When this alarm clock wakes you from your slumber, you will hopefully never have cause to glare angrily at it while hitting the snooze button.
Thatâ??s because the Proactive Sleep tool, invented by two University of Wisconsin-Madison students, is smarter than the average alarm clock. It is calibrated to wake people during a light phase in sleep. Thus, the sleepy-head in question feels less groggy, ready to get up and at â??em.
Scientists have advanced on the sneeze by cracking the code of the common cold.
Researchers at UW-Madison and other institutions have sequenced and analyzed the genetic instructions for the 99 known strains of rhinovirus, the most frequent cause of the cold.
Scientists have unraveled the genetic code of the common cold â?? all 99 known strains of it, to be exact. In fact, the genetic blueprints showed that you can catch two separate strains of cold at the same time â?? and those strains then can swap their genetic material inside your body to make a whole new strain.
It’s why we’ll never have a vaccine for the common cold, said biochemist Ann Palmenberg of the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, who led the three teams that assembled the family tree of the world’s rhinoviruses.
Noted: For commercial growers, energy costs represent the third-largest expense after labor and stock, but figuring out how much energy greenhouses use is not so easy. Climate, size, construction materials and heating systems all determine the amount of energy expenditure. The University of Wisconsinâ??Madison has an online tool U.S. growers can use to figure out which energy-saving technologies would be most economical; it gives baseline energy costs, as well.
New research findings out of Wake Forest University School of Medicine and the University of Wisconsin may help provide some direction for men diagnosed with prostate cancer about whether their cancer is likely to be life-threatening.
Quoted: â??It seems to defy logic,â? said Dr. Perry J. Pickhardt, associate professor of radiology at the University of Wisconsin, who has consulted for some makers of software used to analyze the CT scans.
University of Wisconsin officials are scratching their heads as to why their application numbers are down 4.4 percent this year, especially since many admissions officials expected interest in public universities to increase as the economy continued to founder. Even more confounding, applications from out-of-state students actually increased by 211, while the number of in-state prospective students went down at least around 900.
As the agriculture industry is in the spotlight following cases of salmonella, a local expert is sharing his thoughts on ways to make food safe for consumers.
Feeding millions of people around the world starts with feeding animals. While some farmers use antibiotics to help grow livestock, a local expert said he believes it carries risk.
“The micro-organisms that are in the gut of these animals become resistant, and when people get infected with these organisms, they’re getting resistant organisms. They’re getting infections, (and are) infected with organisms that are multi-drug resistant,” said Dr. Dennis Maki, an expert on infectious diseases at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine.
Curing the common cold, one of medicineâ??s most elusive goals, may now be in the realm of the possible.
Researchers said Thursday that they had decoded the genomes of the 99 strains of common cold virus and developed a catalog of its vulnerabilities.
Scientists announced Thursday that they have cracked the genetic code of all known species of the common cold virus, a major step forward in the effort to develop a cureâ??and perhaps even a vaccineâ??or the common cold.
The findings, published this week in the journal Science, highlighted why researchers have found it so difficult to build effective drugs to combat the virus, which sickens millions each year and sends thousands of children with asthma to the hospital.
Scientists have unraveled the genetic code of the common cold — all 99 known strains of it, to be exact.
But don’t expect the feat to lead to a cure for the sniffling any time soon. It turns out that rhinoviruses are even more complicated than researchers originally thought.
In fact, the genetic blueprints showed that you can catch two separate strains of cold at the same time — and those strains then can swap their genetic material inside your body to make a whole new strain.
Scientists are boldly predicting we may soon have to stop complaining that if we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we cure the common cold?
Researchers have cracked the genetic code for all 99 known strains of the human rhinovirus, the virus that accounts for the majority of human cold infections.
The work, published this week in the journal Science, could lead to the first effective treatments for the common cold within five years, researchers say.
It may be possible to use skin cells to create stem cells that can repair damaged hearts, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison report.
In late 2007, UW-Madison researchers showed that skin cells could be turned back into stem cells. In this new study, these induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells were used to create working heart-muscle cells (cardiomyocytes).
One of the cityâ??s most recognizable symbols started to take shape atop the frozen surface of Lake Mendota in front of Memorial Union on Thursday afternoon after more than a dozen yearsâ?? absence. Thatâ??s right, the Statue of Liberty has returned to Madison.
Constructed and first erected by University of Wisconsin-Madison students in February 1979 based on a promise by the infamous and prank-prone Pail and Shovel Party in its student government platform, the statue has returned to the surface of Lake Mendota twice; once the following winter and again in early 1996. Lady Liberty also made an appearance on Willow Island in 2004 after a restoration by Dane County. Now she is returning to her original home on the ice in front of Memorial Union as part of the Hoofers Winter Carnival.
