Animal research programs at UW-Madison will be fully accredited for the next three years after two site visits from the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care, according to a university news release Tuesday. The accrediting organization conducted an intensive, four-day inspection in October 2011, giving the program 18 commendations but finding areas for improvement.
As a kid, Ahna Skop ruled the science fair. ?Every year I was in at least the top three, and I know I won grand prize once or twice,? she says. Not that her experiments always yielded the predicted results. ?One time I was trying to figure out whether mice would go in a particular direction based on color,? says Skop.
Public meetings and consensus conferences seem to be the tool du jour for many government agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the US Department of Agriculture. Designed to give the public a voice in policy decisions, they can, in some cases, provide valuable insights into the local public?s views and opinions on certain issues. But they can also have disastrous consequences when used as a policy-making tool designed to tap public opinion more broadly. And the likelihood of failure is particularly high when debates emerge in a community about if and where to build controversial facilities for storing nuclear waste or conducting research on potentially deadly biological pathogens.
Animal research programs at UW-Madison will be fully accredited for the next three years after two site visits from the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care, according to a university news release Tuesday.
A story about cutting-edge medicine for pets includes Lisa Forrest, a professor of oncology at the University of Wisconsin?Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine, and UW Veterinary Care’s use of TomoTherapy for cancer treatment.
James P. Hurley has been named director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison?s Aquatic Sciences Center.
….My mother?s ordeal reminded me again that more health care does not necessarily mean better health. ?It may in fact lead to worse outcomes in that an ever-expanding supply of specialists and tertiary services can lead to excessive testing and procedures that are not necessary, are duplicative, and are costly,? said Donna Friedsam, the health policy programs director at the UW Population Health Institute. It?s that last unintended side effect that bothers me most ? the extent to which the human body has become a sort of raw material for economic development.
From Rick Santorum?s assertion that global warming is a “hoax” to Rick Perry?s support for intelligent design, the current Republican presidential primary season has sometimes seemed like a science-free zone.
Publish and be damned. That, in a nutshell, was the prevailing mood at a meeting held on April 3rd-4th at the Royal Society in London to discuss the controversy over two papers which lay out how deadly H5N1 avian influenza, or bird flu, can be made deadlier still by engineering it to pass directly from ferret to ferret. The gaggle of virologists, ethicists, security wonks, government types and representatives of funding agencies from around the world gathered at Britain?s pre-eminent scientific academy was more split when it came to the broader question about where research into dangerous pathogens was headed.
This week on our program, we have music from Drake. We also look at the history of the world?s best-known American word. But first we tell you about some terms in American English that not even all Americans would know.
For two centuries, public research universities such as Indiana University have helped shape the fortunes of the United States. They are economic and intellectual growth engines that give back far beyond what they receive in taxpayer support and knit together the residents of a state in a way that is uniquely American.
The University of Wisconsin reached and surpassed $1 billion in research expenditures in a fiscal year, according to a study from the National Science Foundation.
A: The next generation of weather radars, which are currently being installed throughout the United States, will improve observations of the interior of storm systems. These radars are called dual-polarization radars. Radar, an acronym for Radio Detection And Ranging, consists of a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter emits pulses of radio waves outward in a circular pattern.
The end of an impassioned and often strident global debate over the proper balance between scientific openness and security began with 2 hours of mandatory, studious silence in a room protected by an armed guard.
Scoot across the floor in a device similar to a hovercraft. Drill a hole in ice using hot water. Learn how to photograph the transit of Venus in June, when the planet will appear to glide across the sun. UW-Madison?s Science Expeditions on Saturday will feature five major open houses, six science spectaculars, more than 20 venues and 60 hands-on exploration stations ? the largest collection of activities ever for the 10th annual event.
Speaking at a meeting of the Royal Society in London on Tuesday (April 3), one of the scientists whose research resulted in an H5N1 virus that could spread easily between ferrets has revealed the details of how he did it. University of Wisconsin, Madison, virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka told about 150 attendees of the 2-day meeting that 4 mutations and genes from the H1N1 virus appeared to make the bird flu virus strain readily transmissible between ferrets in his lab.
He?s a Springsteen guy, not an Adele fan. So John Lee had no choice but to scroll through the song list to get past his wife?s pop favorites. Oops. Forgot about that driving thing. ?I took my eyes away from the road much, much too long. Three, four, five seconds,? Lee said with regret. We?ve all been there. But here?s the thing: Lee?s a mechanical engineer. A PhD. Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Co-editor of ?Driver Distraction: Theory, Effect and Mitigation.?
After 50 years, the Dictionary of Regional American English is finally complete. The University of Wisconsin-Madison project has been called “one of the glories of contemporary American scholarship” by The New York Times.
The end of an impassioned and often strident global debate over the proper balance between scientific openness and security began with 2 hours of mandatory, studious silence in a room protected by an armed guard.
Roger Molander, a 1963 nuclear engineering graduate of the UW-Madison, had what you might call the mother of mid-career epiphanies. Molander, who died recently at 71, was an influential nuclear arms analyst in the White House and Pentagon during the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations only to become one of the nation?s most prominent nuclear arms protesters.
