Two new studies have found that people with sleep apnea, a common disorder that causes snoring, fatigue and dangerous pauses in breathing at night, have a higher risk of cancer. The new research marks the first time that sleep apnea has been linked to cancer in humans.
It appears one can add an increased risk of dying from cancer to the growing list of significant health problems associated with sleep apnea.A longitudinal study led by researchers at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health suggests that those with severe sleep-disordered breathing (SDB), or sleep apnea, are nearly five times more likely to die of cancer than those without the disorder.
A: Yes, said Daniel Uhlrich, a UW?Madison neuroscience professor who studies visual processing in the brain. “If you flash a light at the right frequency, some people with epilepsy will have an epileptic seizure.” These “photo-triggered” seizures are not very common, affecting fewer than 10 percent of people with epilepsy. Some of those affected may experience seizures only in response to a specific trigger, while others also have spontaneous seizures.
A: As we head from early to late spring during the month of May, there are a number of ways to measure this progress. One way is to consider how often we experience a temperature 90 degrees during May. The last time Madison reached 90 degrees in May was just two years ago ? on May 24, 2010. This is a relatively rare occurrence, however, as Madison has reached 90 degrees in May only 10 times since 1971 (once each in 2006, 1991, and 1988; twice each in 1978 and 1977 and three times in 1975).
Dear Editor: I have learned that for the first time since the early 1980s, the UW-Madison has approved maternal deprivation experiments on baby monkeys. Maternal deprivation experiments were conducted for two decades at the university by Harry Harlow and his many students. After Harlow?s death, even some of his own students admitted that they should not have been allowed to continue for so long. Some of them have lamented their own silence. This angst and regret was documented by Deborah Blum in her biography of Harlow, ?Love at Goon Park.?
Being a heavy snorer can increase one?s risk of cancer five-fold, according to research.
Saving open-grown oaks, those that were once part of a savanna ecosystem, is one place where urban outdoors residents can be involved in saving a part of outdoors history. Some of these open-grown oaks still remain, even in urban settings, but crowding from our own planting and building are turning them into forest trees, or firewood. These remaining trees, like the huge swamp white oak along Linden Drive on UW-Madison?s west campus, is a beautiful example of an open-grown tree. Its lower limbs survive today, some nearly touching the ground.
The Russian government is set to pay for up to 2,000 of its students per year to attend top universities elsewhere around the world in an effort to produce more scientists and bolster global research collaborations, Nature is reporting. Students who take advantage of the scholarships, however, will be required to return to Russia to work. Ken Cutts, the recruitment and media services manager for UW-Madison?s Office of Admissions, says he isn?t expecting a significant influx of these students and isn?t aware of any plans by the university to lure Russians to town. UW-Madison?s 2011-12 fall enrollment report indicates there were 37 students from Russia, including 13 undergraduates, attending the university.
Some scientists have studied the two forms of happiness in the lab and found some significant differences. Work at the University of Wisconsin has found that people who are higher in eudaimonic happiness have reduced biomarkers of inflammation, like interleukin-6. These biomarkers, according to researcher Carol Ryff, are linked to a number of health problems like metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, so lower levels of them might offer a protective benefit. Ryff has also found that having a strong social support network – an integral part of long term life satisfaction – is connected with lower levels of the same biomarkers.
The Washburn Observatory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been the school?s scientific centerpiece since its commissioning in 1881. The same year which, coincidentally, was the last time anybody bothered to clean the optics.
Intuitive Biosciences opened its doors in Fitchburg in March, and, led by a former TomoTherapy executive, wants to come out of the gate with a series of proven products. Intuitive plans to buy many of the assets of Gentel Biosciences, also of Fitchburg. The deal, whose terms have not been disclosed, is expected to finalize by the end of June, said Shawn Guse, Intuitive?s president and chief executive officer. Guse also is CEO of a separate biotech company, Apartia Pharmaceuticals, a startup based on UW-Madison research, aimed at developing a new class of antibiotics.
