Henry Lardy, a highly regarded emeritus professor of biochemistry at UW-Madison, died of complications due to cancer on Wednesday. He was 92.
“He was really one of the most outstanding people to ever work in our department,” says Hector DeLuca, a longtime UW-Madison biochemistry professor who is a former student of Lardy?s. “He was a very in-demand researcher and yet was so down-to-earth.”
The public can comment next week on plans for a $251 million upgrade to switch a University of Wisconsin-Madison coal-fired power plant to run on biomass.
Until just a few months ago, Henry Lardy could still be found almost every day in his biochemistry lab on the UW-Madison campus, where for more than 60 years he sought solutions to vexing problems from AIDS to sudden infant death syndrome.
His work led to widespread acclaim ? membership in the National Academy of Sciences, winner of the prestigious Wolf Foundation Award in Agriculture ? and a long record of scientific insights.
Higher education leaders want Wisconsin lawmakers and the next governor to provide tens of millions of dollars more for need-based financial aid, saying the investment is desperately needed despite a looming budget shortfall.
The University of Wisconsin System and the Wisconsin Technical College System want funding increases to fill gaps that have left thousands of eligible low-income students without grants, according to budget documents. Private school leaders want modest increases for a separate program for their students.
Sigan Hartley, assistant professor of human development and family studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison?s Waisman Centre, said, ?There seems to be a prolonged vulnerability for divorce in parents of children with autism?Typically, if couples can survive the early child-rearing years, parenting demands decrease and there is often less strain on the marriage?However, parents of children with autism often continue to live with and experience high parenting demands into their child?s adulthood, and thus marital strain may remain high in these later years.?
The Senate is asked today to give approval, sight-unseen and by unanimous consent, to a $3.4 billion ?settlement? of a 14-year-old lawsuit brought by five individuals on behalf of all American Indians who have money or land held in trust by the United States. [A column by Richard Monette, law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.]
It?s not easy going green. Just ask John Harrod Jr., who is helping guide the $250 million green makeover of UW-Madison?s Charter Street Heating Plant.
The coal-burning plant will be converted so that it burns natural gas and cleaner, farm-grown fuels such as switchgrass. The changeover that has won praise from the plant?s many critics, including the Sierra Club, which sued the university for violating the Clean Air Act. Gone will be the giant, dust-generating pile of coal that has become a symbol of the plant and its grimy history.
But Harrod, director of the UW-Madison Physical Plant, said getting rid of that coal pile and moving to cleaner biofuels has brought its own set of problems to solve.
Also quoted: Alan Fish, associate vice chancellor of Facilities Planning and Management
Michael Gaffney?s varied career, culminating in a thriving, coast-to-coast chain of floral design schools, has been guided largely by whims — not to mention a remarkable talent for landing solidly on his feet no matter where his impulses have propelled him.
Consider: As a fine arts major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he joined a bus trip to New York organized by the school to tour the art museums there. He promptly fell in love with the city and declined to get back on the bus for the return trip to the Midwest.
The daily casualty lists of U.S. troops killed in Iraq mention a hometown for each person – places large and small, urban and rural, where flag-draped coffins return to grieving communities. According to a study by University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologists, rural communities across America have paid a proportionately more costly price in the Iraq war with higher death rates of American military members compared with metropolitan areas.
The H1N1 swine flu virus underwent a mutation and used a new trick to spread efficiently in people, another signal to help experts predict whether a flu virus can cause a pandemic, researchers said Friday.
The H1N1 swine flu virus was first identified in people in April 2009 but genetic research later suggested it had in fact been circulating for at least a decade and probably longer in pigs. “This pandemic H1N1 (virus) has this mutation and is why it can replicate so well in humans,” wrote Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison?s School of Veterinary Medicine and the University of Tokyo, who co-authored the paper.
According to a study by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison?s Waisman Center, parents of grown children with autism are more likely to divorce than couples with typically developing children, according to new data from a large longitudinal study of families of adolescents and adults with autism.
MADISON (WKOW) — The next governor is being challenged by higher education leaders to provide millions of dollars for need-based financial aid despite a looming budget shortfall.
MADISON, Wis. — It sounds like science fiction: storms on the Sun?s surface having a ripple effect on Earth with far-reaching plasma interfering with all sorts of human technology. Some solar activity can be significant and cause widespread problems with satellites and other technology, but the latest activity isn?t thought to be a cause of concern. In fact, the activity was expected to produce some spectacular Northern Lights that were to be visible in Wisconsin on Wednesday night.
