In response to departmental budget cuts, the University of Wisconsin-Madison plans to end its research on dairy sheep — a program it says is unique to Wisconsin, but is no longer affordable.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison will close its dairy sheep research program and disperse the flock of about 300 ewes in the fall, as the university rethinks how it serves the state’s broad agricultural sectors in light of state budget cuts.
“Interspecies yeast hybrid” sounds like either a black metal band or a horror movie, but the truth is stranger yet: Yeast hybridization is procreation between very different kinds of Beer goes back at least to the Egyptians, but it was only 500 years ago that what is conservatively estimated as a one-in-a-billion chance cross between yeast species allowed for the production of the first lager. It was Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which makes bread, wine and ale possible, and its distant cousin Saccharomyces eubayanus that accidently married to give us the basis for making lagers. Lagers are characterized by cold maturation with bottom-fermenting yeast and a quaffable taste profile.
Former United Nations bioweapons inspector Rocco Casagrande has a Ph.D. in experimental biology from MIT. He’s got a rational, science-loving mind, so he’s not the kind of guy you’d expect to have a big picture of a tarot card hanging over his office desk.
The achievement gap has been a persistent problem in Wisconsin’s schools, and now the state and UW-Madison are teaming up to try to find an answer. Our guests from the Department of Public Instruction and UW’s Center for Education Research explain why they’re optimistic about the partnership’s ability to close…
Two pro-life organizations have launched a television advertising campaign to encourage legislative action on the fetal tissue research ban. However, it was reported Monday that at least two TV stations have refused to air the ads during prime viewing times.
Despite all the heavy rain in the first half of December, with flood warnings across parts of the state, Wisconsinites should be thankful they didn’t experience a downpour on the order of 5 inches in just 24 hours. Such extreme rainfall can cause damaging flooding, severe soil erosion and crop loss. Wisconsin is experiencing these events more frequently, a trend that is expected to continue as the planet’s climate warms. However, it is important to note that any given weather event can’t be attributed to long-term climate change.
Noted: The latest study included researchers from several government agencies and universities, including the University of Michigan, UW-Madison and the University of Notre Dame.
An anti-abortion group has started airing a television commercial calling on Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to hold a vote on a bill that would prohibit research using tissue taken from aborted fetuses.
Noted: Jim Lattis is the director of UW Space Place in the UW-Madison astronomy department.
When a dealer at a New York coin show showed astronomer Michael Molnar an ancient Roman coin minted in Syria that featured a picture of Zeus on one side and Aries the ram on the other, he bought it for $50.
Noted: The research first started in chickens. Animal science professor Mark Cook and associate researchers disabled a gene that helps defeat the immune system in sick hens.
From that discovery came ground-breaking work inside Arlington’s UW Beef Nutrition Farm, where researchers have been feeding those hens’ eggs to cattle in an effort to help prevent disease without the use of antibiotics.
When your grade-school science teacher described the various methods one can use to construct a telescope, drilling countless holes a mile and a half deep into Antarctic ice probably wasn’t one of them. But that’s exactly how the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory works.
A center that focuses on clean energy research will continue operating at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after a $3.5 million grant from the school’s research foundation.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation’s grant to the Wisconsin Energy Institute was announced Tuesday [Dec. 22].
New research conducted by psychologists at University of Wisconsin-Madison has found that people who learn to meditate on compassion are more likely to help someone who is being treated unfairly.
Top story – Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every 10 Minutes – features imagery from Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies.
An international study involving 26 centers around the world has produced a more detailed picture of the genetic factors involved in age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in the elderly. The University of Wisconsin-Madison was one of the 26 centers involved in the study which was just published in the journal Nature Genetics.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation will provide $3.5 million to fill a budget hole and help a hub for energy research keep operating at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Funding for the Wisconsin Energy Institute had been cut in the state budget lawmakers approved this summer. Gov. Scott Walker removed the funding as part of a proposal to cut back state support for the university system and give it more autonomy.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation plans to give $3.5 million to keep the Wisconsin Energy Institute operating for a year. It’s a stopgap move after state lawmakers passed a budget in July that removed $8.1 million in funding over two years for the Wisconsin Bioenergy Initiative.
