomson, a pioneering University of Wisconsin molecular biologist, reported similar success in Science.
The state is capitalizing on some of its valuable assets — including UW-Madisons research prowess and the states agricultural resources — to produce development in businesses such as biotechnology and medical equipment.
Mentions a 1999 report by the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It’s probably too late for next Thursday’s pivotal game between Green Bay and Dallas, but a new offering from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell provides hope for deals that would put the NFL Network on the major cable companies, including Charter Communications. Includes update on Big Ten Network’s standoff with the cable industry.
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee will start late-night walking patrols in the neighborhoods surrounding the school, hire more officers and seek a security review from an independent task force as part of a $500,000 campus safety initiative unveiled Tuesday
A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor has returned to the U.S. and is recovering from being drugged, robbed and dumped in a remote Russian park.
David Bethea, 59, chairman of the university’s Slavic languages department, said he has visited Russia more than two dozen times but made mistakes he hopes other tourists can learn from.
During the first week of October, I was the science-writer-in-residence at the University of Wisconsinâ??Madison. Being a science-writer-in-residence vastly beats being a regular old science writer, because I did not actually have to write anything. I thus got to recharge my depleted store of metaphors (my brain was a wasteland, a barren desert, a bachelorâ??s refrigerator), rest my tendonitis-ridden mouse arm and leave verbs unconjugated. I declined all declensions.
Meanwhile, hours away at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, students may discover they are eligible for health insurance free of charge. Through University Health Services, Wisconsin’s flagship school provides students with basic health care services at no extra cost, according to the school’s Web site.
He refuses to own a TV, doesn’t read newspapers, hates stories about himself and talksthisfast on the rare occasions he does speak to reporters. Jamie Thomson, Wisconsin’s stem cell pioneer, does not suffer fools lightly, so you’d better get to the point and avoid personal questions.
While China and India each have overtaken the United States in the number of engineers and scientists they graduate, which in turn has powered the ascendancies of both nations, the Kern foundation points to sharp enrollment declines in the engineering programs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UW-Milwaukee.
Madison-based Centrose and the University of Wisconsin-Madison jointly received $150,000 of funding from the National Science Foundation to continue working on a proprietary drug discovery method that uses sugar chemistry to enhance drugs and reinvigorate failed ones. (Second item)
In this episode, University of Wisconsin-Madison cheese researcher Carol Chen explains the physics, chemistry and biology of cheese. And Scientific American’s Christie Nicholson talks about our new web community. Plus we’ll test your knowledge of some recent science in the news. Websites mentioned on this podcast include: www.cdr.wisc.edu; www.cheese.com
The ethical debate over stem-cell research could be over now that the UW-Madison scientist who grew the world’s first human embryonic stem cells has created similar cells without using or destroying embryos.
We have long been strong supporters of embryonic stem cell research, despite the controversy that swirls around it and the presidential veto over federal funding that stunted it.
But we share the excitement about a new breakthrough in this field, one that may hold the tantalizing possibility that embryonic stem cell research will be a thing of the past. What makes it particularly satisfying is that scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who first isolated human embryonic stem cells nearly 10 years ago, including James Thomson, are prominently involved in this development as well.
The advance reported out of the lab of UW-Madison scientist James Thomson has generated global coverage in more than 1,700 media outlets as of this morning. To view the scope and content of this coverage, click here
In breakthroughs that burst like bombshells in biology’s hottest field, rival scientists in Japan and the United States have announced that they successfully turned human tissue into cells that behave like embryonic stem cells — potentially medicine’s most powerful weapon against an array of deadly diseases.
Scientists have created the equivalent of embryonic stem cells from ordinary skin cells, a breakthrough that could someday produce new treatments for disease without the explosive moral questions of embyro cloning.
Researchers have transformed ordinary human skin cells into batches of cells that look and act like embryonic stem cells — but without using cloning technology and without making embryos.
Their breakthroughs, reported on Tuesday, could make possible the long-sought goal of tailor-made medicine, but without the political, scientific and ethical roadblock of using human eggs or embryos.
The discovery that skin cells can be reprogrammed to mimic embryonic stem cells is likely to transform the sticky political debate over the science, a debate that has pitted Mr. Bush against two-thirds of the American public including prominent Republicans like Nancy Reagan and has even helped decide some elections.
By genetically manipulating human skin cells, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a separate team in Japan were able to reprogram those cells to act like embryonic stem cells without using human embryos.
