Category: Research

Two scientists who independently concocted potentially dangerous strains of bird flu viruses?and have had the bioweapons community in a tizzy for the past month with the pending publication of their work?today said that they would suspend their research for 60 days.  The announcement is intended to be a kind of time out, a chance for everyone to catch up with the realization that influenza is no longer solely a matter of public health, but is now a potential bioweapon.

Scientists who created a potentially more deadly bird flu strain have temporarily stopped their research amid fears it could be used by terrorists.

An international debate over whether to censor new research on bird flu may soon prove academic, as other laboratories close in on similar findings showing how one of the most deadly viruses could mutate to be transmitted from one person to another.

Research on the H5N1 virus is critical to public health. But it must be done safely – and it must be done within an internationally monitored system that has clear rules for how the results of the research can be distributed. The experiments in Madison and Rotterdam offer an opportunity to put such a regime in place.

In nature, bird flu kills more than half of the humans it infects — but it?s very hard to catch. 

A different sort of countdown was under way on New Year?s Eve at a remote field camp in West Antarctica.

The World Health Organization says it will take a role in helping sort through an international scientific controversy over two bird flu studies that the U.S. government says are too dangerous to publish in full.

At a conference in Malta last fall, a virologist announced that by infecting a ferret with a mutated strain of bird flu, then infecting another ferret with nose swabs from the first, and repeating this 10 times, he created a strain of virus that could pass from ferret to ferret without the swab, simply through the air.

Moms feed us, read to us, clap the loudest, cry the hardest, sit front row at recorder recitals, write notes in our lunchboxes and promise that the hole in our hearts after a break-up won?t stay there forever.

In the wake of news last month that researchers had created a version of the deadly bird flu that was easily transmissible by air, a heated debate has arisen in the scientific community about whether or not the research should be published. But some experts are taking the discussion a step further back, and wondering why the research was conducted at all.

Dear Editor: Two articles in the Jan. 4-10 Cap Times were noteworthy because of the similar topic of their omissions. The first, ?A brighter year ahead,? looked back on UW-Madison?s past year but made no mention of the university?s successful lobbying of lawmakers to exempt its staff from Wisconsin?s crimes against animals statutes. The second article, a retrospective look at the retiring UW-Madison library director?s tenure, made no mention of the library?s role in or silence about the 2005 shredding of a cataloged 628-piece collection of 15 years of video records from the UW Primate Center, after it refused to provide a copy of one record that was requested as part of a public records request.

Researchers suspect that one reason middle-aged people are more resilient is that their brains have learned to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Using brain imaging to peek inside that 3 lb. of gray and white matter, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that in younger adults, the amygdala, the brain?s emotional nut, was activated when they looked at upsetting as well as uplifting images.

While the New York Times is calling for an influenza virus created in an academic research lab in the Netherlands to either be destroyed or moved to government-controlled laboratories with the highest containment rating because of the danger the virus poses, little is known publicly about another contagious virus engineered in a University of Wisconsin-Madison lab.

The professor who oversees biosafety for the University of Wisconsin-Madison?s controversial avian influenza research responded Monday to mounting criticism about the necessity and safety of the research, saying “ongoing research with H5N1 remains salient.”

Does all this constitute a beet renaissance? Irwin Goldman says, absolutely, yes. He breeds beets at the University of Wisconsin, where he?s a professor of horticulture. He has been waiting for this renaissance for years.

Scientists could better understand how solar flares disrupt cellphone calls, wipe out power grids and knock out satellites, thanks to an aluminum sphere at UW-Madison that resembles the Death Star from “Star Wars.” The 11,000-pound hollow vessel, built to stir gas at 500,000 degrees Fahrenheit and replicate the process that creates the sun?s magnetic field, was installed this week in Sterling Hall.

What do you do when you?ve had a bad day? Depending on the depths of the badness, the cash and time at your disposal, and your post-trauma ability to make complete sentences, you can curl up with a book, hit the gym or the fridge, shop, watch YouTube, or call your mom.

Scientists have long worried that an influenza virus that has ravaged poultry and wild birds in Asia might evolve to pose a threat to humans. Now scientists financed by the National Institutes of Health have shown in a laboratory how that could happen. In the process they created a virus that could kill tens or hundreds of millions of people if it escaped confinement or was stolen by terrorists.

Recent reports that two teams of scientists had genetically altered a deadly flu virus to make it more contagious have provoked fear, even outrage, in some quarters.

Bird flu kills more than half the people who catch it. The saving grace of H5N1 is that it?s not easily spread among humans. Almost all of the 600 people who have been infected by the virus in its 14-year history have picked it up from infected poultry.

Attempts to censor details of controversial influenza experiments that created a highly infectious form of bird-flu virus are unlikely to stop the information from leaking out, according to scientists familiar with the research.

America has no Galileos. Here, we proudly defend the freedom of scientists to go wherever the evidence takes them.

LOS ANGELES — In a top-security lab in the Netherlands, scientists guard specimens of a super-killer influenza that slays half of those it infects and spreads easily from victim to victim.

The specter of censorship loomed over science last week with news that a federal advisory panel had asked two leading journals to withhold details of experiments out of fear that terrorists could use the information to make deadly flu viruses ? the first time the government had interceded this way in biomedical research.

In his research, Jack Williams, director of the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research, studies the impact climate change had at the end of the last ice age–around 15,000 years ago–when global temperatures rose by 9°F.

By analyzing ancient materials trapped in lake beds, he and his colleagues in the field have come to some startling conclusions. For one, small fluctuations in global temperature can cause large-scale biological changes across the planet, including mass migrations and extinctions.