Category: Research

The new study shows that childhood experiences that fall well short of abuse, or even of having a mother who is depressed, leave their marks on our DNA. Led by Marilyn Essex, professor in the Department of Psychiatry and director of the Life Stress & Human Development Lab of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, scientists gave questionnaires to hundreds of parents, who were part of a years-long study, when their kids were infants and again when they were 3½ and 4½ years old.

The interim chancellor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has sent a letter to Wisconsin lawmakers urging them to oppose a bill that would ban the use of fetal tissue in research.

In 2008, Tyler Mills went to court on a charge of child enticement. The charge stemmed from an online conversation with a cop posing as a 14-year-old girl, during which Mills asked her to ?de-virginize? him.

One of the University of Wisconsin?s renowned centers for interdisciplinary research will be able to fund new collaborative projects with the renewal of an $18 million funding stream from the National Science Foundation.

A UW-Madison engineering center won a six year, $18 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The funding will allow the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center on Nanostructured Interfaces to expand its mission.

Will you be able to charge your next mobile phone simply by walking around? A group of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison hope so.

Perhaps the Northwoods? most abundant crop is potatoes.To keep business sprouting, UW-Madison has planted a research facility in Rhinelander to keep moving forward.

Lawmakers and political groups like to point to government spending that seems wasteful ? especially in tough economic times. And one popular target has been scientific studies that either sound silly or involve foreign countries or have to do with sex. Looking at past examples, however, shows that there seems to be a pattern to how research gets singled out ? and what happens after it?s put under the spotlight.

Millions of people up and down the East Coast were rocked by Tuesday afternoon?s 5.8-magnitude earthquake, and, believe it or not, the ground rumbled here in Madison as well, 700 miles away from the quake?s epicenter.

“The windows shook, kind of rattled a little bit,” said James Lustig, who works at the Carbone Cancer Center on the sixth floor at UW Hospital. “I thought, ?That?s kind of weird, my window doesn?t open.?”

How did lager beer come to be? After pondering the question for decades, scientists have found that an elusive species of yeast isolated in the forests of Argentina was key to the invention of the crisp-tasting German beer 600 years ago, according to Chris Todd Hittinger, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

UW-Madison has a new director of its Environment, Health and Safety Department. Paul F. Umbeck, who founded a University Research Park-based consulting firm on biosafety and biosecurity issues, will be in charge of general campus safety.

A stowaway strain of yeast, crossing the Atlantic centuries ago, may be responsible for a cool quarter-trillion-dollar beverage industry today.

The long-missing parent yeast of lager beer was newly discovered, and is believed to have sailed 7,000 miles from Patagonia in South America to Bavaria, to make a fortuitous microbial match at the birth place of the most popular alcoholic beverage of today, which underpins the $250 billion-a-year industry.

Numerous residents in south-central Wisconsin said they felt a magnitude 5.8 earthquake centered roughly 700 miles away, near Mineral, Va. The U.S. Geological Survey says the earthquake struck at 12:51 p.m. CST. It took 2.5 to 3 minutes to reach the Madison area, according to UW-Madison geoscience professor Charles DeMets.

If you like lager beer, you have Christopher Columbus to thank for it. The long-standing mystery of where the yeast that makes cold-temperature lager beer fermentation possible has been solved, in the beech forests of Patagonia in Argentina.

Ice cold beer: In these dog days of summer, few things are better. So, let?s raise a glass and toast Saccharomyces eubayanus, newly discovered yeast that helped make cold-fermented lager a runaway success.

Scientists have identified a yeast that led to the discovery of lager.

How did lager beer come to be? After pondering the question for decades, scientists have found that an elusive species of yeast isolated in the forests of Argentina was key to the invention of the crisp-tasting German beer 600 years ago.

We have to confess we didn?t know that for decades, scientists have been trying to find the “parent yeast” that makes lager beer possible.

Geneticists have discovered the wild yeast that is believed made possible cold-temperature fermentation — and the creation of the first lager beers.

A study conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison says that climate change is threatening a native fish found in the state?s deepest and coldest bodies of water, and researchers warn the population may drop by up to 70 percent within the century and affect fishing in the state.

As a pink gooey substance oozed between her fingers, 12-year-old Sydney Fry said that making the concoction was the best part of the Fun with Chemistry camp she attended on the UW-Madison campus. “It?s fun to play with,” Sydney said about the glue-based mixture. “I?m trying to get it under control.” The white glue-based mixture – tinted red so it came out pink – was one of the activities to learn about polymers at the recent camp, which is one of the Institute for Chemical Education Summer Chemistry Camps.

A new study likely to be controversial in some quarters suggests that hunters are not especially good wildlife stewards when the wildlife in question are wolves.

Making computers behave like humans has taken another step forward.

Dr. Fritz H. Bach, a former University of Wisconsin-Madison physician and medical researcher who helped develop techniques to improve people?s chances of surviving organ and bone marrow transplants, died Sunday at his home in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass. He was 76.

Since the early days in the 1940s, computers have routinely been described as ?brains? ? giant brains or mathematical brains or electronic brains. Scientists and engineers often cringed at the distorting simplification, but the popular label stuck.

The challenge in training a computer to behave like a human brain is technological and physiological, testing the limits of computer and brain science. But researchers from IBM Corp. say they?ve made a key step toward combining the two worlds.

But what’s important is not what the chips are doing, but how they’re doing it, says Giulio Tononi, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who worked with IBM on the project.

The number of scientific experts testifying in court for both the prosecution and the defense has been increasing at a rapid pace. That means lawyers often have to become experts in bio chemistry or genetics just to do their job. That?s one of the reasons the UW-Madison law school is launching a dual degree this year in law and neuroscience.

The Madison research involves the Engine Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as Caterpillar Inc. and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, said Rolf Reitz, a partner in the consulting firm and UW professor of mechanical engineering.