In an effort to better the environment, the University of Wisconsinâ??s Charter Street heating plant will no longer burn coal, Gov. Jim Doyle announced Friday.
A biomass boiler will be installed by 2012, which will produce 250,000 tons of biomass each year, supplying UW with steam for heating and cooling, according to a statement from Doyle.
Quoted: Gary Cook, a research scientist at the Wisconsin Centre for Education Research, part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that while “aligning the standards is a nice thing to say, I’ve tried to do it, and it’s really difficult.”
Noted: The attention is different from the past few legislative sessions, when there was little action on the few proposals on drunken driving, said Lisa Maroney. She is spokeswoman for two coalitions: AWARE, made up of nearly 40 health and medical, law enforcement and insurance groups pushing for a stronger response to drunken driving, and UW Health, made up of University of Wisconsin Hospital & Clinics, its physicians and the UW Medical Foundation.
Noted: So-called innocence projects at Northwestern, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Cincinnati have reported that their non-DNA caseloads have risen. And for almost a year the district attorney in Dallas has been focusing on wrongful-conviction claims that lack DNA evidence.
Blue eyes are typically associated with beauty, or perhaps Frank Sinatra. But to University of Wisconsin anthropologist John Hawks, they represent an evolutionary mystery.
For nearly all of human history, everyone in the world had brown eyes. Then, between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, the first blue-eyed baby was born somewhere near the Black Sea.
Opponents vowed to keep fighting a University of Wisconsin-affiliated surgery center’s plan to provide second-trimester abortions in Madison, despite its final approval Friday.
The Madison Surgery Center board’s private vote was the last needed for the plan to move forward. It followed earlier votes at UW and Meriter hospitals. The center could begin offering the service in weeks or months, UW Health spokeswoman Lisa Brunette said.
Quoted: Cynthia Jasper, a professor of consumer science and chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, agreed with Leonardâ??s theory of Milwaukee and much of the rest of the country being over-retailed. She also said it can be very difficult for shopping malls and retail areas to turn around negative momentum from multiple store vacancies.
Phony Facebook pages are sweeping the stem cell world, report scientists and bioethicists, the latest victims of bogus pages on the popular social-networking site.
“There appears to be an imposter(s) creating fake Facebook web pages,” wrote university of Wisconsin bioethicist R. Alta Charo in an alert sent Thursday. “This is common, but I have learned that a slew of stem cell researchers at the (University of Wisconsin) have one, as do I, and now I learn the problem is shared with some folks in the national stem cell advocacy world.”
University of Wisconsin coach Lisa Stone had hoped to remain mum, prepare her team for a critical Big Ten Conference women’s basketball game Sunday at Purdue and in time help Mariah Dunham find a new program to call home.
However, that was before the junior forward from Watertown High School, who was dismissed from the UW team on Wednesday for repeated violations of team rules, publicly labeled the dismissal unfair and said she had no inkling her status with the team was in jeopardy.
Gov. Jim Doyle said he wants to install a new biomass boiler at a coal-burning power plant in downtown Madison by 2012.
The state agreed last year to reduce coal use at the plant under a settlement to stop a federal lawsuit over pollution at the plant. The Charter Street Power Plant helps heat and cool the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Blackcurrants and green tea contain substances that might fight viruses, bacteria and inflammation, says family physician David Rakel, director of integrative medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Others have made similar claims for chicken soup.
The Doyle administration today has been receving all sorts of accolades from bioenergy supporters and environmental groups about a proposed biomass power plant at the University of WIsconsin-Madison campus.
They’re praising the administration for vowing to build a power plant capable of burning up to 100% biomass.
At the National Pheasant Fest of all places, there’s talk of both feathers, and the future.
Among the dozen of booths at the event at Madison’s Alliant Energy Center Exhibition Hall on Friday, a handful booths demonstrated management of hunting grounds, and the possible harvesting of those lands for biomass.
The Charter Street Heating Plant that serves the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus will burn biomass and natural gas instead of coal under a plan announced Friday.
Gov. Jim Doyle, who supported proposals earlier this decade to build coal-fired power plants, announced last summer that the state would stop burning coal at state-owned heating plants in Madison.
“We must move away from our dependence on coal,” Doyle said in a statement. “This new project will help build the biomass market in Wisconsin, keep the money we spend on energy in the local economy and create green jobs in the area.”
An innovation hothouse like Madison’s University Research Park will be a part of every school in the UW System if a new Board of Regents task force meets its expectations.
Aiming for sweeping change, UW System President Kevin Reilly said Friday he’s pulling together a high-profile group to uncover roadblocks that need to be removed and incentives that need to be put into place to move more university research into the hands of Wisconsin businesses and start-up companies.