A detailed analysis of the 4,400 entries in Walker?s calendar by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism paints a portrait of a public relations-minded governor who focuses his message on receptive, conservative audiences and who, as the effort to recall him has intensified, has spent a sharply decreasing amount of time on official state business. Katherine Cramer Walsh, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the center?s findings matched her own assessment of Walker?s strategy: ?To shore up his base, spend time with his supporters, and not necessarily build bridges, compromise or reach out to opponents.?
The radioisotope molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) is a source for the commonly used radiomarker technetium-99m applicable in cancer diagnostics and life science research, but it?s in short supply and there are no American manufacturers of the material.
UW-Madison is launching a new online master?s degree program in Sustainable Systems Engineering. Classes are scheduled to begin in January, with applications to the new program being accepted through Oct. 15. The university explains this program ?is designed to prepare mid-career engineers with knowledge in sustainable engineering practices to be leaders in managing systems that impact the quality of water, land, air, energy, economics, and society.?
Some ancient plants, although a little smaller, are still around today. Wisconsin Gardner’s Shelley Ryan and botany professor Ken Cameron visit the Mesozoic Garden at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery on the UW-Madison campus to see living fossils that would make great container plants.
Russ Smestad isn?t a scientist, but he has been a key player in the growth of several of the Madison area?s scientific companies, and he has watched the biotechnology industry here grow up. Smestad is president of Stratatech Corp., a Madison company that recently announced promising results in trials of StrataGraft, the human skin substitute it has developed to treat burn patients.
A: Actually, large sewage-treatment plants have been creating and collecting methane for more than half a century, said Daniel Noguera, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the UW-Madison.
A: Since the invention of the telescope in the 1600s, observers have recorded variations in the numbers of dark spots, or sunspots, on the sun?s surface. Observations show that the sun exhibits a periodic change in the number of sunspots that normally follow a regular cycle with peaks 11 years apart.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, the charismatic science educator and face of space who was once hailed as the ?sexiest astrophysicist alive? by People magazine, urges graduating college students to aspire to change the world. Tyson delivered the keynote speech at UW-Madison?s inaugural Senior Day celebration Thursday afternoon on the Memorial Union Terrace.
A standing wheelchair. It?s not the first of its kind, but it will go where no others have. It?s a project five University of Wisconsin at Madison students embraced — more than a thousand hours in the making and a chance to change the life of a surgeon no longer physically able to do his job.
A live feed camera capturing real time views of a red-tailed hawk?s nest on a ledge of Weeks Hall by members of the Space Science and Engineering Center has gained viral popularity over the past weeks.
The Morgridge Institute for Research and the U.S. Department of Energy have reached a multimillion-dollar agreement to help open a medical isotope plant in Janesville – a development that Morgridge?s director says could spark a manufacturing cluster that could ultimately bring as many as 1,000 jobs to economically beleaguered Rock County.
As a conservative and a liberal, policy wonk and professor, Washingtonian and Midwesterner — there isn?t much we can agree on. Where we do see eye to eye is that most aid programs are less cost-effective than they could be. With money scarce and demand for college graduates high, now is the time to fix financial aid. In the Lone Star State, that means thinking smarter about Texas Grants.
Three baby red-tailed hawks are resting in their nest on a ledge below the roof of the four-story Geosciences building on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
The U.S. Department of Energy awarded UW-Madison grants Tuesday totaling more than a $22 million for the Morgridge Institute for Research and for nuclear engineering research.
A private campus research institute was recently awarded funding for a project that will focus on nuclear engineering research.
UW-Madison is reaping the benefits of President Barack Obama?s commitment to restart the country?s nuclear industry. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced in a news release Tuesday that UW-Madison will receive $2.7 million in graduate fellowships and research grants to train and educate the next generation of leaders in America?s nuclear industry.
The Morgridge Institute for Research located on the UW-Madison campus has landed a $20.6 million cooperative agreement from the U.S. Department of Energy?s National Nuclear Security Administration, the university announced in a news release. The funds will be used by the Morgridge Institute and local partner SHINE Medical Technologies to help support the development of a new process and manufacturing plant for molybdenum-99, a medical isotope used by thousands of patients daily in this country.
