Author: jplucas

Joshua M. Hare, a cardiac specialist at the University of Miami, certainly counts himself among the many stem-cell researchers who are eager and excited by President Obama’s expansion of federal support for studies using cells from human embryos.

He’s just not sure that embryos will actually work any better than the more common and less controversial source of stem cells that he’s already using.

After 120 years, the end is finally near.

“There is nothing like it anywhere else,” said Joan Houston Hall.

In 1889, the American Dialect Society began to write the Dictionary of American Regional English. For 80 years, the project moved along without much direction. Until UW Madison professor Frederick Cassidy took it over.

Cassidy created questionnaires and sent them out to 1002 communities all around America asking questions to discover regional dialects. For example, if you were playing hopscotch in Missouri what would you be doing? You’d be playing ‘hop-skit’. In New York you would run outside to play ‘potsy’. And in Indiana you’d be playing ‘hippity-hop’.

As university research projects go, compiling the Dictionary of American Regional English was a challenging and sometimes hazardous one: It took more than four decades, and thousands of interviews, conducted by researchers who were sometimes chased out of rural communities by suspicious locals.

Finally, though, their monumental effort to chart the idiosyncrasies of regional speech in the US is, as they might say in the south, fixin’ to be done.

The final volume, covering the letters S to Z – and revealing, at long last, the meaning of the Maine word “whiffle-minded” (vacillating) – has received a government grant that should see it being published by the end of next year, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who have been working on the dictionary since 1965.

Interviewed: Tracy Perkins is the Administrative Director for the University of Wisconsin Eye Research Institute in Madison. The UW Eye Research Institute brings together researchers from seemingly divergent disciplines to look for answers to eye-specific diseases and conditions. She tells us how the multi-disciplinary approach works.

Andrea Mason is an assistant professor in the department of kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Her research into sensory feedback is part of the work being done at the UW Eye Research Institute. Mason explains how her research relates to the study of vision. (Audio.)

Teeth from exhumed skeletons of crew members Christopher Columbus left on the island of Hispaniola more than 500 years ago reveal the presence of at least one African in the New World as a contemporary of the explorer, it was announced.

A team of researchers is extracting the chemical details of life history from the remains found in shallow graves at the site of La Isabela, the first European town in America, said T. Douglas Price, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of anthropology and leader of the team conducting an analysis of the tooth enamel of three individuals from a larger group excavated almost 20 years ago there.

Noted: A recent study debunks the idea that our immigrant ancestors quickly learned English and the American ways. Researchers Joseph Salmons, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Miranda Wilkerson, now an assistant visiting professor at Western Illinois University, discovered that many immigrants ignored English and relied solely on German schools, churches and business for decades and two or three generations.

“After 50 or more years of living in the United States, many speakers in some communities remained monolingual (in German),” the authors wrote. In one town, the Irish immigrants new to America learned German to fit in.

Scourge. Epidemic. Pest.

All are words often used to describe the pine beetles currently wreaking havoc across large tracts of North America’s forests.

Yet nature is too complex for good-versus-evil characterizations, says Cameron Currie, an Edmonton-born UW-Madison scientist whose recent work has discovered a potential upside to the notorious bugs.

There are no signs that point to the 10,000-year-old mastodon skull; no guided tours that take you past the giant sea turtle skeleton.

The specimens sit behind closed doors on the top floor of a nondescript UW-Madison building, locked in rooms next to mountain lion skins, tapir skeletons and the preserved carcasses of extinct passenger pigeons.

Hardly anyone knows about the zoological museum on the fourth floor of Noland Hall, and thatâ??s the problem.

If you don’t know a stone toter from Adam’s off ox, or aren’t sure what a grinder shop sells, the Dictionary of American Regional English is for you.

The collection of regional words and phrases is beloved by linguists and authors and used as a reference in professions as diverse as acting and police work. And now, after five decades of wide-ranging research that sometimes got word-gatherers run out of suspicious small towns, the job is almost finished.

Joshua M. Hare, a cardiac specialist at the University of Miami, certainly counts himself among the many stem-cell researchers who are eager and excited by President Obama’s expansion of federal support for studies using cells from human embryos.

He’s just not sure that embryos will actually work any better than the more common and less controversial source of stem cells that he’s already using.

From their graves on the swampy coast of the Dominican Republic, the skeletons of men who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to the New World are giving up secrets to researchers from UW-Madison and the Autonomous University of the Yucatan.

T. Douglas Price, a UW-Madison anthropologist, and James Burton, who manages the Laboratory for Archaeological Chemistry, are using techniques they created and perfected to learn more about the crew members, including where they came from, what they ate and possibly even their long-lost identities.