Imago Scientific Instruments, a Fitchburg company that makes high-power microscopes providing 3D images, has been purchased by Ametek, a publicly traded company in suburban Philadelphia, for $6 million. Imago was founded in 1998 based on technology discovered at UW-Madison.
Wisconsin farmers are having a tough time getting loans needed for spring planting. The University of Wisconsin-Madison estimates net farm income dropped 56 percent in Wisconsin last year to about $1 billion – the lowest level since 2002.
In the lab that summer morning, Thomas Wernerâ??s heart pounded. The University of Wisconsin-Madison post-doctoral researcher had to sit down and take deep breaths before continuing the crucial experiment. Werner, who had grown up in East Germany hoping to study butterflies, had instead devoted more than three years to a species of the North American fruit fly, Drosophila guttifera.
Rick Bogle doubts the UW-Madison paid much attention to the stateâ??s animal cruelty statute until last year, when the local Alliance for Animals began questioning the legality of sometimes-fatal decompression experiments involving sheep (see Watchdog, 8/27/09, 9/24/09 and 10/8/09).
Milwaukeeâ??s so-called voucher students, who are given tax dollars to go to private schools, are performing at roughly the same levels in math and reading as their public school peers. That is the finding of an analysis that has concluded its third year in a five year longitudinal study on the Parental Choice Program.
The fact that a Madison-based tech company could raise $7 million in venture capital in the current financing climate is noteworthy. That the financing was led by one of the premier Silicon Valley venture capital firms may be the bigger story.
Local and state leaders have long acknowledged the importance of tapping into the big money financing firms on both coasts for the money, contacts and expertise necessary for the areaâ??s developing tech sector to reach its potential. To aid such efforts, officials have organized special fund-seeking trips to places like Boston and Silicon Valley. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation even opened an office in California.
Sean B. Carroll, a molecular biologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been chosen by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to be its next vice president for science education. Carroll will maintain his lab at UW-Madison.
In the lab that summer morning, Thomas Wernerâ??s heart pounded.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison post-doctoral researcher had to sit down and take deep breaths before continuing the crucial experiment.Werner, who had grown up in East Germany hoping to study butterflies, had instead devoted more than three years to a species of the North American fruit fly, Drosophila guttifera.
Focusing on this species of fruit fly, he and the other researchers in the lab of molecular biologist Sean B. Carroll, had made a prolonged assault on one of the key questions in evolutionary biology: how nature endows creatures with their colorful patterns, from a leopardâ??s dark spots to a butterflyâ??s bold swirls. In different species the patterns serve to attract mates, provide camouflage or provide other advantages in the struggle to survive.
The forest can be a blur of color and patterns, from the rosette spots on leopards and stripes adorning tigers to psychedelic butterflies and polka-dotted flies. Exactly how these animals got their funky coats has been a mystery … until now.
U.S. scientists say theyâ??ve learned the long-sought-after secret of how animals make spots, stripes and other coloring patterns.
“The Wingless molecule is deployed in this species at specific points in time and in specific places — the places where the spots are going to be,” study senior author Sean Carroll, a molecular biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a news release.
How did the butterfly get its spots? A clever “pattern gene” turned them on, a study suggested Wednesday in the journal Nature. “Weâ??re all fascinated by animal colors and patterns,” says evolutionary biologist Sean Carroll of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, senior author of the study. “We found this one kind of fruit fly with polka-dot wings and decided to investigate.”
A University of Wisconsin senior recently received a $250,000 Hertz Fellowship to pursue graduate studies in the field of applied physical science.
Members of an animal rights group said they sued the UW Board of Regents on Monday, alleging that UW-Madison has not provided them with documents they requested related to eye movement research on monkeys and cats. PETA, the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, said the university withheld videos and redacted information in other records when there was “no basis,” according to the lawsuit. UW-Madison officials told PETA that they withheld the information in the interest of ensuring academic freedom for the researchers. “Any such records constitute unpublished proprietary research data,” university officials said, according to the lawsuit.