The University of Wisconsin System is moving ahead with a new computer program to manage its payroll and benefits for employees after already spending $26 million on a previous failed effort.
The university has budgeted $8 million just to plan for the massive and complicated conversion from a system that’s been in place since 1975. There are no estimates yet for how much the project will cost or how long it will take.
A few days ago, Chancellor Biddy Martin announced the University of Wisconsinâ??s intent to end business relations in March with Russell Athletics, a clothing manufacturing company contracted to supply apparel donning UW-Madison logos. The reasoning behind the termination of this relationship was the companyâ??s aggressive action against workersâ?? movements to unionize, particularly shutting down a plant in Choloma, Honduras, where workers were beginning to form a union.
His theory of evolution is accepted in many circles, controversial in others.
Regardless, Saturday was Darwin Day at UW-Madison. It was the fourth year in a row the event took place close to the birthday of evolution expert Charles Darwin. He was born 200 years ago on February 12.
The day long festivities included biology and evolution experts as guest speakers, as well as a look at evolution research going on at the campus.
The University of Wisconsin System is suspending payments from 38 endowments whose values have plummeted because of the recession, its president said Friday.
The move will mean $700,000 less is available this year for scholarships, programs and other initiatives on campuses across the state, President Kevin Reilly told the Board of Regents.
The UW-System says itâ??s making â??significant progressâ? in providing more need-based financial aid for students. But future progress will depend on what the state and federal governments can provide.
UW-System President Kevin Reilly says last semester, the UW was able to help about 2,000 students with $1.76-million from the new Fund for Wisconsin Scholars. Most of that help came through either grants or stipends. Administrators say a similar amount will be awarded for the spring semester.
UW-System spokesman David Giroux says this money comes from a private, non-profit fund set up by a multi-million dollar gift from alumni John and Tashia Morgridge. (Second item.)
Last week, UW Chancellor Biddy Martin announced her decision to terminate UW-Madisonâ??s Russell Athletics contract over worker rights violations in the apparel companyâ??s Jerzees de Honduras factory. The factory was the subject of an investigation by the Worker Rights Consortium, which confirmed that Russellâ??s union-busting behavior clearly violated not only UW-Madisonâ??s Code of Conduct for apparel producers, but also Honduran law and internationally recognized labor standards. Chancellor Martin made the right call.
Consider reasons for late-term abortion
I do not believe in abortion. But what happens if complications occur that will affect the mother’s health or cause her death if the fetus lives to full-term?
To Tony Goldberg, a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine, the concept of evolution is far from a dusty theory. It’s a real process that informs just about everything he does in his laboratory.
Goldberg studies the ecology and evolution of disease and disease-causing organisms and he sees evolution every time he studies a virus or a bacteria that has changed to resist our latest efforts to control it.
More than 2,000 University of Wisconsin System students received a total of $1.76 million in need-based financial aid during fall 2008, thanks to a generous scholarship donation.
Q: Whatâ??s the difference between an economic recession and a depression?
A: The “official” arbiter of recessions is the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private, nonprofit research organization, comprised of a number of top economists, according to Stephen Malpezzi, Lorin and Marjorie Tiefenthaler Professor of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics at the Wisconsin School of Business.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison will no longer do business with a clothing manufacturer that allegedly closed a plant in Honduras after workers began unionizing, university officials said Thursday.
A year after she got her college degree, Renetta Waupoose learned she had leukemia, a blood cancer.
More bad news came a few months later. Waupoose needed a transplant of blood-forming stem cells, but her brother wasn’t a match. Nor were any adults on the donor registry.
Finally, good news arrived. Doctors said Waupoose could become the first adult patient at UW Hospital to receive a transplant of umbilical-cord blood. It contains stem cells that grow into blood cells.
The most ridiculously named conference the University of Wisconsin has held in many years went off without a hitch Thursday, as a crowd of elitists put on their blinders and whined about how their cherished illusions are being challenged.
The “Free Trade Under Threat” session at Grainger Hall, which was promoted by the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy, the UW-Madison Center for International Business Education and Research and the Madison International Trade Association, featured as its whiner-in-chief Paul Blustein, of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates were all under 25 when, more than 150 years ago, they set out from England to explore the wild and virtually unknown jungles of South America.
While Darwin embarked on his famous voyage in 1831 on the navy vessel the HMS Beagle, Wallace and Bates explored the Amazon two decades later on commercial trading ships. These three naturalists not only proposed and developed the idea of natural selection, but helped provide the evidence to support their beliefs and solve “the problem of the origin of species.”
Hmong activists said Thursday they look to President Barack Obama to fight Thailand’s forced deportations of Hmong refugees to a hostile homeland.
