Category: Research

A special prosecutor in Wisconsin has declined to charge University of Wisconsin researchers who animal rights groups accused of breaking the law when sheep died undergoing experiments in a hyperbaric chamber.

SOLON, Ohio — Take dozens of hard-working students, combine with two committed coaches, and add in a few involved parent-volunteers.

The most common brain cell, called the astrocyte, is often overlooked in the face of its cousin, the neuron. Researchers are finally realizing their importance and have, for the first time, been able to grow them in the lab.

LONDON: A novel method for producing large amounts of astrocyte cells – which assist in regulating the extracellular composition of brain fluid – from human stem cells has been achieved by scientists in the U.S.

Scientists have developed the chemically defined conditions necessary to prompt human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) to differentiate into immature astrocytes. The University of Wisconsin-Madison team claims the immature astrocytes readily develop into mature astrocytes when implanted in the mouse brain, by forming connections with blood vessels. Writing in Nature Biotechnology, Su-Chung Zhang, Ph.D., and colleagues, report on their achievement in a paper titled ?Specification of transplantable astroglial subtypes from human pluripotent stem cells.?

It takes something special to bring the community together. This week, it was compassion. Not the practice of it, exactly, but the concept. It gave everyone something to think about.

This week, catapults will storm the walls of UW-Madison buildings. Robots will wrestle at the Field House. Rubber-band helicopters and bottle rockets will zoom into the university?s airspace. And there will be about 6,000 extra people on campus.

Starting Wednesday, students, parents, and teachers will stream into Madison from all over the country for the Science Olympiad National Tournament, the Olympic Games of middle and high school science.

A University of Wisconsin-Madison administrator has been named to lead the University of Florida?s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. UF officials announced this week that Teresa Balser, director of UW-Madison?s Institute for Biology Education, has been hired as the UF college?s new dean. She starts July 1.

The National Science Olympiad Tournament runs Wednesday through Saturday and will bring more than 6,000 middle and high school students, educators and parents from all over the country to the UW-Madison campus for a variety of science and engineering competitions.

ALBANY — The career paths of the three stem cell scientists awarded the Albany Medical Center Prize on Friday shifted in directions they never expected.

Two University of Wisconsin ? Madison researchers, Scott Peckham and Stith Tom Gower, have been combing data to figure out the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest?s role in the carbon cycle.

Researchers led by Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison measured the electrical activity in the brains of 11 rats, which they kept awake past their bedtimes by continuously introducing new objects into their cages. They found that the activity in some brain areas in the rats showed brief descents into “slow wave” sleep patterns. That?s the type of sleep we experience for 80% of the night, the kind that mostly doesn?t involve dreaming.

By now pretty much everyone admits that global warming is an inconvenient truth, but a new book argues it?s a deadly one, too—and not just for critters stranded by melting ice in far away places. “This is not just about polar bears and penguins, this is about us,” says Dan Ferber, co-author with Harvard doctor and researcher Paul R. Epstein of a fascinating new book called “Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can do About It.”

The abstract, written by University of Wisconsin?Madison researchers who have not answered e-mails, says that the ATLAS experiment has found more pairs of photons at an energy of 115 billion electron-volts (GeV) than expected.

The director of the University of Wisconsin Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center calls it the best news researchers could have hoped for.

New results from a drilling project in Greenland suggest that the ice sheet there may be more stable?and Antarctica?s may be less stable?than previously thought. The findings, which come from the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project, were presented on Thursday at a symposium on Antarctic science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Another state agricultural college will be working with Case IH and its dealers to provide students with access to the newest farm equipment and precision technologies available on the market. The company announced it is partnering with the University of Wisconsin-Madisons Agricultural Research Stations to deliver around 150 pieces of equipment to the schools 12 research stations for a nominal fee. The dealers are in the process of delivering tractors as well as equipment for tillage, spraying, planting and harvesting, and skid steer loaders. They will also assist with normal scheduled maintenance.

UW-Madison animal researchers claim medical progress depends on animal models, and that animal research is valuable and transparent. Yet they didn?t want further public discussion, and they managed to silence further “sifting and winnowing” by promising to hold their own public forums.

An experiment in a US lake suggests that ecosystem collapses could be predicted, given the right monitoring.

The closed eyes, the unresponsiveness, the drool ? sleep is an easily recognizable, all-encompassing state. But the divide between sleep and wakefulness may not be as clearcut as we thought.

Researchers know that sleep deprivation makes people and animals less functional. Now a team of researchers in Wisconsin and Italy has found that in rats kept awake past their bed times, their brains begin to turn themselves off, neuron by neuron, though the rat is still awake.

OTTAWA ? Older people call them “senior moments” ? you put the milk in the cupboard; you can?t remember why you walked into a room; you lose your train of thought in the middle of . . .

When you are sleep deprived some of your neurones actually fall asleep and can lead you to make mistakes, new research has found.

Faced with the increasing price of medical care, more pet owners are pulling out insurance cards when visiting the veterinary?s office. Pet health insurance has been available in the United States for almost 30 years, but expanded veterinary treatments and changing attitudes toward the family pet have bolstered the number of policies over the past decade, even during the economic downturn. Available to Wisconsin pets for several years, insurance probably covers about 1 percent of the animals seen at the UW-Madison Veterinary Hospital, estimated Steve Wall, assistant hospital director. The hospital logged 21,406 ?patient visits? in 2010.