Quoted: UW-Madison astronomy professor Alex Lazarian
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to collaborate with Milwaukee academics to improve water-treatment technologies. EPA head Lisa Jackson is scheduled to meet with Wisconsin officials Thursday afternoon. She?s expected to sign a research agreement with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
When he worked at the UW athletic department, Vince Sweeney recalls some serious soul-searching about whether to permit StubHub to be an official sponsor. He says there was concern over how fans would feel about the athletic department doing business with the online ticket resale giant. But after approval, “we didn?t hear boo,” says Sweeney, former senior associate athletic director and now vice chancellor of university relations. As with most things, the Internet has changed the game.
A project this Editorial Board has long championed appears to be closer than ever to reality. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said this week that it had reached an agreement in principle to move its new School of Public Health into a permanent home at the former Pabst Brewery.
Even as manufacturing emerges as one of the few sectors showing consistent life in the nation?s struggling economic recovery, experts at UW-Madison stand ready to help Wisconsin businesses get a bigger piece of the action.
At UW-Madison?s Center for Quick Response Manufacturing, one of director Ananth Krishnamurthy?s goals is increased outreach to help state manufacturers be more competitive, by applying center principles aimed at cutting costly lead time in all phases of a company?s manufacturing and office operations.
The Human Services Board is next in line to discuss the merits of a resolution which asks the chair of the Dane County Board to appoint a citizens advisory panel to examine whether or not experimenting on monkeys at UW-Madison is humane and ethical.
This topic is listed on the agenda for Thursday?s (today’s) Human Services Board meeting, which begins at 5 p.m. in room 357 of the City-County Building, 210 MLK Blvd.
In June, the wiry 18-year-old walked across the Oregon High School stage at his graduation ceremony. Now Fred Machado is at a military base 2,000 miles away, training to become a Marine. He joins more than 2,700 Wisconsinites younger than 25 entering active military duty this year.
….Recruiters say the lengthy economic downturn, which has created double-digit unemployment rates in some parts of Wisconsin, and a strong sense of patriotism, especially in rural areas, have made recruiting easier.
It?s hard to believe, but the he University of Wisconsin-Madison Pre-college Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence (PEOPLE) program is already 10 years old.
?We started in 1999 with about 66 students,? says PEOPLE program executive director Jacqueline DeWalt.?Right now, we have 1350 students in the program ? elementary through undergrad degree. For those students that have completed our program we actually have 100 percent high school graduation, and 94 percent of our students go onto higher education, with about 50-55 percent coming here to UW-Madison and another 14 percent going to other UW system schools and another 30 percent going to other universities.?
Quoted: Dr. Ken Robbins, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A Downtown Madison church is stepping in to ease a chronic late-summer problem ? university students forced into a night of homelessness because they?re between apartment leases.
The researchers, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Georgia State University and Boston University, said they weren?t surprised that parents of ASD children were nearly twice as likely to divorce. Their results were in line with another study that found couples raising a child with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder were about twice as likely to split up compared to other couples.
Population growth in Dane County in recent decades, coupled with a rise in the number of law enforcement officers, has increased the chance that contacts with officers will involve deadly force – but only slightly.
In Madison and Dane County, where law enforcement officers have a long history of exercising restraint, the probability that officers will use deadly force remains “very, very low,” said Michael Scott, director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing and a professor at the UW-Madison Law School.
The H1N1 “swine” flu virus used a biochemical trick to spread efficiently in humans, according to a new study released on Thursday.The virus caused a worldwide epidemic in 2009-10 that sickened up to 34 million Americans alone and caused up to an estimated 6,000 deaths in the U.S.
The report in the current issue of Public Library of Science Pathogens said H1N1 used a different way to jump from an animal host to humans than what was previously discovered by scientists.
Yoshihiro Kawaoka, professor of pathobiological sciences at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine and one of the world’s leading influenza experts, said the discovery of the mutation in the H1N1 virus helps explain how the virus replicated so well in humans.
Dr. Todd S. Varness, age 36, passed away peacefully on Monday, Aug. 2, 2010, at UW Hospital. He was an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the School of Medicine and Public Health.
CHICAGO ? Jay Valai?s career will be over by the time the Big Ten Conference officially includes 12 teams and splits into two divisions for football. Still, the University of Wisconsin senior safety cringes at the thought of the Badgers not being in the same division as traditional rivals Minnesota and Iowa.
The Princeton Review unveiled its annual rankings of the nation?s best colleges earlier this week. Although UW-Madison didn?t earn the No. 1 slot on the Review?s list of top party schools — the University of Georgia in Athens took home that honor — Wisconsin?s flagship institution nonetheless garnered as many kudos for its party scene as its academic rigor. On the positive side, UW-Madison was noted as “a Best Midwestern College.”