An animal rights group alleges in a lawsuit that the University of Wisconsin illegally withheld public records related to animal testing at a Madison lab. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals filed the lawsuit Monday in Dane County Circuit Court. PETA alleges that pictures and videotapes of animal tests at the university should have been provided when requested instead of withheld.
Members of an animal rights group said they sued the UW Board of Regents on Monday, alleging that UW-Madison has not provided them with documents they requested related to eye movement research on monkeys and cats.PETA, the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, said the university withheld videos and redacted information in other records when there was “no basis,” according to the lawsuit.
MADISON, Wis. — An animal rights group alleges in a lawsuit that the University of Wisconsin illegally withheld public records related to animal testing at a Madison lab.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals filed the lawsuit on Monday in Dane County Circuit Court. PETA alleges that pictures and videotapes of animal tests at the university should have been provided when requested instead of withheld.
An animal rights group alleges in a lawsuit that the University of Wisconsin illegally withheld public records related to animal testing at a Madison lab.
An animal rights group alleges in a lawsuit that the University of Wisconsin illegally withheld public records related to animal testing at a Madison lab.
Animal-rights activists have petitioned a Wisconsin court to prosecute officials and researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison for the accidental deaths of three sheep in a study related to decompression sickness, The Wall Street Journal reported. A judge in Madison heard arguments in the case on Thursday.
The village of Plain in Sauk County will get a $1.1 million state grant to help build a green technology training and enterprise center to address the need for new manufacturing workers, Gov. Jim Doyleâ??s office announced Thursday. The project will include partnerships with several high schools, Madison Area Technical College, UW-Madisonâ??s Green Construction Management program, the Association of General Contractors and several private industry partners, who also will be able to use the center for training.
A Wisconsin has had tornadoes in every month of the year except February, say Steven A. Ackerman and Jonathan Martin of the UW-Madison department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences. We can have tornadoes almost anytime, although the chances of having one in winter are pretty small.
Angie Vitale steps into a metal vault and lies on a table. A large cylinder hanging above her fits snug against her waist. It looks as if sheâ??s boarding a spaceship, but this journey is within: The device is a magnetic detector recording the tiny, irregular beats of her fetusâ??s heart.Vitale, from Sun Prairie, is among a small but growing number of pregnant women getting what amounts to a souped-up ultrasound at UW-Madison, which has the countryâ??s leading lab for fetal scanning.
Magnetic detectors that record fetal heart rates arenâ??t available in medical clinics today. But one could be traveling by truck in a few years, thanks to a $3.2 million National Institutes of Health grant awarded last month to a company in Rice Lake. Shared Medical Technology Inc. operates mobile units housing MRI, CT and bone density scanners. The company is working on a portable version of the magnetic detector used to monitor fetal heart rhythms at UW-Madisonâ??s Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research.
If you look closely at bread and cakes, there are open areas in the structure that provide a soft texture that yields when you bite into it, says Franco Milani, assistant professor of food science at UW-Madison.
Quoted: Ellen Zweibel, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Noted: The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which tracked people who graduated from high school in Wisconsin in 1957.
References report by UW graduate students about impact of bicycling on the state’s economy.
Scientists on the UW-Madison campus had little time to celebrate the history-making collision of subatomic particles at a massive collider near Geneva, Switzerland, this morning, moving quickly from running the experiment to combing through early data from the particle smash-up. Physicist Wesley Smith, one of more than 30 UW-Madison researchers working on the project, said data from the first collisions in the Large Hadron Collider were already flowing to computer banks in Chamberlin Hall and elsewhere on campus. Smith, who is now in Madison but will return to Switzerland in a few days, is part of a team that built one of the colliderâ??s main particle detectors. “It looks quite good,” Smith said of the data.
The linked computer systems that will handle data from the LHC were developed in part by Miron Livny, a UW-Madison professor who specializes in distributed computing.