At the anthropology meeting in Portland, I sat down with John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, who chaired the open lab session, to learn more about how it came to be. Hawks explained that the impetus came in 2011, when Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, donated casts of the recently discovered remains of A. sediba to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. The move inspired the association?s vice president and program committee chair, Karen Rosenberg of the University of Delaware, to propose inviting other researchers and curators to bring casts of other fossil hominins (humans and their extinct relatives) to the meeting and make an event of it. Rosenberg then asked Hawks to organize the event, which became the plenary session of the meeting.
In the rushing streams and clear cool waters found from Minnesota to the Hudson Bay, the prized smallmouth bass feeds on crayfish, insects and the occasional bait launched into the water by a hopeful angler. They can be greedy, as freshwater scientist Gretchen Anderson Hansen found while collecting crayfish in a lake in Vilas County, Wis., when she found herself being observed by a handful of hungry smallmouth bass. Anderson Hansen, who does her research work with the UW-Madison Center for Limnology, was able to protect her samples this time around, but she?s not always so lucky. She says “opportunistic” bass “often grab her ?samples? before she gets a handle on them.”
As the flagship college in the state, the University of Wisconsin-Madison holds a special place in education. Well, at least it?s supposed to. And it does, to some extent, but not in the same way that it used to.
The Morgridge Institute for Research in Madison has been awarded a $20.6 million project from the U.S. Department of Energy to support the institute?s work with SHINE Medical Technologies in developing a new process and manufacturing plant for a medical isotope needed by tens of thousands of U.S. patients daily.
This summer, University of Wisconsin researchers and engineers will use a unique NASA drone to conduct hurricane research.
The genetics comparison was made possible by tissue that had been collected by a postdoctoral geneticist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Stacie Robinson has taken data sets of deer from the north and two areas in southern Wisconsin.
Unless you have several hundred dollars to spare, and a foot of shelf space for five 8¾-by-11¼-inch volumes of a close to a thousand pages each, you aren?t likely to own a copy of the Dictionary of American Regional English. But you might find it worth your while to visit your local public or university library to take a look at the 60,000 rare and unusual words inside.
A: The chicks (which can be viewed at go.madison.com/hawkcam) may leave the nest by the end of May, according to Mark Berres, a UW?Madison ornithologist. “About 45 days is all it takes for them to fledge ? to leave the nest for good,” said Berres, who has been glued to the streaming video.
Dear Editor: Whenever and wherever highways, streets, railways and subdivisions are expanded and rebuilt, let?s conserve the soils and water natural resources. Every place that we humans build, the flood hydrograph must be FLATTER afterward, not more spiked. If $715 million is budgeted for I-39-90, then at least $15 million should go to reduce flash floods, like the one that damaged UW-Madison in July 2006.
A: The white condensation trails left behind jet aircraft are called contrails (condensation trails). Contrails usually form higher than 26,000 feet above the ground. Contrails form when hot, humid air from jet exhaust mixes with surrounding air of low water vapor content and low temperature. The clouds that form are similar to the cloud you see when you exhale in cold air and “see your breath.”
Al Gore has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. So has Wisconsin?s Larry Landweber.
I?m betting you know all about Gore, the former vice president and U.S. senator who is occasionally the butt of jokes on late-night comedy shows. While Gore didn?t “invent the Internet,” as he once claimed in a weak moment, he made essential political contributions during its formative years.
I?m also guessing you know next to nothing about Landweber, who along with Gore and 31 others made up the inaugural class of the Internet Society?s Hall of Fame, announced in late April in Geneva, Switzerland.
Noted: “I?ve also been involved in a study called the Wisconsin Project by researchers at the University of Wisconsin. It?s a device that was made for traumatic brain injury that electrically stimulates the brain through the tongue to help the brain reorganize and create different pathways. It has changed my ability to exercise, and I?ve learned that exercise and diet can affect everything for physical and emotional well being. I don?t care if you?re in a wheelchair or bedridden.”
A poll released Wednesday by the Marquette Law School offers a glimpse of just how divisive politics has become in the state. According to the poll, nearly one-third, or 29 percent of respondents, say they have stopped talking to someone about politics due to disagreements over the recall of the governor. There?s no baseline for that figure — pollster Charles Franklin says the question has never been asked before on a survey — but he argues the 29 percent figure is probably ?up from the norm.?