Because it remains uncertain which teams will fill the Bowl Championship Series slots, the University of Wisconsin’s bowl picture remains unsettled.
However, according to a high-ranking UW official and a representative from Florida Citrus Sports, UW remains in the running for the Big Ten Conference’s No. 2 bowl, the Capital One Bowl on Jan. 1 in Orlando.
Call it the Wisconsin Idea 2.0.
The University of Wisconsin is holding listening sessions around the state Nov. 27 to get ideas on how it can do a better job of bolstering the state’s economy and its communities.
Quoted: Barbara Knox, medical director of the University of Wisconsin Child Protection Program.
Nearly a decade after University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists rocked the scientific world by first isolating human embryonic stem cells, they and a separate group in Japan have achieved another breakthrough, one that could make the field of embryonic stem cell research passé.
With their fourth consecutive victory over rival Minnesota in the books and the opportunity to record a 10-victory season intact, the University of Wisconsin players can recuperate thanks to a week off, and wait to learn their bowl destination.
A house fire near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus Sunday morning killed a 23-year-old man who was visiting friends for the weekend and injured three others, according to the Madison Fire Department.
On Thursday, when college students take their seats at Thanksgiving tables, there could be some surprises in store. The biggest one might be that there aren’t many surprises.
Anthony Reuter, 20, a junior at the University of Minnesota, told his parents about his shaved head a full month before going home to Viroqua this week.
“My mom screamed,” said Reuter, who also gave them a heads-up when he pierced his lip this time last year.
A state consortium of farm, labor, business and education groups has come up with a “Competitive Mandate for Wisconsin” seeking an economic development strategy that emphasizes education and builds on state assets to cultivate more high-paying jobs
Will Wisconsin tight end Travis Beckum return to UW for his senior season or enter the 2008 National Football League draft?
….As the one-week early national signing period begins today, recruiting analyst Van Coleman studied the Badgers’ four-man class and rated it as middle of the pack among Big Ten Conference schools.
Coleman then added that rating means nothing to Wisconsin because, “those guys will be better in Bo’s system than they’re rated as individuals.”
Some artists talk a lot about working with young people and students. Other artists just do it.
Among the latter is four-time Grammy-winner soprano Dawn Upshaw – who will perform Joseph Cantaloube’s popular “Songs of the Auvergne” and contemporary composer Osvaldo Golijov’s “Three Songs with Orchestra” with the Madison Symphony Orchestra in Overture Hall this Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m.
Upshaw will lead an on-campus master class at the Carol Rennebohm Auditorium, Music Hall, UW-Madison on Thursday, Nov. 15, beginning at 2:30 p.m. and running to about 4 p.m
Jolene Anderson, Danielle Ward and Janese Banks have bonded through adversity during their careers with the University of Wisconsin women’s basketball team, and breaking into the Associated Press Top 25 poll has been a satisfying accomplishment for the seniors.
Wisconsin athletics director Barry Alvarez asked lawmakers Wednesday to help his department avoid a potentially huge tax liability.
The Department of Revenue is threatening to start collecting the sales tax on donations made to Badgers’ athletics by people trying to qualify for season tickets, Alvarez said. His department would owe $400,000 in the first year and up to $2 million if the tax is collected retroactively to 2001, he said.
n a setback for Gov. Jim Doyle, a proposed constitutional amendment to kill the so-called “Frankenstein veto” cleared a major hurdle today.
On a bipartisan 4-0 vote, the Senate Ethics Reform and Government Operations Committee approved the proposed constitutional amendment, clearing the way for Senate approval of the measure. If the full Senate approves it, the proposal would go to voters for final approval next year.
First-term County Board Supervisor Ashok Kumar will not seek re-election in 2008 in District 5, which covers the University of Wisconsin campus.
Kumar, 23, plans to move out of the area, “possibly to the San Francisco bay area,” he said, and continue doing organizing work, “more grassroots efforts.”
Rumors are swarming that an announcement concerning Lloyd Carr’s retirement will come after this weekend’s Ohio State-Michigan game. None of my sources can confirm it, but I wouldn’t be shocked.
Michigan may have been looking at its next head coach when it lost to Wisconsin’s Bret Bielema last Saturday.
Week after week, University of Wisconsin coach Bret Bielema didn’t hesitate to praise freshman tailback Zach Brown.
The results of recent surveys of young peoples political savvy are grim: Just one-third of college students said its important to stay current with political issues and events. More than half of people ages 15 to 25 didnt know that only citizens can vote in the United States.