A coalition of students and colleges in Wisconsin are calling on the Governor to protect financial aid in his state budget.
The governor has warned that all state programs could face cuts in his upcoming budget. If financial aid takes a hit, Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities President Rolf Wegenke warns that it could force many students to give up on higher education. If that happens, he predicts many will never finish college.
The compromise, $789-billion economic-stimulus bill that Congress is planning to try to deliver to President Obama by Monday contains large sums of money for student aid and biomedical research, and would give states billions of dollars to ease budget cuts to colleges and schools.
College lobbyists didn’t get everything they wanted in the plan, which the House and Senate are expected to approve and could take up as soon as today. The measure, for instance, doesn’t include the separate pot of money for campus construction that the House had passed or money for the Perkins Loan program that the Senate had approved.
Today some UW-Madison engineering students are putting their homework aside for the University’s annual Innovation Days. The student inventors are vying for thousands of dollars in prize money awarded to the most useful and original devices. Christina Clarkson reports. (Audio, eighth item.)
Wisconsin could get about $3.5 billion from the federal stimulus compromise.
Much of Wisconsin’s share of the latest $789-billion economic stimulus plan would go to education, healthcare, road projects and jobless benefits. About 70,000 jobs would be created or saved in Wisconsin.
As the dust began to settle and details slowly emerged about the composition of the compromise economic stimulus bill crafted by Congress, the picture for higher education was generally positive â?? with students and colleges poised to receive somewhere between $50 billion and $75 billion, based on our rough estimate. But exactly how it looked very much depended on where you sat.
College chiefs have to be careful to adopt the right tone when discussing the recession with trustees and professors. Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin, new chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, describes how she navigated a series of public forums on the university’s financial situation. (Audio.)
The big news last week was unemployment, which hit its highest rate â?? 7.6 percent â?? since 1992.
I remember 1992 well. That was the year I graduated from the UW-Madison journalism school, entering a tough job market and a profession notorious for low pay. I remember seeing a long list of UW-Madison majors next to their expected annual entry-level salaries.
Journalism was dead last â?? below even philosophy majors.
Q: How do snowflakes grow so symmetrically?
A: Many people have ascribed the symmetry of snowflakes to an intelligent designer, but there are less mysterious explanations for their seeming perfection, says UW-Madison mathematics professor David Griffeath.
New research offers yet another argument for why high school students should avoid the college early-admissions frenzy: They may be more likely to regret their decision later in life.
Quoted: “There was tremendous enthusiasm for this in large parts of China in the 1990s,” said Ed Friedman, a China specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Evolutionary biology isn’t just something you do in the lab or the library: Over the past two centuries, scientific pioneers have had to weather seasickness, survive shipwrecks and watch out for polar bears while they ferreted out the facts.
In his latest book, “Remarkable Creatures,” molecular biologist Sean B. Carroll recounts the rip-roaring adventure tales behind the great advances in the theory of evolution.
Genes may play a role in a person’s ability to empathize with others, suggests a U.S. study involving mice.
Researchers trained highly social mice to identify a sound played in a specific cage as negative by also having squeaks of distress come from a mouse in that cage. But a genetically different strain of mice that were less social didn’t make the same negative connection.
An education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison education believes that MMOs like World of Warcraft (WoW) can help to produce better real-world citizens.
Professor Constance Steinkuehler outlined her views at a recent campus event.
Noted: On Wednesday, Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn joined a few dozen law enforcement officials at a meeting with Vice President Joe Biden in Washington to talk about the stimulus package.
“The ‘money quote’ (from Biden) was ‘the federal government has a role to play’ in local law enforcement, that ‘now we’re back in the game.’ That was music to our ears,” Flynn said after the meeting, referring to an estimated $4 billion in law enforcement grants for localities in the package.
Also present was Susan Riseling, police chief for the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an officer of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
Overall, reportable crime in the city of Madison last year went down slightly, but violent crime increased nearly 6 percent.
Madison police on Wednesday released the latest crime figures in a report called Uniform Crime Statistics.
The Uniform Crime Statistics for 2008 show there were 10,572 crimes in Madison last year, compared to 10,705 in 2007, a decrease of 1.3 percent.
The economic stimulus bill that is expected to win passage in the Senate on Tuesday would provide about $83 billion for child care, public schools and universities.
That is a lot less than the $150 billion voted by the House, but would still account for a vast increase in the federal share of the nationâ??s education spending.
