Category: Research

We?ve all heard of, if not ventured across, the soda/pop divide. In Pittsburgh, we?re close enough that it?s a day trip and doesn?t even require the wagon trains of old.

Now that laboratory studies have yielded a glimpse of H5N1 flu viruses that might spread rapidly in humans and cause a devastating pandemic, vaccine makers will be better prepared if one develops. Or will they?

A new study asserts that marriages and cohabiting relationships aren?t all that different in the long run. Instead, after a few years, married couples look like unmarried couples on measures of well-being, health and social ties, researchers Larry Bumpass of University of Wisconsin at Madison and Kelly Musick of Cornell University write in the February 2012 issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family.

NEW YORK?Sparks flew Thursday night at a New York Academy of Sciences panel discussion about whether or not certain recent research into the H5N1 avian flu virus has created a major biosecurity threat and what, if anything, to do about it.

In the midst of an ongoing UW discussion surrounding the ethics of animal research, the university will host a scientist renowned for his research on primates? level of cooperation at an ethics of animal research open forum Feb. 3. Frans de Waal, a psychology professor at Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, will discuss observed pro-social behavior of primates and elephants.

The best news comes from brain researchers at the University of Wisconsin, who find from scans that adults in their middle and upper decades ?seem to have the ability to screen out or tamp down negative emotions; their amygdalae light up when they see positive images but ignore the disturbing ones.?

From whoopensocker to upscuddle, strubbly to swivet, 50 years after it was first conceived the Dictionary of American Regional English is finally about to reach the end of the alphabet.

Concerns that research about a genetically mutated form of bird flu could escape from labs or fall into the hands of bioterrorists led U.S. scientific advisers to ask two prominent journals to withhold key details on the groundbreaking research, the advisers explained Tuesday.

Researchers are used to explaining scientific processes. Recently they have taken to explaining themselves. As we reported last week, on January 20th scientists who have created a new, more contagious form of bird flu explained in Science and Nature that they would take a 60-day hiatus from their research. The work of Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre, in Rotterdam, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had created such alarm that American officials had asked the two leading scientific journals to censor it.

Citing safety risks of “unusually high magnitude,” a U.S. advisory panel has explained why it recommended limiting publication of two bird flu research papers in late December.

Members of the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) on Tuesday defended its recommendation that details about how scientists made a virulent form of the H5N1 flu virus not be made public.

Details of a genetically altered strain of the deadly avian flu virus are “a grave concern” to public safety and should be kept under wraps, a federal advisory board declared Tuesday.

If you?re training for a new job someday soon with a video game controller in your hands, thank Constance Steinkuehler. Steinkuehler is on an 18-month assignment at the White House, studying the civic potential of video games.

A panel of scientists and science journalists discuss the debate over avian flu research, including work in University of Wisconsin?Madison labs.

The newest Earth-observing satellite, launched into orbit last October, has been renamed to honor the late Verner Suomi, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor often called the father of satellite meteorology.

Another researcher whose work on the H5N1 avian flu has been delayed from publication because of the recommendations of a U.S. government advisory board, and who agreed to a 60-day moratorium on further work, has written that studies of the potentially dangerous virus — including work that creates strains that might infect and sicken humans — must go on.

Why would scientists deliberately create a form of the H5N1 avian influenza virus that is probably highly transmissible in humans? In the growing debate about research that has done precisely that, a key question is whether the public-health benefits of the work outweigh the risks of a potential pandemic if the virus escaped from the lab.

A University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist whose bird flu research has pulled him into the fray of an international controversy disclosed Wednesday in the journal Nature that the contagious virus created in his lab was not fatal and responded to available vaccines.

Fourteen years ago James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin isolated stem cells from human embryos. It was an exciting moment. The ability of such cells to morph into any other sort of cell suggested that worn-out or damaged tissues might be repaired, and diseases thus treated?a technique that has come to be known as regenerative medicine. Since then progress has been erratic and because of the cells? origins controversial. But, as two new papers prove, progress there has indeed been.

A couple of days ago, out of the blue, Eric Suomi got a call from NASA. The space agency wanted permission to name its newest Earth-observing satellite after his dad. “Of course I said yes,” said Suomi, an electrical engineer at Electronic Theatre Controls in Middleton. “My father would have been thrilled and honored.” The late Verner Suomi, a UW-Madison professor, was known as “the father of weather satellites.” So now the Suomi satellite orbits the Earth, predicting weather conditions, collecting climate change data and monitoring natural disasters.

Yoshihiro Kawaoka explains that research on transmissible avian flu viruses needs to continue if pandemics are to be prevented.

NASA?s “Blue Marble” image is one of the best-known high-resolution pictures of our planet. It?s even included as one of the default images for Apple?s iPhone. Now NASA has released a brand-new “Blue Marble 2012,” based on image data from the VIIRS instrument aboard Suomi NPP, the most recently launched Earth-observing satellite.

NASA today released a spectacular, high-resolution “Blue Marble” image of Earth that was taken by a recently launched satellite.The photo was compiled from several images taken Jan. 4 by the Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite aboard the Earth-observation satellite Suomi NPP. The satellite was renamed Tuesday for the late Verner E. Suomi, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin. He was considered “the father of satellite meteorology.”

An airborne strain of avian flu engineered in Wisconsin isn?t lethal and can be blocked with existing medicines, the study?s lead scientist said.

Why would scientists deliberately create a form of the H5N1 avian influenza virus that is probably highly transmissible in humans? In the growing debate about research that has done precisely that1, a key question is whether the public-health benefits of the work outweigh the risks of a potential pandemic if the virus escaped from the lab.

It was a public health nightmare: A deadly flu bug spread like wildfire around the world, killing tens of millions of people.

A Wisconsin virology team that created a more contagious form of bird flu did not produce a highly lethal superflu, as a Dutch team famously and controversially did last year, according to the leader of the Wisconsin team.

The Internet is becoming our main source of memory instead of our own brains, a study has concluded. In the age of Google, our minds are adapting so that we are experts at knowing where to find information even though we don?t recall what it is.

Are there some experiments that should never be carried out? Is there some knowledge that is too dangerous for humans to possess? Can the dissemination of knowledge, once it has been discovered, be limited to only a few people? These are some of the questions being raised by two papers from two virology groups [one of them UW?MAdison’s Yoshihiro Kawaoka] that created an avian H5N1 influenza virus that is easily transmissible from mammal to mammal through the air.

Researchers working on the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus have voluntarily agreed to stop their studies for 60 days over concerns that their data could provide a bioterror threat.

If you were paying attention to the flap over two recent flu experiments involving ferrets, you may have come away with the impression that scientists all but waved a red flag in front of terrorists and said, ?Here?s a perfect biological weapon ? help yourselves.?

The US funder of two projects that created a highly pathogenic flu virus mutation has welcomed a two-month moratorium on further research while defending the value and safety of the experiments.

“We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found. “This sentence comes from the findings of a new study conducted by psychology professors at Columbia University, the University Of Wisconsin-Madison, and Harvard University. 

A small — in relative terms — group of technical experts will be invited to Geneva in mid-February to begin the difficult task of trying to break an impasse arising from the proposed publication of controversial bird flu research, the World Health Organization revealed Saturday.

The scientists who altered a deadly flu virus to make it more contagious have agreed to suspend their research for 60 days to give other international experts time to discuss the work and determine how it can proceed without putting the world at risk of a potentially catastrophic pandemic.