Author: jplucas

Noted: “I?ve also been involved in a study called the Wisconsin Project by researchers at the University of Wisconsin. It?s a device that was made for traumatic brain injury that electrically stimulates the brain through the tongue to help the brain reorganize and create different pathways. It has changed my ability to exercise, and I?ve learned that exercise and diet can affect everything for physical and emotional well being. I don?t care if you?re in a wheelchair or bedridden.”

Watching storm waves crash ashore, it?s obvious these monsters are taller than the waves that lap the beach on a calm, sunny day.This seemingly clear dichotomy led geologists to assume that there were two types of waves stirring up the shallow seafloor: small fair-weather waves and big storm waves. Now, this decades-old theory has been turned on its head by two geologists at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who, in the process of studying waves, discovered a large size discrepancy between waves in different oceans.

A paper on controversial avian H5N1 influenza research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison finally is being published in full this week in the journal Nature after touching off a months-long international debate over the value of preparedness vs. the risk of key details falling into the hands of terrorists.

On Tuesday, Salon reported that the Federal Aviation Administration has approved 25 universities to fly drones in U.S. airspace.Included on the list is the University of Wisconsin. But this isn?t something well known, even among campus administrators.

This week sees the online publication of the paper ?Experimental adaptation of an influenza H5 HA confers respiratory droplet transmission to a reassortant H5 HA/H1N1 virus in ferrets? by the Japanese?US team headed by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

You might not have noticed, but the influenza world has been in a bit of an uproar since late last year, when news leaked out that two teams of researchers had purposefully tweaked H5N1 bird flu in the lab to potentially make it more transmissible among human beings. (H5N1 spreads like wildfire among birds ? and usually kills them ? but the virus only rarely seems to jump to human beings, though when it does the infections are often fatal.)

After months of controversy, the journal Nature has published the details of an experiment describing how the avian flu can be modified into a human-contagious form.

The journal Nature has published the first of two controversial papers about laboratory-enhanced versions of the deadly bird flu virus that initially sparked fears among U.S. biosecurity experts that it could be used as a recipe for a bioterrorism weapon.

It?s finally out. After months of will-they-won?t they and should-they-shouldn?t-they deliberations, Nature has finally published a paper about a mutant strain of bird flu that can spread between mammals.

Only a handful of genetic mutations can make bird flu infectious among mammals, serving as a warning sign for the deadly virus possibly spreading to people, biologists report.

Today, a scientific journal published a study that some people thought might never be made public at all.

A contested bird flu study was finally published Wednesday.

The science journal Nature has published the first of two controversial papers about laboratory-enhanced versions of the deadly bird flu virus – described by some as a ?recipe? for a bioterror attack.

Foremost Farms CEO Dave Fuhrmann is leading a $32 million campaign to renovate a Wisconsin research and training facility essential to the state?s dairy industry. The dairy plant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is also home to the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research. The campaign has raised $6 million of the $32-million goal and Fuhrmann expects to reach the halfway mark by July or August.

Noted: More recently, she and her colleagues have begun identifying some of the baseline settings of infant social intelligence. Katherine D. Kinzler, now of the University of Chicago, and Kristin Shutts, now at the University of Wisconsin, have found that infants just a few weeks old show a clear liking for people who use speech patterns the babies have already been exposed to, and that includes the regional accents, twangs, and R?s or lack thereof. A baby from Boston not only gazes longer at somebody speaking English than at somebody speaking French; the baby gazes longest at a person who sounds like Click and Clack of the radio show ?Car Talk.?

When you see someone walking down the street yammering to himself, with no Bluetooth in sight, he?s not necessarily out of his mind. He might just be trying to bring something to mind — and saying it out loud helps, found a study by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Pennsylvania.

So if it seemed quiet in the blogosphere this week, it may be because most of science-writing?s all-stars (plus me) were in the same room at the University of Wisconsin, talking about subjects that make many people uncomfortable: vaccination, climate change, evolution. The occasion was a conference, ?Science Writing in the Age of Denial,? and the point was to get accomplished people talking about hard questions of verification, communication and belief.

Steve Barnet is hiring, but not for an ordinary IT job. His ideal candidate “will be willing to travel to Polar and high altitude sites.”