Author: jplucas

In an accompanying article on early agriculture, Eve Emshwiller, an ethnobotanist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, was quoted as saying the reports of early dates for plant domestication in the New World were remarkable because the activity appeared to have occurred not long after humans first colonized the Americas, which is now thought to be at least 13,000 years ago.

Scientists say they’ve created embryonic stem cells by stimulating unfertilized eggs, a significant step toward producing transplant tissue that’s genetically matched to women.
The advance suggests that someday, a woman who wants a transplant to treat a condition like diabetes or a spinal cord injury could provide eggs to a lab, which in turn could create tissue that her body wouldn’t reject.
Ethicists disagreed on whether the strategy would avoid the long-standing ethical objections to creating embryonic stem cells by other means.

MADISON, Wis. â?? Federal regulators are reviewing a complaint by a watchdog group accusing University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists of mistreating primates who died after experimentation.

Necropsy reports obtained by Stop Animal Exploitation Now show a 4-year-old macaque monkey that died in 2005 had an unspecified foreign object lodged in its intestinal tract.

A 14-year-old female rhesus monkey also died that year after a tube inserted for a surgery severely injured the monkeyâ??s throat, reports show. Another female rhesus died of a bacterial infection after giving birth.

Take the sweet sugar in your kitchen, and imagine turning this into something that could fuel your car. A team of chemical engineers at UW think they finally found a way to do just that.

“It has the same energy density as gasoline, so 40-percent more than ethanol,” said grad student and team member Yuriy Roman Leshkov.

“So we’re making a fuel that’s superior to ethanol and biodiesel,” said fellow researcher Chris Barrett. The two worked under the leadership of professor James Dumesic, who’s findings were reported earlier this month in the journal ‘Nature.’

WASHINGTON — Michigan will get at least 100 new jobs — with the potential for thousands more — as a result of $50 million in federal ethanol research money Michigan State University was awarded Tuesday.

The money puts MSU at the center of a major federal effort to turn common plants into ethanol that could replace gasoline in the nation’s cars and trucks — an effort whose “Holy Grail,” one MSU official said, is a Michigan economy fed by fuel from plants.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison will receive one of its largest grants ever to fund renewable energy research.

The $125 million grant will be used to open the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center. Governor Jim Doyle helped unveil the plan on Tuesday, which he says will help the nation meet its growing need for alternative energy sources.

Madison, Wis. – The United States. Department of Energy will invest up to $375 million over five years in three new Bioenergy Research Centers, including $125 million for a center led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to promote the development of cellulosic ethanol.

The Madison bioenergy research facility, which will be called the DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, will operate in collaboration with Michigan State University and be directed by Timothy Donohue, professor of bacteriology at UW-Madison.

Science Times this week has a special issue devoted to these advances and Sean B. Carroll, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin, is one of scientists whose work is featured. Watch a video interview with Dr. Carroll.

WASHINGTON, June 25 â?? The Energy Department is creating three bioenergy research centers to find new ways to turn plants into fuel.

The three centers, which the department described as three start-up companies with $125 million each in capital, will be in Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Madison, Wis.; and near Berkeley, Calif. They will involve numerous universities, national laboratories and private companies. The goal of the centers, which are to be announced on Tuesday, is to bring new technologies to market within five years.

The new approach supports President Bushâ??s goal of reducing gasoline consumption by 20 percent in 10 years.

A new generation of Americans like the Morrises, in moving to places perched on the edge of vast, undeveloped government lands in the West, are living out a dangerous experiment, many of them ignorant of the risk.

Their migration â?? more than 8.6 million new homes in the West within 30 miles of a national forest since 1982, according to research at the University of Wisconsin â?? has coincided with profound environmental changes that have worsened the fire hazard, including years of drought, record-setting heat and forest management policies that have allowed brush and dead trees to build up.

â??Itâ??s like a tsunami, this big wave of development thatâ??s rolling toward the public lands,â? said Volker C. Radeloff, a professor of forest ecology and management at the University of Wisconsin. â??And the number of fires keeps going up.â?

WASHINGTON – Michigan State University will receive $50 million in federal grants over five years to conduct basic research on biofuels, officials said Monday.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman is expected to announce Tuesday that Michigan State and other universities have been selected to share $375 million in federal funding to develop new bioenergy centers for research on cellulosic ethanol and biomass plants.

The young geographer would tell strangers he was hunting uranium. In 1952, that explanation seemed more understandable than the truth about what he was doing in the desert.

Who would believe the broad, flat rocks called pediments had led this slender man, 98 pounds, into Arizona’s San Pedro River Valleyto map remote country under a blazing sun? At night, he camped out in a beat-up Ford coupe, and read by Coleman lamp until, tired, he pulled down the seats and slept with his head by the steering wheel, his feet stretched back into the trunk.