Governor Jim Doyle announces legislation which cuts state government spending by $125 million dollars – part of effort to close Wisconsin’s budget gap. The governor says the legislation will mean across the board cuts by state government agencies in Wisconsin, and will result in a $700 million reduction in the state’s current budget gap.
Provost Tom Sullivan has decided to dissolve the University of Minnesotaâ??s graduate school, placing more power in the hands of individual deans and his own office. Justified in part by budget shortfalls, the decision forecasts the kind of bold and arguably risky tactics college leaders may employ under increased demands to streamline â?? and it quickly began to stir controversy at the university.
Richard Z. Kabaker, attorney, civic leader, fundraiser, brother, husband, father and friend, died on Jan. 29, 2009. Since 1972, when the family moved to Madison, Richard had spent his professional time teaching at the University of Wisconsin Law School, practicing law with private firms in Madison and working to better the community in so many ways.
Quoted: John West, a 1991 graduate of the UW-Madison Law School who now lives in Los Angeles.
UW-Madison student Aaron Andrzejak showed up Tuesday afternoon at the Vilas Zoo grinning and bare-armed in a T-shirt.
Listeners might never again hear the charming sound of a bus engine rumbling behind the smooth talk of a morning DJ.
And students likely wonâ??t need to suffer spiritedly through shifts in a 100-degree studio, overheated by broadcast equipment.
For the first time in five years, undergraduate applications for fall admission to UW-Madison are on the decline.
The reason why is still unclear, officials said, but it could be related to the slumping economy and a smaller class of high school graduates.
The total number of students who applied to UW-Madison dropped from a record high last year of 25,073 to 24,263 this year.
Quoted: Lynn Knutson, professor of nuclear physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said tritium is not harmful unless ingested, and even then it eventually flushes from the body. â??I tend not to be scared of tritium in small amounts,â? he said.
A Wisconsin board has fired a professor from Florida who mysteriously failed to show up to teach at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire last fall.
The UW System Board of Regents voted during a closed meeting last week to fire Philip Siegel. Details of the decision were made public Tuesday.
After a search, UW-Eau Claire hired Siegel as an assistant professor to teach financial accounting courses last fall.
Taking a chemical approach, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a two-step method to convert the cellulose in raw biomass into a promising biofuel. The process, which is described in the Wednesday, Feb. 11 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, is unprecedented in its use of untreated, inedible biomass as the starting material.
The key to the new process is the first step, in which cellulose is converted into the “platform” chemical 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), from which a variety of valuable commodity chemicals can be made. “Other groups have demonstrated some of the individual steps involved in converting biomass to HMF, starting with glucose or fructose,” says Ronald Raines, a professor with appointments in the Department of Biochemistry and the Department of Chemistry. “What we did was show how to do the whole process in one step, starting with biomass itself.”
The ongoing battle between Russell Athletics and Honduran workers continues, and the hundreds of universities like Cornell that are sponsored by Russell are caught in the middle.
The issue â?? which dates back to October 2007 â?? started when Russell Athletics announced it would be closing Jerzees de Honduras, the only solely Russell-owned factory in Honduras. The controversy arose over the ThreadsThreadscontext of the closing: The factory was shut down after 750 of the 1800 workers announced the consolidation of a union on Oct. 5. The leaders of the Union, Moises Elias a Bovado, who was president, and Norma Estela Mejia Castellano, vice president of the union, have been touring campuses nationwide to make their cause heard, and authorities have been listening.
Noted: Mike Knetter, dean of the UW-Madison School of Business and a UW-Eau Claire graduate, was the event’s keynote speaker. He also has worked as senior staff economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisors for former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Although Knetter acknowledged the damaging recession and an economy that’s been particularly hard-hit in the past five months, he said the previous 15 to 20 years were a period of favorable unemployment rates, solid gross domestic product growth, increased values for the Standard and Poor’s 500 and improvements in labor productivity.
Quoted: “Companies in the Midwest are certainly affected, but many are still hiring,” says Blair Sanford, director of the M.B.A. career center at the Wisconsin School of Business. “The students who want to go to banks on the East Coast are the ones we’re working harder to get conversations for.”
The economy is hurting right now.
But, according to the state’s higher education institutions that makes funding for financial aid all that more important.
“There has never been this cross sector. Rallying around on behalf of student aid before.”
Tuesday afternoon state lawmakers got a surprise visit.
Quoted: “Today we live in a second golden age of evolution,” says University of Wisconsin biologist Sean Carroll, author of Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species, also out Thursday.
