Author: jplucas

Once again today, a couple of stories landed on our desks that were more related than they first appeared.

The first, from a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, the Alliance for Excellent Education, produced a study showing if every Wisconsin student in the class of 2005-2006 graduates from high school, the state would save $202 million in lifetime health costs. The second, from the UW-Madison Center on Wisconsin Strategy, found that 178,000 Wisconsin families need public health or other benefits despite having year-round jobs.

The nuclear reactor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is small and not particularly powerful, with a core no bigger than a dormitory refrigerator and operating power one six-hundredth that of an average power reactor. Compared with its commercial counterparts, it is so unimposing that some nuclear scientists call it a “Micky Mouse reactor.”

But its fuel is weapons-grade uranium, a crucial ingredient in the making of nuclear bombs. If the fuel were ever stolen, it could be used in a nuclear weapon.

This year, two nutritional scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Rachel N. Close and Dale A. Schoeller, took a unique twist on the calculations to determine what ââ?¬Å?supersizingââ?¬Â a fast-food meal costs society. Paying 67 cents to supersize an order ââ?¬â? 73 percent more calories for 17 percent more money ââ?¬â? adds an average of 36 grams of adipose tissue. The future medical costs for that bargain would be $6.64 for an obese man and $3.46 for an obese woman. ââ?¬Å?The hidden financial costs associated with weight gain from upsizing a value meal may help convince people it is not a bargain,ââ?¬Â Mr. Schoeller said.

A second study found that the amygdala, the brain’s fear hub, likely becomes abnormally small in severely socially impaired males with autism.Teens and young men who were slowest at distinguishing expressions had a smaller than normal amygdala, Richard Davidson, and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin found when they made magnetic resonance imaging studies of their brains.

OTTAWA — Preschool is better preparation for kindergarten than the attention of a stay-at-home mom, new research shows.
The national study in the United States found children who attend preschool — centre-based care — enter public schools with higher levels of academic skills than their peers who experienced other types of child care, including stay-at-home parent, relative care and babysitters.

And the preschool advantage in reading and math persists through Grade 3 unless children are placed in small classes with high levels of reading instruction.

“The key is, you really have to look at what happens at home versus what happens at preschool or centre-based care,” lead author Katherine Magnuson of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said in an interview.

Q: Are winters getting less snowy?

A: “That depends on how long your memory is,” says Scott Bachmeier, a research meteorologist with the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at UW-Madison. “If you were here through the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, those were some pretty snowy decades, and if we compare these years to those years, yes, we are in a snow drought.”

Scientists would help lead the nation’s research on deadly animal diseases at a high- security building near Stoughton if UW-Madison is picked as the site of a new federal lab.
But the proposal, at the university’s Kegonsa Research Campus in the town of Dunn, faces significant competition: 14 applicants are vying for the new National Bio and Agro- Defense Facility.

A Dane County circuit court judge ruled in favor of animal rights activists who wish to build a museum between two primate testing facilities on the UW-Madison campus.

Judge Sarah O�Brien ruled that Richard McLellan, who supports the Primate Freedom Project, had a legitimate commitment from landowner Roger Charly to sell some land in Madison for $675,000. The parcel in question is between the Harry F. Harlow Primate Psychology building and the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center. Organizers with the Primate Freedom Project want to use the land for a museum, which they say would expose the cruelty of primate research.