A study co-authored by a Wisconsin researcher says that when humans showed up on Earth, changes came to a plant-animal association that had lasted 300 million years.
Noted: The $5.25 million grant will span four years. The money will support research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison through the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and the Institute for Research on Poverty, officials said.
A University of Wisconsin researcher known worldwide for his work on influenza and ebola is the winner of a prestigious award from the United Nations.
An analysis of rivers and streams finds the waterways — collectively — are a bigger source of the greenhouse gas, methane, than previously estimated, according to a study led by a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor.
The letter, which was written by three UW-Madison scientists, contends that the bill “would severely restrict promising avenues of biomedical research for conditions such as diabetes, Down syndrome, heart failure, Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injury and more.”
Interviewed: David Drake of the Urban Canid Project and its efforts to find out more about the coyotes and foxes that make their homes in urban areas.
Noted: UW limnology professor John Magnuson says Mendota could soon go the way of other large lakes in the region and occasionally miss winter freezes.
Doug Todd of Wausau treasures the astonishingly gracious letter he received from Nobel Prize-winner William C. Campbell.
The Japanese professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka won the 2015 edition of Carlos J. Finlay UNESCO Prize for Microbiology, to be awarded on December 21 in a ceremony at the Cuban Academy of Sciences, in Havana.
The issue of food and housing insecurity on community college campuses across the country is now at the forefront of many discussions thanks in part to a report published by the Wisconsin HOPE Lab on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Two projects at UW-Madison are going forward after approval Wednesday by a state panel.
The state building commission approved the renovation of the Babcock Hall dairy plant so it can house the Center for Dairy Research.
The building commission also okayed money for an addition to the UW-Madison police department on Monroe Street.
If you like your lager or ale served with a side of science, you might want to head up to Minocqua in the coming months.
In February 2014, staff from UW-Madison’s Living Environments Laboratory arrived at a Mazomanie residence where a murder had recently been committed.
(Video) Karin Swanson talks to a group of Wisconsin scientists heading to Antarctica to study weather. Quoted: Matthew Lazzara, principal investigator of the Antarctic Automatic Weather Station Program, and Lee Welhouse, instrument technician.
Irish-born Nobel Prize laureate William C. Campbell has warned of the great cost of a decline in the kind of scientific research that lead to him beating the parasitic infection that leads to river blindness.
Alta Charo interviewed on Central Time about the future of gene editing and the implications it could have for treating disease and much more.
The project is researching the size and behavior of packs of coyotes and foxes on and around the UW-Madison campus by capturing the animals and putting radio collars on them. Physical examinations and bio-testing of anesthetized animals provides data for the eventual mapping of the transmission of disease from wild canids to domestic dogs, said David Drake, a professor in the UW-Madison Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology and UW Extension wildlife specialist.
More than half of community college students surveyed at 10 schools in seven states are at risk of hunger or homelessness, according to a new study released Friday by the Wisconsin HOPE Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Makers of beer, wine and other products using yeasts may soon produce new flavours and entirely new products with a new method that creates yeast interspecies hybrids. The method delivers more strains of yeast for the industry to conduct experiments with and enhance their production.
Research released in 2014 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that “participants who engaged in cognitive activities like card games have higher brain volume, in specific regions, compared to peers who played fewer or no games,” said Ozioma C. Okonkwo, an assistant professor of medicine at the university and the study’s senior author.
Akatsuki’s 2-year mission aims to peel away some of the mystery of Venus’s dense, cloudy atmosphere. Mostly carbon dioxide, it includes a 20-kilometer-thick layer of sulfuric acid clouds, and it sweeps over the planet at speeds exceeding 300 kilometers per hour, or 60 times faster than Venus itself rotates. What drives the superrotation “is a fundamental physics question,” says Sanjay Limaye, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and member of the Akatsuki scientific team. To try to answer it, the probe will use a suite of cameras to observe cloud formation and movement as well as heat flux from the planet’s surface to the upper atmosphere. It will also record lightning flashes and send radio signals through the atmosphere to receivers on Earth to probe its temperature and composition.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a way to generate cells similar to primitive leukemia cells, an advance that will allow researchers to study the disease in a lab dish and perhaps even find better treatments. The new work appears in the journal Stem Cell Research.
