Category: Research

Two researchers from the University of Wisconsin Madison School of Medicine and Public Health will leave their laboratory for the road to Chicago as part of the Alzheimer?s Breakthrough Ride. The cross-country trip includes 55 scientists seeking to draw attention to the need for their work.

Dear Editor: Recently a federal judge stopped stem cell research because of a law that was the result of Christianity?s war on science. According to Christian values, people like me would burn in hell in the next life for doing scientific research on cells that would otherwise have ended up in the garbage.

Dear Editor: For those undecided about whether there needs to additional investigation of experiments on lab animals in Madison, here?s a recent story to consider: The Ohio State Comprehensive Cancer Center decided to study the effect the cage environment itself had on the outcome of mice specifically bred to get cancer. When put in small, barren cages, all the mice got cancer. When put in large cages with all sorts of interesting activities (but the same population density), the mice developed smaller tumors or didn?t get cancer.

Wisconsin?s dependence on federal research dollars makes a recent court decision even more devastating to the human embryonic stem cell research being done at the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Talk about judicial activism. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth just ruled that the federal government can?t fund any stem cell research because it destroys embryos. He voided not just President Obama?s stem cell policy, but former President George W. Bush?s policy, too.

Stem-cell scientists still reeling from a judge?s ruling that their life?s work violates federal law received little reassurance about their job security from the nation?s largest funder of these studies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Describing stem-cell research as one of the more promising engines of scientific discovery, NIH director Francis Collins said the legal decision “poured sand into that engine of discovery.”

A glimmer of hope among those with Alzheimer?s, Parkinson?s, diabetes and other ailments that might be relieved with new treatments derived from embryonic stem cells was dimmed this week by a federal judge, whose injunction on federal funding for such research could not only jeopardize American medical science but the health of millions of patients worldwide. But the failure isn?t just judicial ? the ruling was based in part on a sound interpretation of an ill-considered law imposed by Congress.

The renewed debate over embryonic stem cells highlights the advances and complications that have arisen in the field since its controversial beginnings. Mention James Thomson, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A day after a U.S. district judge halted federal funding of all research involving embryonic stem cells, the government froze about $70 million for projects that were either up for renewal or well along in the approval process, effectively shutting down one of President Barack Obama?s top scientific priorities.

In Wisconsin, the temporary injunction triggered praise from opponents of the research and anxiety from scientists who have dozens of projects and millions in federal money at stake. The ruling put at risk hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation could potentially reap from its three key embryonic stem cell patents. And in the space of 24 hours, the court action thrust the issue of embryonic stem cell research into an already heated campaign for governor.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison, known around the world as the place where James Thomson isolated and grew human embryonic stem cells for the first time, now has 21 projects and about $5 million a year in federal money that depend on the use of the controversial cells. At the Medical College of Wisconsin, embryonic stem cell research accounts for federal grants of $2 million to $3 million a year.

The nation again finds itself in the weeds over embryonic stem cell research – again needlessly – after a federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Monday blocked the government?s effort to expand funding.

Blindsided by a court ruling blocking federal funding for research involving human embryonic stem cells, the U.S. government plans to freeze all new grants for scientists and impose other restrictions on this burgeoning area of science.

The head of the National Institutes of Health said Tuesday that some stem cell research would continue for a while, but new research would be stopped, in the wake of a federal judge?s ruling Monday that blocked President Obama?s order in 2009 to expand embryonic stem cell funding.

A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked guidelines set down by the Obama administration expanding human embryonic stem cell research, throwing into doubt studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and other major universities across the nation.

“It?s broad and could have dramatic impact if the court upholds this for all funding of embryonic stem cell research,” said Timothy Kamp, director of UW?s Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine Center.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered 50 proteins that help plants survive in the absence of water, a crucial step toward one day engineering crops that can resist droughts.