“We put our faith and hope in President Obama to help provide for our people. We must act now before it is too late,” said Pa Shoua Vang, the daughter of refugees, a UW-Madison student and a 19-year-old Elk Mound, Wis., resident.
Kathleen T. Horning, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s Cooperative Childrenâ??s Book Center (CCBC), joins the list of distinguished names who have delivered the May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture.
â??It was a big surprise and a great honor,â? says Horning, who goes by the name K.T., when she heard her name announced as the 2010 lecturer at the American Library Associationâ??s (ALA) Youth Media Awards ceremony in Denver last week. â??Now all I have to do is write the lecture.â?
The list of social networking sites is longer than you could probably imagine. Just to name a few, thereâ??s Webkinz, a site that targets kids as young as six years old. MySpace recently disabled the accounts of 90,000 sex offenders and Facebook, which used to target college students but now is open to the general public. Doctor Megan Moreno says the main problem with kids using sites like these is that theyâ??ve convinced adults theyâ??re harmless. She says sheâ??s not blaming parents, but the New Berlin case shows they have to pay attention.
Barely two months remain before the opening of the eleventh Wisconsin Film Festival, and preparations for it are in high gear. Though the final selection of films has yet to be determined and ticket sales are a month away, there has already been a tremendous response from persons interested in volunteering for this celebration of cinema.
Evolution has given the human brain a vast prefrontal cortex, a ball of neural tissue that enables us to engage in abstract reasoning, reflect on the past, and make predictions about the future.
It also allows us to wander a mental landscape filled with emotional minefields, says Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin.
“It allows us to screw up our emotions far more than other animals,” he said during a visit to the University of Utah this week. “It allows us to persist in emotional responses beyond which they are still useful.”
If the University of Wisconsin does not intend to use the body parts of aborted babies for research they must say so, thus clearing the air in that regard. It recently came to light that our prestigious university is making plans to work with Madison Surgery Center to perform abortions on babies at 13-22 weeks gestation.
Quoted: “Especially if you’re feeling anxiety and stress about your ability to pay down your debt. you just don’t know where to begin. Credit counseling can definitely help you do that, making a budget helping you write down what you’re spending, coming up with a plan,” says University of Wisconsin financial specialist Michael Collins.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Carolyn “Biddy” Martin said the university will end its relationship with Russell Athletic, a UW licensee that makes fleece wear with the university’s logo.
The contract will terminate in March when the current license agreement expires. The contract generated nearly $40,000 in revenue for UW-Madison in 2007-08.
“We are withdrawing our contract from Russell,” Martin said during a break in a UW System Board of Regents meeting on campus Thursday.
The University of Wisconsin System gave more than $1.7 million in need-based financial aid to students last semester thanks to a scholarship donation.
Nearly 2,000 students received the aid from the Fund for Wisconsin Scholars. Roughly the same amount in aid will go to about the same number of students in the current semester.
The fund was created with a $175 million gift from UW-Madison graduates John and Tashia Morgridge.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison said Thursday it will cut ties with Atlanta-based Russell Athletic over questions about its labor practices at a shuttered plant in Honduras.
Chancellor Biddy Martin said she accepted a recommendation from a committee to not renew its licensing agreement with the company when it expires in March.
Russell makes fleece products bearing the universityâ??s logo under the license. The deal generated nearly $40,000 in revenue for the university in the most recent fiscal year.
UW-Madison officials said a half dozen engineering school graduates either had accepted job offers rescinded, or delayed for months, by national firms.
College of Engineering career services director John Archambault told 27 News the firms involved provided payments akin to severance to compensate students, but students were left to scramble to adjust career plans.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison announced today that it would end its business relationship with Russell Athletic, which makes apparel with the universityâ??s logo, when its current licensing agreement expires in March.
Buried in the recent news about big endowment losses and the steps colleges are taking to weather the economic crisis is an emerging pattern: Culture, it would seem, is expendable.
First came Brandeis Universityâ??s decision to close its art museum and sell off more than 6,000 works in its collection. Then Miami University, in Ohio, and Texas Tech moved to sell or shutter their radio stations. Now Utah State University may stop its academic press.
Junior Mariah Dunham was dismissed from the University of Wisconsin women’s basketball team for repeated violations of team rules, Coach Lisa Stone announced Wednesday.
Today Dunham spoke to us in an exclusive interview about her side of the story. (Video.)
Boleslaw “Bill” Uminski, passed away on Monday, Feb. 2, 2009, at the age of 85. Bill enjoyed a career with the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a police officer and following graduation from Waukesha he obtained a position with the UW-Madison as assistant safety director and retired in 1982.