Eight months into the search, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation identified a candidate for its top job — which one observer called one of the most important openings in the state — but failed to clinch the deal.
Quoted: “For those that acquire HIV, there is every reason to come in early to be on treatment to not have this disease have any important part of your life,” said Dr. Bennett Vogelman [Senior Associate Chair for Education for the Department of Medicine]. He’s one of the founding fathers of the UW Health HIV/AIDS Comprehensive Care Program. “It would be like treating high blood pressure or diabetes. We can control this and that’s a big change.”
A grant will fund collaborative research between Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction and the University of Wisconsin-Madison [WCER] to narrow gaps in student opportunity and achievement levels, according to a release.
The $5.2 million U.S. Department of Education grant will fund research on data from all state public schools over the next four years, officials said. The goal of the research is to identify proven techniques that teachers can use to narrow gaps in student opportunity and achievement levels across all racial and ethnic backgrounds and family incomes.
(Video) On World AIDS Day, Dr. Ryan Westergaard talks about what UW is doing in the battle against HIV.
(Video) The Dictionary of American Regional English took researchers at UW 49 years to complete. The five volumes document dialects in all regions of the country. But they thought it would be time to update it. Joan Houston Hall talks about the project.
Sheepshead lives. So does the card game’s Germanic name, Schafskopf. Wisconsin residents still gulp water at bubblers and eat cannibal sandwiches (made from raw ground beef seasoned with onions, and also known as tiger meat).
The latest figures on academic research spending in the United States provide, on the surface, some reassuring news for Wisconsin. For starters, the University of Wisconsin-Madison held its position as the nation’s fourth-largest research and development powerhouse. Lurking under the waves, however, are currents that should send a chilling message to policy-makers who believe the state can continue to reduce support for higher education — especially basic research — without taking on water over time.
Various kinds of cranberry juices, dried berries and supplements contain different levels of the compounds thought to promote health. That can make research findings unclear. “They’re not drugs, but we’re using a paradigm that has been really designed for clinical studies of drugs,” said Jess Reed, a UW-Madison animal sciences professor who studies cranberries.
Five UW-Madison scientists have been honored as elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, according to the university.
Madison is about to get another startup hub. Nestled in the heart of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, right across the street from the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, a (formerly purple, as some Madisonians know) brick building was christened “@1403,” named for its location at 1403 University Ave., last week.
UW-Madison retained its 4th place national ranking in research spending, despite a continuing erosion of federal and state funding, the university’s news service reported Tuesday.
Video: Associate Professor of Surgery Dr. Nathan Welham on the creation of lab-grown vocal cords.
A $5.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education will fund a collaboration between the state Department of Public Instruction and the University of Wisconsin-Madison aimed at helping schools narrow the achievement and opportunity gaps among Wisconsin students, the DPI and the university announced Tuesday.
Caitilyn Allen has had an early glimpse at the devastation climate change might bring. A professor of plant pathology at the UW-Madison, Allen studies how climate change is likely to increase disease in crops and other plants. The possibilities aren’t pretty.
Why are cranberries and sugar a seemingly inseparable pair? The typical fresh cranberry is an acrid thing to put on the tongue without sugar to balance it out.But maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. Cranberry breeders at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed an experimental variety that’s naturally sweet. It’s called the “Sweetie.”
Top biological research institutions in Wisconsin fought a proposal to ban the use of fetal tissue obtained through abortion and nearly half the state’s voters agree it’s a bad idea, according to the latest Marquette University Law School Poll.
UW-Madison’s computer sciences department has received a $5 million donation from a Milwaukee businessman and his wife.
The university announced the donation from Sheldon and Marianne Lubar on Friday. Other Badger alumni, John and Tashia Morgridge, matched $2 million of the Lubars’ donation, making the total donation $7 million.
The state’s two public doctoral research universities are stepping up efforts to more effectively compete for top graduate students who play key roles in research and teaching undergraduates.
A Milwaukee businessman and his wife have donated $5 million to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s computer sciences department.