Watching storm waves crash ashore, it?s obvious these monsters are taller than the waves that lap the beach on a calm, sunny day.This seemingly clear dichotomy led geologists to assume that there were two types of waves stirring up the shallow seafloor: small fair-weather waves and big storm waves. Now, this decades-old theory has been turned on its head by two geologists at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who, in the process of studying waves, discovered a large size discrepancy between waves in different oceans.
After a five-month-long debate, a study that shows how mutations in the H5N1 influenza virus, known as the avian flu, can be transmitted in the air was published Wednesday.
A paper on controversial avian H5N1 influenza research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison finally is being published in full this week in the journal Nature after touching off a months-long international debate over the value of preparedness vs. the risk of key details falling into the hands of terrorists.
After months of handwringing and heated debate between scientists and biosecurity experts, UW-Madison bird flu expert Yoshihiro Kawaoka finally had his controversial H5N1 influenza virus research published in full Tuesday by the journal Nature.
Four mutations in a bird flu virus enabled the virus to spread among ferrets in a lab, UW-Madison researcher Yoshihiro Kawaoka reported Wednesday in the journal Nature. The study, which identifies the mutations, was published after months of international controversy
After a five-month-long debate, a study that shows how mutations in the H5N1 influenza virus, known as the avian flu, can be transmitted in the air was published Wednesday. The study shows mutations to the natural avian flu virus spreads easily among ferrets, which suggests the virus is could also be airborne-transmissible among humans since both react similarly to flu viruses.
On Tuesday, Salon reported that the Federal Aviation Administration has approved 25 universities to fly drones in U.S. airspace.Included on the list is the University of Wisconsin. But this isn?t something well known, even among campus administrators.
This week sees the online publication of the paper ?Experimental adaptation of an influenza H5 HA confers respiratory droplet transmission to a reassortant H5 HA/H1N1 virus in ferrets? by the Japanese?US team headed by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
You might not have noticed, but the influenza world has been in a bit of an uproar since late last year, when news leaked out that two teams of researchers had purposefully tweaked H5N1 bird flu in the lab to potentially make it more transmissible among human beings. (H5N1 spreads like wildfire among birds ? and usually kills them ? but the virus only rarely seems to jump to human beings, though when it does the infections are often fatal.)
After months of controversy, the journal Nature has published the details of an experiment describing how the avian flu can be modified into a human-contagious form.
The journal Nature has published the first of two controversial papers about laboratory-enhanced versions of the deadly bird flu virus that initially sparked fears among U.S. biosecurity experts that it could be used as a recipe for a bioterrorism weapon.
It?s finally out. After months of will-they-won?t they and should-they-shouldn?t-they deliberations, Nature has finally published a paper about a mutant strain of bird flu that can spread between mammals.
Only a handful of genetic mutations can make bird flu infectious among mammals, serving as a warning sign for the deadly virus possibly spreading to people, biologists report.
Today, a scientific journal published a study that some people thought might never be made public at all.
A contested bird flu study was finally published Wednesday.
The science journal Nature has published the first of two controversial papers about laboratory-enhanced versions of the deadly bird flu virus – described by some as a ?recipe? for a bioterror attack.
Four mutations in a bird flu virus enabled the virus to spread among ferrets in a lab, UW-Madison researcher Yoshihiro Kawaoka reported Wednesday in the journal Nature. The study, which identifies the mutations, was published after months of international controversy that delayed public release of the findings.
After months of handwringing and heated debate between scientists and biosecurity experts, UW-Madison bird flu expert Yoshihiro Kawaoka finally had his controversial H5N1 influenza virus research published in full Tuesday by the journal Nature.
Foremost Farms CEO Dave Fuhrmann is leading a $32 million campaign to renovate a Wisconsin research and training facility essential to the state?s dairy industry. The dairy plant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is also home to the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research. The campaign has raised $6 million of the $32-million goal and Fuhrmann expects to reach the halfway mark by July or August.