Scientists from around the world, including several from UW-Madison, on Monday were anxiously awaiting what could be a historic period of discovery about the nature of our universe at the 17-mile-long particle collider in Europe. Early Tuesday, the researchers who have been speeding particles around the Large Hadron Collider LHC, a $10 billion underground loop of steel and magnets near the Swiss-French border, were to take their next step toward answering crucial and puzzling questions about the nature of our physical world.
For years, the rallying cry for education parity was on behalf of girls. This culminated in 1992, when the American Association of University Women reported that female students werenâ??t being called in class as often as boys, werenâ??t participating in math and science classes like their male peers, and thus, werenâ??t likely to pursue those fields in college.
Schools caught on, and for the most part, the campaign worked. But a curious thing happened on the way to Jane earning her chemistry degree â?? the boys got left behind. Over the past decades, public high schools report that more girls than boys are taking Advanced Placement courses, including calculus and biology. And your typical college campus is nearly 60 percent female.
Dear Editor: I agree with Rick Marolt that the UW-Madison has not properly evaluated ongoing experiments using monkeys. My interests, however, concern the living conditions that are forced on all the monkeys kept by the university.
Several years ago I was allowed to visit the UW-Madison monkey colony after proving I was free from tuberculosis. I still recall the horrendous smell of monkey urine, but mostly I remember looking carefully at individual monkeys and deciding they were very sad and probably
STEVENS POINT â?? One of natureâ??s great choruses will soon echo again across the verdant woods and wetlands. The spring peepers, wood frogs and their fellow amphibians will be at it again, carrying on one of natureâ??s most glorious and resonant love fests.
Across Wisconsin, volunteers will fan out to record the sounds on 120 routes, all of them part of the Wisconsin Frog and Toad Survey coordinated by the Department of Natural Resources. But for the first time since the surveyâ??s inception in 1981, the woman who initiated it and nudged it along for many years wonâ??t be among us.
Madisonâ??s bid for a $97 million high-speed Google fiber network is stuffed with facts and figures about underground conduit and utility poles, but itâ??s also complemented by digital video clips, snapshots, blog entries and tweets. The Babcock Hall Dairy on the UW-Madison campus still plans to make its mark with Google-themed ice cream.
Quoted: Stephen Carpenter, director of the UW-Madison Center for Limnology.
A new study takes a look at the health of Illinois county by county and offers mixed feelings about west-central Illinois.Julie Willems Van Dijk, assistant scientist with University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, was part of the team of researchers that compiled the report. She said a similar report had been made for the past six years for Wisconsin.
Theyâ??re an integral part of Wisconsinâ??s agriculture: pollinating nearly all of the stateâ??s crops and much of the food we eat.
Dear Editor: Having taught environmental management at the University of Wisconsin for 30 years, I was concerned to see comments from Greg Hull and other County Board candidates opposing the concept of shoreland zoning. Critical claims that property values and tax base are reduced completely miss the point.
(Felstehausen is a UW-Madison professor emeritus of urban and environmental planning)
UW-Madison has assured citizens recently at a public meeting and on public radio that experiments on monkeys are ethical because the benefits of the experiments exceed the costs. But an inquiry has revealed that the committees responsible for approving experiments cannot compare costs and benefits of an experiment because they have no method for quantifying them, and that there is little or no evidence that the committees even discuss costs and benefits.
Want to rock the world? You can do it at a new website geophysicists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have created which allows users to model the Earthâ??s 25 interlocking tectonic plates crashing into each other. The scientists describe it as “a dynamic three-dimensional puzzle of planetary proportions. Dubbed MORVEL, for Mid-Ocean Ridge VELocity (because much of the data comes from the mid-ocean ridges) it was created by University of Wisconsin-Madison geophysicist Chuck DeMets and collaborators Richard Gordon of Rice University and Donald Argus of NASAâ??s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Digital and new media games are already part of kidsâ?? recreational time at home. A research group at UW-Madison is looking at ways to integrate this activity into the classroom. Moses Wolfenstein with Games, Learning and Society looks at games such as World of Warcraft, its methods of interaction and potential applications in education.