The poor economy is ratcheting up anxieties about college affordability at a time when more Americans than ever say a college degree is essential to success, a report says today. Those findings, based on a survey of 1,009 Americans in late December, are hardly mind-boggling, but they represent dramatic shifts in public attitude in a short period of time.
A small but growing percentage of high school students have passed at least one college-level course before they graduate, but participation and pass rates among some minority groups remain disproportionately low, a report says.
Think of happiness as a skill, not so different maybe from learning to play the piano: the more you train, the better you get. That was the encouraging message Wednesday night from Richard Davidson, a pioneer in the biology of emotions.
Our emotions, it turns out, are revealed deep inside our brains, in areas such as the amygdala and the uncinate fasciculus. And these structures of our brain can physically change with training, says Davidson, who is a distinguished professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is director of the school’s Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior. He will also head up a planned Wisconsin Center on the Neuroscience and Psychophysiology of Meditation.
Mariah Dunham’s days as a Wisconsin Badger are over.
Dunham, the second leading scorer and rebounder on the UW women’s basketball team, was dismissed from the team Wednesday by coach Lisa Stone for repeated violations of team rules.
Junior forward Mariah Dunham was dismissed from the University of Wisconsin womenâ??s basketball team for repeated violations of team rules, coach Lisa Stone announced yesterday.
The announcement comes after Dunham was suspended indefinitely on Feb. 1 before the teamâ??s game at Michigan following an off-the-court incident.
Quoted: Smokers make a New Year’s resolution to quit, but despite all the advancements in treatment, the most popular way is to quit cold turkey, said Dr. Douglas Jorenby. Jorenby is a professor of medicine at UW-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health, home to the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention.
Sara Wilcox was a freshman at Wausau West High School when she saw the University of Wisconsin Varsity Band perform there in 2001.
“I saw how much fun they were. It looked like they really enjoyed performing,” said Wilcox, now a senior majoring in legal studies at UW-Madison. “I knew that was what I wanted to do.”
Wednesday, the UW Hospital Board gave overwhelming approval of a plan that would offer late term abortions.
Doctors acknowledged abortion is a personal, contentious issue and there may never be a consensus among people.
Outside the meeting, protesters picketed and shouted. Inside, a war of words. Supporters and opponents of abortion rights argued the ethics of second term abortions.
The governing body of the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics on Wednesday approved a plan to allow certain late-term abortions at an outpatient clinic.
After hearing three hours of emotional testimony from supporters and opponents Wednesday, the board voted 11-3 for the plan to provide abortions on women 19 to 22 weeks pregnant at the Madison Surgery Center.
UW Hospital, the UW Medical Foundation and Meriter Hospital are proposing the plan in the wake of the December retirement of a Madison abortion doctor. In his absence, the Madison area does not have a provider who will perform abortions after 19 weeks.
The time has come to mourn the short and trashy life of JuicyCampus.
For some, the now defunct Web site was a forum for exacting sweet, anonymous revenge â?? a sort of cyber boxing arena where jilted lovers could settle scores, and the Goth set could take the Greeks down a peg. There was also a downside. JuicyCampus was a nightmare for higher education officials and some students, who saw the site as a potentially dangerous provocateur, encouraging students to spread hurtful gossip, lies, threats and racial epithets.
The University of California took a major step on Wednesday toward adopting a sweeping change in its undergraduate admissions policy that would enlarge its applicant pool and drop the requirement that students take the SAT Subject Tests.
The U.S. Senate economic stimulus bill being debated today contains at least $3.1 billion for Wisconsin, according to a review by the Democratic Policy Committee.
The review looked at some, but not all, of the spending in the bill, which could get a vote today.
From fetal defects and womenâ??s health risks to late recognition of pregnancy and lack of money, the reasons for second-trimester abortions vary, say doctors who support a clinic that would perform the procedures in Madison.
Catherine Eve “Kitty” Hank passed away in the early morning hours of Saturday, Jan. 31, 2009. Kitty ran the Surgical Pathology Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin Hospital for Dr. Walter Jaeschke for more than 30 years.
Privacy experts are reminding people who use online social networking sites like Facebook to be careful not to fall victim to identity thieves.
An area woman recently found out that it doesn’t take much to create a fake profile page on a site like Facebook.
Gabriela Cezar, an acclaimed stem cell researcher, created a Facebook account about a year ago to network.
A 2005 decision to invest $100 million for stem cell research and training has paid off for University of Connecticut researchers and, Gov. M. Jodi Rell says, for the stateâ??s economy.
University of Connecticut researchers have created two new human embryonic stem cell lines essential for investigators working at the frontier of stem cell research. Discoveries can be translated into new treatments and cures for millions of people stricken with debilitating chronic diseases.