Unfortunately, we could see this coming. The Wisconsin Covenant program, Gov. Jim Doyle’s promise to state students about getting a college education, doesn’t have enough money. So says the higher education research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Under the Covenant, Wisconsin eighth-graders pledge to keep a B average through high school, take college-prep classes and stay out of trouble. In return, the state pledges to give them a spot in a state college and a financial aid package to help them pay for it.
A stimulus bill working its way through Congress would help thousands of students pay for college and could give colleges money to fix crumbling buildings. But would spending billions of dollars on education really kick-start the economy?
That’s the question many legislators and policy experts in Washington were asking last week as the U.S. Senate debated the roughly $900-billion measure.
When we talk about the future of public universities, we are usually talking about the flagship state universities. They have greatly increased expenditures in the past decade. A case in point is the University of Kansas, which has tripled its spending and raised its tuition and fees by a factor of five since 1988.
Author: Howard H. Schweber is an associate professor of political science and law at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Three years ago, when Rene Rejo Pera was setting up a new lab at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), she had to make sure she had two of everything: one microscope for her federally funded lab, for example, and one for a privately funded replica next door. Because of funding restrictions on stem-cell research ordered by President George W. Bush in 2001, this was a redundant scenario played out in labs across the country. The edict specifically limited federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research to a small number of cell lines already in existence, leaving scientists who wanted to conduct cutting-edge research in this area scrambling for private money.
Quoted: Tim Kamp, codirector of the Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center at the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: “We could see the lowest prices here in January or February. By March or April, we could see prices come up about a dollar or so, but as we move into the second half of the year we could be moving closer to $15 or $16,” Bob Cropp, dairy economist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Quoted: Menzie D. Chinn, professor of Public Affairs and Economics at the University of Wisconsin, said about the Senate bill, “I don’t understand the direction of the movement toward cutting spending. Cutting the transfers to the states seems particularly ill-advised, as we have a good feeling that the propensity to spend out these funds will be high and relatively quick.”
Bones donâ??t lie. John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin at Madison likes evidence he can put his hands on, so he takes me on a tour of the universityâ??s bone laboratory. There, the energetic 36-year-old anthropologist unlocks a glass case and begins arranging human skulls and other skeletal artifactsâ??some genuine fossils, others high-quality reproductionsâ??on a counter according to their age. Gesturing toward these relics, which span the past 35,000 years, Hawks says, â??You donâ??t have to look hard to see that teeth are getting smaller, skull size is shrinking, stature is getting smaller.â?
As Congress continues to debate an economic-stimulus bill that includes billions of dollars for students and colleges, one U.S. senator warned higher-education leaders on Monday that they needed to rein in costs if they wanted to persuade his colleagues to back further increases in aid to academe.
This interview with Mark Bugher, director of Madison’s University Research Park, was conducted as the Tech Council’s report on the economic value of academic R&D was released.
A nuclear reactor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will be converted to run on less dangerous fuel under a national safety initiative.
UW-Madison officials said the reactor’s fuel will be converted from highly enriched uranium to low enriched uranium this year or early next year. The school said leftover fuel will be stored at a lab in Idaho.
Arlene Doris Rudman Davenport, age 77, died on Saturday, Jan. 31, 2009. Arlene began working for the University of Wisconsin in 1966 as an undergraduate advisor in the Department of Psychology and was employed by the university for 40 years, retiring in 2006.
The two Madison executives Gov. Jim Doyle tapped to lead the office coordinating anticipated federal economic stimulus funding say they won’t be deciding which transportation, education and other projects get the money.
And it won’t become a slush fund for Doyle, the Legislature or local officials, either, they added.
That’s because most of the money will flow through more than 100 existing federal programs, which already set strict criteria for whether a project qualifies, said Gary Wolter, president and chief executive officer of Madison Gas and Electric Co., and Al Fish, associate vice chancellor for facilities, planning and management at UW-Madison.
Gov. Jim Doyle said Friday he wants to install a new biomass boiler to replace coal burning at UW-Madison’s Charter Street heating plant.
The state agreed last year to reduce coal use at the plant under a settlement to stop a federal lawsuit over pollution at the facility.
The new UW-Madison south campus union will cost $7.1 million more than expected, bringing the total building cost up to $94.8 million.
The Board of Regents approved the request for extra money at its meeting last week. To fund the difference, the campus is providing money from parking fees, adding gift funds, and moving money from the Memorial Union Theater renovation project.
An extra $7.1 million was approved Friday toward the construction of the new Union South, bringing the total cost of the project to $94.8 million.
Associate Director of Wisconsin Union Hank Walter said the Union Council, which oversees the project, was faced with the choice of scaling back the Union South project or increasing the budget with funding from other sources.
