Welcome to a new episode of “WisBusiness: The Show,” a twice-a-month Web show covering state business news and issues.This episode features an interview with Derek Hei, director of UW-Madison’s Waisman Biomanufacturing Center, about its work with early stage clinical trials.
Most people will have heard music that sounds a bit like cats fighting – but it turns out that is not far from the kind music our feline pets actually enjoy.
Two professors at the University of Wisconsin have been selected for Alfred P. Sloan fellowships to support their research in mathematics and computer sciences.
The Walker administration has focused more on offering tax cuts and credits to the traditional manufacturing sector. Gov. Scott Walker rarely mentions Epic Systems, the most successful tech firm in Wisconsin history, and its 8,000 employees, when touting the state economy. There are also hurdles due to the type of research being conducted at the UW. Of the roughly $1.1 billion in federal grants coming into the university annually, some $700 million is related to biotechnology or biomedical research – two areas that are expensive to commercialize.
Evidence that financial education works is beginning to surface. Researchers at the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin recently found a direct tie between personal finance classes in high school and higher credit scores as young adults. Now, national results from a high school “budget challenge” further build the case.
A nine-year legal challenge to human embryonic stem cell patents ended Tuesday, when the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
University of Wisconsin ranks fifth nationally among faculty participating in the Fulbright Scholarship Program. One recipient, UW professor Adrian Treves, seeks to bring the harmony he found between nature and society in Sweden back home.
In response to stark inequalities that remain for women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, female leaders at University of Wisconsin are moving forward with steps to address these issues.
Doug Erickson’s article in the Feb. 15 State Journal about kindergartners and the “kindness curriculum” developed by UW-Madison was great.
The Association of University Technology Managers AUTM annual meeting will start tomorrow in New Orleans. With this in mind, today we continue our recent coverage of university patenting with a look at the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation WARF. Founded in 1925, WARF serves as the tech transfer organization for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It manages a $2.6 billion endowment and supports innovation at UW-Madison by obtaining patent rights for the university’s discoveries and licensing those patents commercially.
MADISON — It may be subject matter that some can find annoying and even creepy. But PJ Liesch keeps pretty busy fielding questions about the little critters in the insect world that bug us.
When a small group of University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty and staff launched a campus lab for developing connected devices just over a year ago, they weren’t sure what kind of response they’d get.
The Internet of Things will connect everyone and everything like never before. Through an innovative new education lab in America’s heartland, the University of Wisconsin is preparing the next generation of engineers to harness it.
Walker’s budget adds a blanket exemption that would allow UW to deny public record requests on controversial research, conflicts of interest or how tax dollars are spent.
Scientists at Rutgers and Wisconsin universities are linking climate change and extreme weather, such as this winter’s persistent cold snaps gripping the Lehigh Valley and beyond.
A University of Wisconsin research center has received a $3.7 million federal grant to study e-cigarette use patterns and health-related issues, as e-cigarette popularity continues surging but their health effects remain largely unknown.
A team of geoscience researchers from the University of Wisconsin are in the process of discovering more effective methods of obtaining geothermal energy, renewable energy from the heat generated by the earth’s interior.
The University of Wisconsin would be exempt from revealing the details of its research under a new provision in Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposal.
Like many of my fellow Badgers, I am constantly impressed by the incredible production of academic research that is undertaken and led by some of the greatest minds in the country at University of Wisconsin. Ranked fourth nationally in 2013 for annual research expenditures, UW places an emphasis on the importance of discovery and furthering the Wisconsin Idea.
After a paper found that biomedical research is “an unsustainable, hyper competitive system,” the University of Wisconsin began a campus-wide conversation Monday launched by Chancellor Rebecca Blank.
A provision in Gov. Scott Walker’s biennial budget would allow the University of Wisconsin System to keep the details of its research secret.
In a just-released study, UW-Madison researchers found that kids who had participated in the curriculum were less selfish and exhibited better social skills and greater mental flexibility than children who did not do the exercises. And in an added bonus, the kids who did the kindness curriculum earned higher academic marks at the end of the school year.
I could not agree more that the absolute least we should accept from animal researchers is full public disclosure of their records.
Obesity, a major risk factor for diabetes, heart disease and other conditions, costs $1.5 billion in medical expenses in the state each year, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. It seems appropriate, then, that the UW School of Medicine and Public Health’s Wisconsin Partnership Program is committing $8.6 million over five years to the Wisconsin Obesity Prevention Initiative.
The blanket exemption in Walker’s budget from open records laws for UW researchers could lead to abuse and public distrust.
“Over the last two years in Colorado, that number has jumped to about 10 percent,” said Dr. Patrick Fehling, an author of the study and a graduate of the University Of Wisconsin School of Medicine.
In 2011, Yoshihiro Kawaoka reported that his team had engineered a pandemic form of the bird flu virus. Bird flu, also known as H5N1, has infected infected nearly 700 people worldwide and killed more than 400. But it hasn’t yet gained the ability to jump easily from human to human. Kawaoka’s research suggested that capability might be closer than anyone had imagined. His team showed that their virus could successfully hop from ferret to ferret via airborne droplets. In addition to scaring the bejesus out of many, Kawaoka’s controversial study, and a similar study by Ron Fouchier in the Netherlands, also sparked a debate about the wisdom of engineering novel and potentially deadly pathogens in the lab.
Today we debut a new series of natural history commentaries, featuring scientists from two Northwoods field stations: UW-Madison’s Trout Lake and Kemp Research Stations.
A technology in development at the University of Wisconsin that mimics human tissue in scientific research is showing promising results and could replace animal testing.