Kevin P. Reilly, president of the University of Wisconsin System, said that in his state, the proposed regulations ?would be contrary to the Wisconsin Legislature?s grant of authority to the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System and to the history of postsecondary educational governance in Wisconsin.? Officials in other states with oversight systems already in place asked that the regulations be revised to note that states with authorization and oversight systems already in place would not have to create new practices or agencies to be in compliance.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison soil scientist James Bockheim.
The public is invited to a hearing on Wednesday, Aug. 11 about plans for the $250 million renovation of the Charter Street heating plant on the UW-Madison campus. It is the single most expensive building project in UW-Madison history.
Wearing hard hats, T-shirts and shorts, drillers practiced their work skills Monday afternoon with one big exception.There was no ice.Training for a trip to the South Pole, the group practiced lowering equipment into a concrete hole at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Physical Sciences Laboratory and wiped the sweat from their faces in the 85-degree heat.
Wisconsin coach Bret Bielema wanted to snatch the words out of the air as soon as they escaped his lips.
“I felt terrible,” Bielema acknowledged Tuesday on the second day of the Big Ten Conference preseason football meetings.On a nondescript day last winter, Bielema encountered tailback John Clay in the UW locker room. Clay was between ankle surgeries that prevented him from running and was overweight.
Bielema glanced at the 6-foot-1 Clay and joked he looked like right tackle Josh Oglesby, who is listed at 335 pounds.
The private group that raises money for the University of Wisconsin-Madison won?t say how much its new leader will make. The UW Foundation announced last week that UW-Madison business school dean Michael Knetter (Kuh-NET-ter) will become its next president and chief executive officer starting Oct. 16.
Despite concerns that the city doesn?t need more liquor outlets, especially at pharmacies, the City Council on Tuesday approved liquor licenses to let Walgreen Drug Stores sell beer and wine at three stores in Madison. The approvals continue Walgreens? national push to reintroduce beer and wine sales to its stores in response to customer demand and competition.
The council, following recommendations of the Alcohol License Review Committee and after a near three-hour debate, approved licenses for stores at 7810 Mineral Point Road, 606 S. Whitney Way and 8302 Old Sauk Road.
Detectors buried thousands of feet under the Antarctic ice recently confirmed a mysterious cosmic lopsidedness. Though it might seem reasonable for our planet to receive energetic particles, called cosmic rays, on average from all directions equally, more cosmic rays? seem to approach Earth from certain preferred directions. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which is still under construction, confirmed these odd cosmic ray preferences, previously detected in the northern hemisphere.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison doctor who was the subject of Journal Sentinel report in November about researchers who failed to disclose conflicts of interest in published research has resigned from the university amid an investigation of a clinical trial that he headed.
Stoughton ? Wearing hard hats, T-shirts and shorts, drillers practiced their work skills Monday afternoon with one big exception. There was no ice.
Training for a trip to the South Pole, the group practiced lowering equipment into a concrete hole at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Physical Sciences Laboratory and wiped the sweat from their faces in the 85-degree heat.
Most have already spent several seasons working during the Antarctic?s austral summer and know that soon, most of their skin will be covered to prevent frostbite. They?re part of the crew installing the IceCube Neutrino Observatory scheduled to finish in December.
John A. Gundlach Sr., age 68, went to be with his heavenly Father, on Sunday morning, Aug. 1, 2010, at St. Mary?s Hospital surrounded by his family. He worked for the University of Wisconsin Zoology Research Department for 30 years, retiring at the age of 50.
After residents fought a much larger project, the Mullins Group is proposing a six-story, $15 million to $20 million housing redevelopment on a triangular block where University Avenue meets Campus Drive on the West Side.
Mullins wants to redevelop the 2500 block of University Avenue ? except for Lombardino?s restaurant ? with 110 apartments, eight town homes, commercial space and a 166-space parking garage. The project, which would replace older, one- and two-story buildings and surface parking, would target professionals working at UW-Madison and nearby hospitals, said Sue Springman of the Mullins Group.
STOUGHTON ? Here in the cornfields, Nathan Bowker wears a blue T-shirt that reads, ?Hello from South Pole, Antarctica.?
On an 80-degree day that?s muggy enough to make straight hair curl, it doesn?t seem like Bowker could get much further from the South Pole. But he?s part of a team that spent Monday preparing for a trip there in November ? summer in Antarctica ? where he and others are expected to complete the IceCube neutrino detector. When it is finished, it will be the world?s largest such device.
CHICAGO ? Big Ten Conference commissioner Jim Delany was uncommonly revealing Monday, saying there will be no name change for the Big Ten despite the addition of Nebraska in 2011, there almost certainly will be a conference championship game in football next year, divisional alignment will be determined in 30 to 45 days and adding a ninth conference game won?t happen immediately but probably will within a few years.
But not even the conference?s all-powerful commissioner had an answer for everything at first day of the Big Ten?s football media get-together.