In a study released Tuesday, the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ranked Philly as the least-healthy county in Pennsylvania for the third consecutive year.
The project, a collaboration of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, aims to help local leaders and residents see not only where they rank on factors that determine health, but also specific ways to improve.
St. Croix County, across the Mississippi River from Minneapolis-St. Paul, has unseated Ozaukee County as the healthiest county in Wisconsin in an annual health ranking released Tuesday.
While a myriad of factors determine a community?s overall health, a strong correlation exists between median household income and health outcomes, according to Governing?s analysis of data from the 2012 County Health Rankings, conducted by the University of Wisconsin and sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Two controversial research projects with the H5N1 bird flu virus haven?t produced a killer bug but have generated useful information, two researchers told scientists and bioethicists gathered here to talk about the benefits and pitfalls of manipulating deadly pathogens.
?We can use this information to understand what?s happening in nature,? Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin told the group, which is meeting to discuss experiments on the much-feared flu strain that has infected 600 people, killing more than half of them, since 2003. He said his work is already shedding light on outbreaks in Egypt, the country with the second-largest number of H5N1 cases over that period.
A scientist whose work was deemed too dangerous to publish by US biosecurity advisers revealed for the first time on Tuesday how he created a hybrid bird flu virus that is spread easily by coughs and sneezes.
In a conference presentation that was webcasted live to the public, he detailed how his team created the deadly virus. Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison described experiments that pinpointed four genetic mutations enabling the virus to spread between ferrets kept in neighbouring cages. The animals are considered the best models of how the infection might spread between people.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison crossed the $1 billion mark in research spending in fiscal 2010 and held its place as the third-biggest research institution in the country, according to new figures from the National Science Foundation.
Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison described experiments that pinpointed four genetic mutations enabling the virus to spread between ferrets kept in neighbouring cages. The animals are considered the best models of how the infection might spread between people.
In the study, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison used MRI to examine the brains of 55 patients with chronic temporal-lobe epilepsy and 53 people without epilepsy. The participants were aged 14 to 60.
Hey big spender! UW-Madison spent the third largest amount on research among U.S. universities, spending $1.03 billion in 2010, according to new figures from the National Science Foundation.
The analysis, from the UW-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs, said the current U.S. unemployment rate of eight percent masks a far greater problem, the precarious situation faced by men with few skills and modest education.”Twenty percent of American men ages 25 to 54 are not working, compared to less than 5 percent in the 1950s, and 35 percent of those men lack high school diplomas,” said UW-Madison Prof. Robert Haveman, co-author of the study.
Stem cells derived from the skin and blood of blind people are morphing into retina-like balls in Dr. David Gamm?s lab at UW-Madison. WiCell Research Institute and the Waisman Center, both connected to the university, are growing stem cells to help researchers around the country prepare for clinical trials.
(This story first appeared in the Sunday edition of the Wisconsin State Journal)
Sioux County, North Dakota (USUSND), is the least healthy place in the U.S. for the second consecutive year, while Los Alamos County, New Mexico (USUSNM), is the healthiest, according to a study.
The rankings, produced by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, compare counties throughout the state ? and nation ? based on both physical and socioeconomic factors. The third annual report is being released today at http://www.countyhealthrankings.org.
The authors of the study are based at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. On a campus that size, they calculate, blackout-related emergency-room visits by students cost roughly a half-million dollars annually.
A U.S biosecurity panel?s recommendation that two controversial papers on bird flu be published in full is not a reversal of the stand it took last year out of concerns over terrorism, the head of the group said on Monday in London.
The U.S. government?s biosecurity advisers said Friday they support publishing research studies showing how scientists made new easy-to-spread forms of bird flu because the studies, now revised, don?t reveal details bioterrorists could use. The decision could end a debate that began in December when the government took the unprecedented step of asking the scientists not to publicize all the details of their work.
Last year, the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) ? an independent advisory board to the government ? recommended that both papers should be published with significant redactions. The full information would only be released to selected scientists. But on 30 March, after a two-day meeting, the NSABB announced that it had changed its mind.
“Research has found that individuals tend to drive drunk 80 to 100 times before they are caught,” according to Richard Brown, a UW-Madison physician and clinical director of the Wisconsin Initiative to Promote Healthy Lifestyles. “There just aren?t enough police officers around to catch most people most of the time.” Moreover, most of the people responsible for alcohol-related traffic deaths have never before been picked up for drunken driving, he said.
UW-Madison?s Richard Davidson, who remains on the cutting edge of brain research that sheds light on understanding our emotions, on Tuesday will be giving his first local talk about his latest book, ?The Emotional Life of Your Brain,? a work that?s co-authored by Sharon Begley, the former Newsweek science writer.
A:….If the nighttime temperatures are too warm, the sap will not flow. Our March weather has been terrible for harvesting sap for syrup. Minimum temperatures throughout Wisconsin were 10 to 15 degrees above normal, and maximum temperatures soared into the 70s and 80s.
