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.
Noted: The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center is led by the UW-Madison and is one of three bioenergy research centers established in 2007 by the U.S. Department of Energy. Research at the center supports the development of a pipeline from biomass production through pre-treatment and final conversion to fuel.
Quoted: There’s nothing wrong with Turner’s nine approaches “provided none are taken to extreme,” said Toby Campbell, assistant professor of medicine, oncology, palliative care medicine. “My concern is when people with definite advanced cancer shift entirely away from modern medicine in exchange for strategies like these,” he said.
Kari Wisinski, assistant professor of medicine and hematology/oncology, said the term “radical remission” presents challenges because expected responses can vary among cancer types and from different treatments. Also, for patients with incurable cancer, hope shouldn’t be associated only with “beating cancer,” Wisinski said.
When groups of people come together and pool their resources, great things can be accomplished flinging humans onto the Moon comes to mind. In the US, the National Science Foundation is a factory of great things. It guides billions of tax dollars into university research projects each year in 2015, $7.344 billion to be exact. And since science costs money, one unhappy necessity of the academic lifestyle is securing funding to keep the lights on and the lab running. Give a kid a grant-writing kit to go with their chemistry set for Christmas. See if they play with it. NSF grants are the lifeblood of many fields of science.
Scientists at University of Wisconsin-Madison are reporting a breakthrough in using very small technology to extend the battery life of some electronic devices.
A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.
It should be a wake-up call to policymakers that “we’re running up to and beyond the biophysical boundaries that enable human civilization as we know it to exist,” Steve Carpenter, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Limnology, said in a statement.
Noted: For instance, one study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison compared children who talked and instant-messaged with their mothers after a stressful situation. The researchers measured cortisol, known as the stress hormone, and oxytocin, a hormone noticed in positive relationships. The children who talked to their mothers showed decreased stress and increased positive feelings, while those who instant-messaged remained stressed.
Margaret McFall-Ngai has dissected the relationship between a beautiful squid and its live-in bacteria — and found lessons for microbiome research on the way.
It’s increasingly apparent that schools can do exceptional things when you give them 3D printers. Need proof? The University of Wisconsin’s Mechanical Engineering department is using its advanced selective laser sintering printer to make a wide range of intricate projects, including 3D music scores for the blind.
A laboratory designed to host classified cybersecurity research has been built at the University Research Park on the West Side. It comes after last year’s approval by the state Legislature of classified research at University of Wisconsin System labs.
Interview with Prof. Michael Coen and Associate Lecturer Angela Dassow regarding their research on Gibbon language.
Conducted by UW-Madison’s Wisconsin HOPE Lab, the analysis also found that being in the program for all four years of high school significantly boosted graduation rates for male students of color.
Dr Angela Dassow and Professor Michael Coen explain how white- handed Gibbons make themselves understood.
Scientists may have discovered a form of language used by animals, similar to that used by our own ancestors.
Animals use organised sound patterns to communicate with each other in a system that scientists believe is similar to early human language.
“We have recorded a father talking quietly to his daughter,” said Michael Coen, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has developed an algorithm that is helping to decipher the language of gibbons.
A bad flu season in Wisconsin continues to be problematic for health officials statewide. According to UW researchers, the number of hospitalizations this season is now up 1,813 people.
University of Wisconsin researchers are laying the groundwork to make it possible to “print” new transplant-ready organs, grown from cells cultured from a patient’s blood sample. This project, which merges research in biotechnology and nanotechnology, is under way today thanks to funding from the National Institutes of Health NIH.
Madison WKOW– A bad flu season in Wisconsin continues to be problematic for health officials statewide. According to UW researchers, the number of hospitalizations this season is now up 1,813 people.
For over 100 years, UW-Madison researchers have conducted dirt, plant and agricultural tests for Wisconsin farmers at a laboratory on Mineral Point Road to further agricultural research in the state. But later this year, the Soil and Plant Analysis Laboratory will be consolidated with a second lab in Marshfield.
The study, from a research group led by UW-Madison botany professor Donald Waller, says deer account for at least 40 percent of the change seen in the forests over the past half-century or so.