In research that offers promise for growing crops in a warmer, drier world, scientists at UW-Madison have identified dozens of proteins that control how plants respond to drought. The findings were published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers, led by Michael Sussman, a professor of biochemistry, probed the workings of a well-known plant hormone called abscisic acid in the oft-used laboratory plant Arabidopsis.

Some immigrants in the United States may need more than translations to grasp what is involved in cancer treatment, researchers found. Tracy Schroepfer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said cancer educators may find it difficult to explain cancer detection and prevention to people who may not even have a word for cancer.

If you ever want to be in awe of nature, take an occasional peek at this site:ge.ssec.wisc.edu.

This is a high resolution visible satellite image courtesy of NASA that is processed by the “other UW” — the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as part of the “MODIS” program.

Mentions new research by Barry Burden and three University of Wisconsin-Madison colleagues, voting ahead of Election Day has more than quadrupled since the early 1990s, increasing from 7 percent of votes in 1992 to 30 percent in 2008.

Quoted: Frank Salomon, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin who led a recent project to help Rapaz protect its khipus in an earthquake-resistant casing.

The Space Dynamics Laboratory at Utah State University has landed a major NASA contract to work on a new satellite designed to produce highly accurate climate records. The lab joins Harvard and the University of Wisconsin, Madison in winning a contract to work on the Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory project.

If only for a moment Thursday, Milwaukee was the center of the universe.

Using a program developed and run by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee physicists, a team of international researchers announced the first astronomical discovery made using volunteer computing power, according to a report published online in the journal Science.

Scientists are calling on Harvard University to make public details about the findings of its three-year internal investigation of psychology professor Marc Hauser?s laboratory, which found evidence of scientific misconduct.

The article quotes Jenny Saffran, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who published a paper with Hauser in Cognition in 2008 looking at grammar-learning in infants and in cotton-top tamarin monkeys. In an e-mail, Saffran said she tested the infants in her lab, but the monkeys were tested in Hauser?s lab.

Scientists have identified two parts of the brain linked with severe anxiety in young monkeys, and they suspect these same areas may also play a role in children who develop anxiety disorders, offering new promise for treatment.

Nervous monkeys in the study showed heightened brain activity in the amygdala and anterior hippocampus, a team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Brain regions that may play a role in the development of childhood anxiety have been pinpointed by U.S. researchers. The findings could lead to new methods of early detection and treatment for at-risk children, according to study leader Ned. H. Kalin, chair of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.

In children, an anxious temperament can be a warning sign. Kids who are painfully shy and nervous are more prone to anxiety disorders and depression later in life, and they?re more likely to self-medicate with alcohol and other drugs. But what causes a child to have an anxious temperament in the first place? A new study with monkeys finds that an anxious temperament is partly heritable and that it?s tied to a particular brain region involved in emotion.

Children with an anxious temperament often freeze up when they meet a stranger or encounter a social situation they perceive as threatening, says Ned Kalin, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

More than half of black U.S. children with a low-education parent will experience having a parent behind bars by age 14, researchers found.Julie Poehlmann of the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues estimated that at any one time, 1.7 million, or 2.3 percent, of all U.S. children have a parent in prison.

According to a survey of more than 200 medical students at the University of Michigan and University of Wisconsin at Madison, 77 percent say they would participate in a multiplayer online health care simulator if said simulator helped them accomplish an important goal.

Medical students would embrace using video games to help them train, a new survey shows. Students at the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison were surveyed and 98% said they liked the idea of using technology to enhance their medical education, a study published online Tuesday in BMC Medical Education.

New research shows that gender imbalance, when men outnumber women, affects male longevity by an average of about three months. Although the link between gender ratio and longevity has been shown in animals, the study published in the journal Demography is thought to be the first to show the impact in humans. UW-Madison contributed to the research.

Medicine isn?t a game. But more medical students think video games and virtual environments could help them become better doctors, a University of Michigan and University of Wisconsin-Madison survey found.