Category: Research

Antarctica may be the bottom of the world, but the coldest, driest, highest continent is the best place for looking up at the heavens from Earth.

It?s a rare kind of research that incites a frenzied panic before it?s even published. But it?s flu season, and influenza science has a way of causing a stir this time of year.

In honor of the centennial of Roald Amundsen?s South Pole expedition, the IceCube Research Center on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus has scheduled a celebration next week.

A $112 million biochemistry complex on Henry Mall will be substantially completed this month and occupants are expected to move in over winter break. The complicated project involved gutting several historic buildings, the restoration of 1940s-era murals and a new, six-story research tower.

UW-Madison?s Bassam Z. Shakhashiri is canceling his long-standing and popular holiday chemistry show this year for the first time since 1994 due to a family medical issue. “It was a hard decision. We?re very sorry to do it,” said Cayce Osborne, outreach specialist for the Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy.

Differences seen in the structure and function of psychopaths? brains could help explain their often callous and impulsive anti-social behavior, U.S. researchers report.

Inside a Dutch medical facility is a potentially devastating weapon that could kill millions: A genetically modified version of the H5N1 bird flu, engineered to be easily transmitted among ferrets. And the researchers who figured out how to do it would like to share their work with the world.

At some point, engineering professor Brianno Coller realized he didn?t like slogging through dry math problems as an instructor any more than he had as a student. So he thought about what could liven things up ? animation! interactivity! ? and it hit him: video games.

Psychopaths are usually diagnosed by their behavioral patterns: an eccentric personality, including lack of empathy and remorse, deceptiveness, and abusive actions. Now, researchers have shown that psychopaths also have differences in particular brain regions, with fewer connections between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a brain region involved in feelings of empathy and guilt, and the amygdala, which mediates fear and anxiety, according to a study published in the November 30 issue of Journal of Neuroscience.

If your neighbors say it is raining more in Milwaukee now than in their youth, they are correct.

Milwaukee?s climate has been getting wetter over the last 60 years. Future generations here might be telling each other that the city is getting even more rain than today, with more intense storms, said Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist with the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A US biosecurity committee is deciding whether crucial research on H5N1 bird flu is too dangerous to publish. The work shows a few mutations that might allow H5N1 bird flu to cause a lethal human pandemic.

A group of scientists is pushing to publish research about how they created a man-made flu virus that could potentially wipe out civilisation.

Mentions that this year, about $1 million was programmed for genetic improvement research, conducted at University of Wisconsin-Madison and other institutions. Another approximately $300,000 is pegged for conservation programs.

Differences in psychopaths? brains may help explain their anti-social behavior, according to new research.

The longer a child lives in an impoverished neighborhood, the greater the risk that they won?t graduate from high school, according to a recent study by the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have grown human embryonic stem cells into neurons that appear capable of adapting themselves to the brain?s machinery by sending and receiving messages from other cells, raising hopes that medicine may one day use this tool to treat patients with such disorders as Parkinson?s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig?s disease.

Integrating a complex, single-crystal material with “giant” piezoelectric properties onto silicon, University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers and physicists can fabricate low-voltage, near-nanoscale electromechanical devices that could lead to improvements in high-resolution 3D imaging, signal processing, communications, energy harvesting, sensing, and actuators for nanopositioning devices, among others.

Mentions a 2011 study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison?s Applied Population Laboratory of declining participation among male deer hunters

Religion is said to be the driving influence behind Americans? low moral opinion of nanotechnology, according to a researcher who surveyed public opinion on science and technology. Dietram Scheufele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of life sciences, and a colleague found in their study that only 29.5 percent of respondents from a sample of 1,015 adult Americans agreed that nanotechnology was morally acceptable.

If you?re a fan of clean air and water, it?s time to make your voice heard. That was the message delivered Tuesday afternoon by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson to a crowd of about 400 people on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

Thirteen years ago, in a small closet-like laboratory, a University of Wisconsin scientist named James Thomson used funding from a Menlo Park, Calif.-based biotechnology company called Geron to create the first human embryonic stem cells, cells derived from human embryos that should have the potential to develop into any type of human tissue.

Geron Corp. is exiting the field it pioneered in a calculated business move that underscores the long, costly path embryonic stem cells face to become real-world products.

The muriqui monkeys of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, a highly endangered species numbering only about 1,000, live in an egalitarian society.

The company conducting the world?s first clinical trial of a therapy using human embryonic stem cells said on Monday that it was halting that trial and leaving the stem cell business entirely.

[VIDEO clip] — UW?Madison psychology and psychiatry professor Richard Davidson and the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds are studying whether yoga and meditation can help veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.