Noted: He adds that the fact that a scholar like Jonathan Mark Kenoyer is one of the advisers of the project underlines the importance of the site. Dr. Kenoyer, Chair and professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a specialist in Harappan archaeology with more than 35 years’ of field experience.
The year 2014 offered many significant weather events, including twin tornadoes in Nebraska, the extreme amount of lake-effect snow in Buffalo, N.Y., and drought conditions from California to Brazil.
As 2014 comes to an end, let’s take a look at the year’s biggest outbreaks, pathogens, and technofix dramas.
I am a proud recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. When I walked across the stage at my graduation ceremony in May, I looked out across the crowd at the smiling faces of the family, friends and faculty members, all who helped make this dream become a reality.
RACINE — When Charles Ricchio II went on a field trip to a mechanical engineering lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in November 2013, the work he saw going on there was already familiar to him.
Running truck convoys through the wilds of Afghanistan, U.S. Army Sgt. Matthew Stoppenbach drove on roads that resembled rocky trails and desert paths where blowing sand, deep ruts and searing heat took a toll on vehicles and troops.
The capital city and its flagship university, research-based UW-Madison, will play a prominent role, but the founders want it to reach statewide. “The idea is to make it primarily Wisconsin-based,” said David Nelson, a retired UW-Madison biochemistry professor. “Not just the university but the whole state.”
Quoted: “There seems to be a lot in our brains and animal brains that is directional that neural signals move in a particular direction, then stop, and start somewhere else,” said Dr. Giulio Tononi, a psychiatry professor and neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the study’s co-authors. “I think this is really a new theme that had not been explored.”
During this season of reflection, I am thankful for curious people of all ages. I am fortunate to be surrounded by students and scientists who are driven to uncover how things work in the natural world. There is no doubt that as we set out to explore the inner workings of microbes, plants and animals, we gain knowledge that we can apply in ways that will continue to change the world. But long before we get to the point where we apply knowledge, we have to wonder. I celebrate that sense of wonder.
This is the story of a rare disease that was diagnosed in a rare young woman, and what happened before, and after.
Forty percent of Americans are evangelical Christians, and many of them reject evolution. Jeff Hardin, chairman of the University of Wisconsin’s zoology department, takes this personally. Hardin is an evangelical, but much of his evangelism is directed at his fellow believers. He wants to persuade them that evolution and Christianity are compatible.
A joint venture announced Tuesday by UW School of Medicine and Public Health and Swoop Search, an information technology in Madison, seeks to identify better tests and treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.
And the second most powerful state political figure, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, has joined the attack on science. Vos … threatened that he wants university research to focus exclusively on economic development and not, as he put it, “on the ancient mating habits of whatever.” University researchers will now have to worry that the guy who holds their purse strings and can cut their budget will be passing judgment on what they should research.
For more than a decade, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have tracked hundreds of state residents with a family history of Alzheimers disease, collecting information about everything from their dietary and exercise habits to whats inside their brains, blood and genes.
(Jamie) Thomson, who first grew human embryonic stem cells in a lab in 1998 and co-discovered a way to reprogram mature cells to their embryonic state in 2007, is working with researchers across campus on … creating “tissue chips” — clusters of interacting cells that mimic specific organs, such as a model of a developing brain. Using stem cells, miniature scaffolds and sophisticated computer programs, they’re crafting prototypes that could someday replace animal testing for drugs and serve as screening tools for environmental toxins.
The findings could indicate that biblical accounts of David and Solomon described real kings rather than the backwater chieftains considered more likely by some archaeologists.
As students at the University of Wisconsin know, it can get bitterly cold in Madison during December. But for Kristina Slawny, who serves as program director of the Ice Drilling Design and Operations IDDO arm of Wisconsin’s Space Science and Engineering Center SSEC, those frigid temperatures might seem downright balmy.
Jeff Blakely from the University of Wisconsin-Madison said: ’Our dates for the bullae are based on multiple types of evidence we combined to determine a general 10th century BC date.’
A Mississippi State University professor and a team of archaeologists discovered ancient artifacts that might offer proof of the existence of biblical civilizations controlled by David and Solomon.
Report on the release of the 2014 Wisconsin Health Trends report from the UW-Madison Population Health Institute.
It’s almost cruel to talk about sweet corn in December. But then, it does give us one more reason to look ahead past winter.