David Drake, an associate professor of forest and wildlife ecology and a UW Extension wildlife specialist, is leading a research team that is humanely trapping and tracking foxes and coyotes who are making the campus their home.
One of the most extraordinary stories in Norman Doidge’s new book, The Brain’s Way of Healing, is that of the Broadway singer, Ron Husmann. Husmann developed multiple sclerosis MS and, over a 30-year period, the disease robbed him of his rich baritone voice and most of the function of his limbs. A friend of Husmann’s, who had also developed MS, told him about a laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where they were testing an electronic device that seemed to be effective at treating a range of neurological disorders, including MS.
New technology is leading us to be able to print a tangible 3D object. The process of 3D printing has infiltrated its way into the Madison area more and more, proving to make life easier for some.
With more than $1 billion spent in 2013 on research at UW-Madison, the university has maintained its ranking as one of the top U.S. universities in research expenditures.
Carl Gulbrandsen, whose job is to convert research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison into commercial businesses, needed less than a nanosecond Thursday to begin itemizing specific ways the school has enhanced the states economy.
Theres no shortage of foot traffic on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
When scientists studied Albert Einstein’s brain they discovered he had more astrocytes, star-shaped cells, in his brain than other people. But our understanding of what these cells do is poor.
UW-Madison scientists identified two new fluorescent tumor-targeting agents that light up brain cancer cells, according to a Jan. 22 press release.
A team of students from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is conducting research on foxes and coyotes in hopes of learning how the animals and humans can peacefully coexist.
Dear Editor: On behalf of our colleagues in the department of neuroscience we write to express our appreciation for our colleague Professor Tom Yin. The false claim that the closing of Yin’s laboratory was a PETA victory reminds us of the fable of the rooster that believed that his crowing in the morning made the sun rise. The professor is 70 years old and, after a distinguished career that has lasted for 45 years, he plans to retire.
January and February are part of the mating season for coyotes and foxes, which is good news for UW-Madison professor David Drake and his research team.
Dr. Stephen Carpenter, of UW-Madison, is one of 18 international authors sharing the message that humans are impacting the world’s ecosystems and changes must be made to ensure life on Earth continues.
The private, non-profit foundation, entrusted with managing the lion’s share of UW-Madison’s intellectual property portfolio, is ranked sixth in the world in patents obtained for new technologies, with 160 patents issued to WARF in 2013.
With 160 patents issued, the University of Wisconsin-Madison ranked sixth among 100 universities surveyed around the world in 2013, according to a news release from the school on Thursday.
Noted: David O’Connor, a pathology professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, realized that digital treasure trove might also include information about GBV-C. And sure enough, he found the genetic fingerprints of that virus in the records of 13 samples of blood plasma from the Ebola study. Though six of the 13 people who were co-infected with Ebola and GBV-C died, seven survived.
With portions of the population leaning either “red” or “blue,” it seems both sides are growing ever further apart in Wisconsin, and the 2014 midterm election results seem to back that up. According to Kathy Cramer, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, that polarization is making us a lot less willing to talk about politics.
Here is a nice thought: What if kids were taught kindness and empathy along with traditional academic skills? For 12 weeks, a Wisconsin public school district tried it out on a group of preschool kids, reports University of Wisconsin-Madison psychologist Lisa Flook in Developmental Psychology. At the end of the course, the children who’d taken the “kindness curriculum” scored better on tests designed to measure both social skills and attention; these kids also received higher grades on their report cards than their peers who hadn’t taken part in the curriculum.
Like never before, egg freezing is being boasted in the headlines as the latest cure for declining fertility.
A University of Wisconsin research laboratory that attracted controversy for using live cats in experiments is closing this year, the school said.
Though criticized by PETA and other animal rights groups for it use of cats in its research into how the brain localizes sound, UW-Madison said such criticism had no bearing on its decision to close the lab, saying that the retirement of neuroscience professor Tom Yin is the driving force.
In an effort to further research in veterinary medicine, the University of Wisconsin is looking to expand a newly created animal shelter medicine program with a newly acquired $1.3 million in funds.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have identified two new fluorescent agents that target tumors, lighting up brain cancer cells, a feature that could prove useful in surgery.
The university said that the closing of the lab was due to the impending retirement of neuroscience professor Tom Yin, not the complaints of any animal rights groups. Yin, 70, decided to retire more than a year ago when his National Institutes of Health grant was up for renewal, a UW spokesman said.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison has quietly halted controversial experiments using cats, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals reported Friday.
The national animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is claiming credit for closing a University of Wisconsin lab that conducted research on cats.
MADISON – A University of Wisconsin-Madison cat research lab that was the focus of protests by animal-rights groups and a Hollywood actor quietly closed more than a month ago, a university spokesman said Friday.
The retirement of a highly respected senior neuroscientist at the center of a sustained recent publicity campaign by an animal rights group generated a victory claim on Friday when PETA realized that their target had retired.
Richard Davidson, professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, touted the importance of being mindful, especially in the workplace.
Since its founding in 1980, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals PETA has sought to end animal research. Its tactics have changed over the years, as have its targets, which have broadened to include fast food, factory farms, and the cosmetics industry. As PETA shifts gears yet again—launching a new campaign to target animal research by publishing in peer-reviewed scientific literature—Science looks back at its 4-decade crusade.
Whenever 11-year-old Meg Heinzen plays piano, she can anticipate the notes. Yet as a young child, her family could never have anticipated her habit of rolling her eyes at them could mean something more serious.
Researchers at UW-Madison and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently developed a collaborative project to develop new ways of integrating robots into human workforces, according to a university press release.