A prominent UW-Madison cancer researcher has abruptly resigned after university officials began investigating a potential conflict of interest involving his outside business interests.
The case involving Dr. Minesh Mehta, an internationally recognized expert on human clinical cancer trials, comes amid heightened national scrutiny of doctors? ties to industry and the university?s own attempts to better monitor such relationships.
The Big Ten Conference should hold its first football title game in 2011 thanks to the addition of Nebraska, with a site to be determined. The conference also should have divisions in place for football sometime within the next 30 to 45 days, appears headed for a nine-game league schedule in perhaps 2013, and appears content to stay at 12 schools for the foreseeable future.
An inspection conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture July 17 revealed further breaches of the Animal Welfare Act by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The second longest serving chancellor in the UW-System begins his retirement this week.When Julius Erlenbach was hired at the University of Wisconsin-Superior in 1996, he agreed to stay five years. Those five years turned into 14.
Stepping down from the podium at this time last year, the University of Wisconsin?s Bret Bielema a bit surprised. He was the only Big Ten head football coach who didn?t use his allotted 15-minute time slot?not by choice, but by the lack of interest his team had generated in coming off a 7-6 season.
Safe to say, things are much different this year.
Commissioner Jim Delany expects the Big Ten to hold a championship game next season, when Nebraska joins and brings the league to 12 members.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is the #12 party school in the nation, according to the Princeton Review.
The University of Georgia has won a national title this year — top party school.
Nike has agreed to compensate over 1,500 Honduran factory workers who were laid off abruptly in January 2009 when two Nike-contracted factories closed.
In addition to contributing $1.5 million to a worker relief fund, the company said in a July 26 statement that it will pay to enroll the workers and their families in the Honduran national health-care program for one year. Over the next two years, Nike will also work with its Honduran suppliers to place those affected in other Nike-contracted factories while offering vocational training programs to prepare them for these jobs.
This move has the potential to improve the company?s relations with UW-Madison. The university terminated its contract with the company last April citing concerns over more than $2 million in unpaid severance packages.
It may be 80 degrees and muggy enough to make straight hair curl, but scientists are gathering in Stoughton today to prepare for a far different climate.They are getting ready for the annual work season in Antarctica, where the IceCube neutrino detector has been under construction since 2004. The world?s largest such detector, it is expected to be completed this winter.
University of Wisconsin running back John Clay might be the returning offensive player of the year in the Big Ten Conference. But the media still chose Ohio State quarterback Terrelle Pryor as the preseason player of the year in balloting prior to the football media days, which begin today in Chicago. And the Badgers might have sky-high expectations this season — being picked in the top 10 of several early polls — but they still are picked to finish third behind Ohio State and Iowa.
The 2010 Big Ten Conference preseason football poll looks exactly as most analysts predicted: No. 1 Ohio State, No. 2 Iowa and No. 3 Wisconsin.
Janet L. Meyer, age 66, of Madison passed away Friday, July 30, 2010, at Marquardt Memorial Manor in Watertown. Janet had been employed at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health as an administrative assistant in the Department of Surgery.
Quoted: UW-Madison Political Science Professor Charles Franklin.
Dear Editor: The transplant service providers at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics are proud to be leaders in treating kidney transplant patients, including minorities, at significantly higher rates than national averages. In fact, the most recent data available show that the percentage of African-American patients who received kidney transplants over a three-year period (2004-2006) at the University of Wisconsin is more than 38 percent higher than the national average.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Superior. That?s a fine school. But after seven years with Schwarzenegger at the helm, California is an economic and political mess.
On the other hand, Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell has no college degree. Yet her state is doing rather well after six years of her leadership. So should Wisconsin be looking for someone with a college degree to take over from outgoing Gov. Jim Doyle, a graduate of both the University of Wisconsin and Harvard Law School?
While addressing faculty senators this spring about pressing issues facing UW-Madison in the near term, Chancellor Biddy Martin noted the critical importance of finding a quality replacement for Sandy Wilcox, who announced last fall his plans to retire as president of the UW Foundation.
By all accounts, that item was successfully crossed off the to-do list Wednesday when Mike Knetter, the popular and highly regarded dean of UW-Madison?s School of Business, was named the next president and chief executive officer of the UW Foundation, the private, nonprofit corporation that raises funds for the university.
Deshaunsay Sykes-Crowder?s short life does not appear to have been a happy one. But it might be a profitable one ? for others, at least. Last month, Deshaunsay?s estate and her mother filed a civil rights suit in U.S. District Court in Madison against Dane and Cuyahoga (Ohio) counties and the 6-year-old?s aunt, Lynda Sykes, who was also her foster mother.
Quoted: Susan Michaud, a former child welfare worker who now runs the public child welfare training program at UW-Madison