I enjoy reading the “Ask the Weather Guys” column. Last Monday, however, I was disappointed that professors Jonathan Martin and Steven Ackerman inserted their opinion that the recent warm spell in the midwestern United States is indisputable evidence of man-made climate change and that skeptics (some of whom are presidential hopefuls of major political parties, they state), are unreasonable if they don?t agree.
There is a nationwide debate over strains of the deadly bird flu that were man-made by researchers here in Madison.
Cellular Dynamics International has expanded its distribution agreement with iPS Academia Japan. The Madison stem cell company will begin providing its iCell neurons and endothelial, or blood vessel, cells to the Japanese company in addition to its heart cells, distributed through an agreement reached last June.
Many words in American English, like honeyfuggle and pinkletink, don?t show up in standard dictionaries. But you can find them in the Dictionary of American Regional English. The fifth and final volume of the massive work has just been published.
One Monday morning in September last year, Ron Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus medical centre in Rotterdam, stood at the Intercontinental hotel in Malta and told an audience of scientists how he created one of the world?s most dangerous viruses.
Wisconsin kids enrolled in private school choice programs aren?t performing as well as their public school counterparts on standardized exams, according to data released Tuesday by the state?s Department of Public Instruction, sparking another round of partisan debate about whether taxpayers should be funding voucher programs. John Witte, a UW-Madison political science professor and a national expert on voucher programs, counters that some of his most recent research is suggesting that while math scores between public and voucher school students in Milwaukee are similar, kids attending the private schools are starting to make strides in reading.
One of Wisconsin?s leading exports offers an encouraging sign. It?s not cheese, motorcycles or football. It?s high-end medical equipment. Think MRI, CAT scan, colonoscopy and ultra-sound. Thanks in part to the presence of GE Medical and spinoffs from research at UW-Madison, Wisconsin is third in the nation in electromedical equipment manufacturing employment, with 6,100 jobs. Only California and Minnesota employ more in the field.
Fibs are common in online dating profiles. An inch taller, a few pounds lighter, and you might just get that first coffee date. But liars beware: Subconscious quirks in how you write a profile may give you away, according to a study published in February in the journal Communication.
A decade ago, three-quarters of the world?s solar panels were manufactured right here in the U.S. Today, China is making 75 percent of them and it didn?t happen via the free market. The Chinese government made a conscious decision to grab control of the clean energy industry, subsidizing production of photovoltaic technology even as its own coal-burning power plants pump carbon emissions into the atmosphere. That production shift, says former White House ?green jobs? czar Van Jones, should alarm anyone concerned about the direction of this country.
The scene is a mysterious one, beguiling, thrilling, and, if you didn?t know better, perhaps even a bit menacing. According to the time-enhanced version of the story, it opens on an afternoon in the late fall of 1965, when without warning, a number of identical dark-green vans suddenly appear and sweep out from a parking lot in downtown Madison, Wisconsin.
Everybody knows by now that spring has sprung early this year. But nobody expected summer to be coming along right behind. From blooming magnolias ablaze in the UW Arboretum to maples and oaks unfurling their leaves everywhere, the changes on the landscape and the activities of everything from birds to bees suggest we?ve missed a month or more from the calendar. The UW Arboretum looks more like May than March, said Molly Fifield-Murray, outreach and education manager. Insects are buzzing earlier than normal, too, said Phil Pelletteri, a UW-Madison entomologist.
One can see why Laurel Rice does not follow politics closely, considering that what she calls her ?day job? is performing gynecological cancer surgery. Dr. Rice is chair of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Who better, I thought, to ask about the bill that majority Republicans in the Legislature recently passed requiring that doctors take unnecessary steps and abide by new restrictions before performing an abortion.
A. What an amazing warm spell! March 14 was the first day of five consecutive days in which record-high temperatures were set in Madison. This matches the longest consecutive-day streak for setting record highs in our city?s history (the other two times were in the 1950s).
People can ?sniff out danger? because the brain responds to threatening smells, scientists claim.
Today we talk about words like honeyfuggle and pinkletink, puckerbrush and swop. These are words not found in most dictionaries. But you can find them in the Dictionary of American Regional English. Joan Houston Hall is the chief editor.
In June of 2009, a committee met at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to do a routine safety review of proposed research projects.One of those projects involved genetically modifying flu viruses. And during the review, the committee brought up the idea of “dual-use” research. “Dual use” means legitimate scientific work that?s intended to advance science or medicine, but that also might be misused with the intent to do harm.
The University of Wisconsin Hospital has begun participating in a national initiative requiring all doctors, nurses and visitors to the intensive care unit to wear gloves and gowns while in the wing.
The recent publication of the fifth, and final, volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) marks the culmination of nearly five decades of work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. DARE is a landmark of American scholarship, recording the words, phrases, pronunciations, and pieces of grammar and syntax that vary from one part of the country to another. And the attendant hoopla and coverage from media and DARE admirers around the world is fitting and deserved.
Zoning out while trying to read this? No offense taken, since all of us do it at least a third of the time that we?re awake. In recent years a number of academicians have ventured into this previously unexplored territory, trying to figure out why our minds wander while we?re supposed to be paying attention. They were probably spurred on by the blank faces of their students during their stimulating lectures.
