Author: jplucas

Cameron Currie, a UW-Madison researcher, has already impressed the scientific world with his detailed studies of ant species that raise fungus for food. He broke new ground with research that showed the ants produce bacteria that, in turn, produce an antibiotic used to kill parasites on their fungus farms.

The images were indelible, and the words of Neil Armstrong were unforgettable.

Hundreds of millions watched worldwide as the Apollo 11 astronauts made their mark on the moon forty years ago.

Among those captivated on Earth was University of Wisconsin geochemist Mike Spicuzza. “I was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin sitting in front of my television, watching it on a grainy black and white TV in my kitchen,” said Spicuzza on Monday.

Johnny Burke referenced it in song.

Thousands have tromped up its stairs to get a closer look at the heavens.

And earlier this summer, campus travelers swore at it for forcing another detour.

For its age and history, the Washburn Observatory atop Observatory Drive remains a lively part of Madisonâ??s cityscape. Within just a few weeks, Old Washburn, as it has been fondly called, will be reopened after a two-year renovation and restoration.

For years before Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon, there were many arguments over the makeup of the lunar surface.

Scientists were pretty sure it wasnâ??t green cheese. But one UW-Madison researcher got to prove to naysayers the surface was created by volcanic activity.

Monday, July 20, is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission moon landing.

“They [the National MS Society] have two deadlines a year for putting in applications: August and February. They’re canceling the August deadline because they don’t have enough money to fund grants,” explains Dr. Ian Duncan, a multiple sclerosis researcher at UW-Madison, “This is the first time in their history that this has happened.

“Things are looking grim. It’s really… depressing.”

Duncan leads a team of 9 researchers at the university.

They’re 1 of only 4 groups worldwide to receive a major MS grant that is entering into its final year.

An overseas Chinese student has said at a meeting of prominent environment experts in Beijing that the Chinese government must do more to educate people living in remote and border areas about protecting plants and animals.

Remote and border areas in China were known for their biological diversity, but residents had little knowledge of biological protection, Le Yang, a graduate student at the Department of Landscape Architecture of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, said Thursday.

Climate models of the past, present and future seem to be in no short supply these days. But a new and dynamic picture of climate change appears in this week’s Science, one that could affect the way future conditions are predicted.

Recent history has been kind to humans, providing a relatively stable climate for about the past 10,000 years. Many previous models have re-created short glimpses of this past.

But, says Axel Timmermann, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, “None of these snapshots were able to capture abrupt climate change and transition,” thereby making them less useful for predicting coming sudden shifts. Even if the near future doesn’t unfold like the 2004 climate-gone-haywire film The Day After Tomorrow, scientists need to be able to produce accurate models of what abrupt change (more likely spanning hundreds or thousands or years, rather than days) would look like and why it might occur, explains Zhengyu Liu, lead author of the study and director of the University of Wisconsinâ??Madison’s Center for Climate Research.

VANCOUVER – North American university students are at high risk of being victimized by “intimate partners” who’ve been drinking heavily, a new University of B.C. study says.

The study, led by UBC researcher Elizabeth Saewyc, says almost 20 per cent of young men and women on subject campuses have reported being targets of “physical or emotional violence (which) is often linked to drinking” in the past six months.

Saewyc worked with researchers at the University of Wisconsin and University of Washington in Seattle to survey more than 2,000 students who attended campus health services for routine appointments. The study was part of a larger project on problem drinking and campus health funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Friday’s article on calorie restriction is a good example of research using monkeys at UW-Madison.

According to the National Institutes of Health’s Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool, since 1994, the earliest year for which financial data on this project are available to the public, Richard Weindruch has received nearly $17 million to study the effects of dietary restriction on monkeys.

Weindruch and his colleagues claim that eating fewer calories will make us healthier and might allow us to live longer. The university’s press office summed up its release with the admission that people are longer lived than rhesus monkeys, and no similar study with human subjects is currently under way, so what’s the point?

If you think all the warnings about swine flu this spring turned out to be a lot of hubbub over a relatively routine illness, think again. Reports in the past week from UW-Madison, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization show why it’s prudent for doctors, families, schools and governments to be on guard.