Virent Energy Systems has reached a milestone in its quest to create a better biofuel.Madison-based Virent announced Tuesday that it has opened the first biogasoline plant, creating gasoline from plant sugars. The company was formed in 2002 to deploy technological innovations developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
When a “day” gets noted in day planner organizers, such as Christmas Day, Memorial Day, etc., itâ??s definitely a big deal. Such is the case with Earth Day, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary on April 22 with one of the bigger gatherings in the country happening in Madison two days before the anniversary.
“Earth Day at 40: Valuing Wisconsinâ??s Environmental Traditions, Past, Present and Future” will be a two-day conference hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies on April 20-21 at Monona Terrace.
The project, which took 20 years to complete, is said to describe a dynamic three-dimensional puzzle of planetary proportions. The model was created by University of Wisconsin-Madison geophysicist Chuck DeMets, Richard Gordon of Rice University and Donald Argus of NASAâ??s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Ultraviolet portion of sunlight plays a bigger role than vitamin D in controlling multiple sclerosis (MS), according to researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Bill Lueders, the news editor for the weekly Isthmus newspaper, has received a â??Genesis Awardâ? from the Humane Society of the United States, presented in Beverly Hills this past weekend, for his writing and reporting on animal issues. Lueders was honored for his reporting on animal research at UW-Madison.
A University of Wisconsin professor whose animal research privileges were revoked last year due to multiple conduct violations was recently reinstated with stricter research oversight requirements.
A report on the underrepresentation of women in science and math by the American Association of University Women, to be released Monday, found that although women have made gains, stereotypes and cultural biases still impede their success. The report, â??Why So Few?,â? supported by the National Science Foundation, examined decades of research to cull recommendations for drawing more women into science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the so-called STEM fields.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison suspended an associate professor last year based on what officials said was a “clear pattern” of animal-welfare problems in her laboratory, according to records obtained by The Wisconsin State Journal.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison last year suspended the right of a professor to work with animals after finding a “clear pattern” of problems with her treatment of animals, The Wisconsin State Journal reported.
It turns out that only four times in the last 60 years has the tournament been free of snow – that is, only 6.7 percent of the time does no snow fall during the duration of the tournament, say Steve Ackerman and Jonathan Martin.
Noted: Research from the Applied Population Laboratory at UW-Madison.
Quoted: Marsha Seltzer, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s Waisman Center, which focuses on developmental disabilities.
Animal rights activists have protested on this issue in front of UW employeesâ?? houses, harassing neighbors and children alike. I should know â?? my family was one of the targets.
Quoted: “The recognition you get from winning in a contest like this is invaluable for your business,” said Gary Grossen, a cheesemaker at UW-Madisonâ??s Babcock Hall.
UW-Madison suspended a professor who studies Parkinsonâ??s and other brain diseases from working with animals last year, a rare move prompted by what officials called a “clear pattern” of problems with animal welfare, according to university records released this week. University administrators say researcher Michele Basso has had a bumpy history, citing a lack of respect for veterinarians, incomplete record-keeping and instances where monkeys developed brain injuries. But Basso said she hasnâ??t violated any rules.
U.S. scientists say they have created a simple and cost-effective technology that uses small amounts of waste energy to turn water into usable hydrogen fuel. University of Wisconsin-Madison Assistant Professor Huifang Xu, who led the study, said his team grew nanocrystals of two common crystals — zinc oxide and barium titanate — and placed them into water. When pulsed with ultrasonic vibrations, the nanofibers flexed and catalyzed a chemical reaction to split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.
The road ahead of you is aglow with thousands of tiny sparkling snowflakes, like diamonds in the distance. The air on your face is brisk and refreshing, but it harmonizes with the warm sun. There is bliss in these moments of winter, experienced in the solitude of a long run, where your only purpose is to continue to put one foot in front of the other.But what if you could no longer run?
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Madison-based Alliance for Animals petitioned Tuesday to bring criminal animal cruelty charges against the University of Wisconsin for allegedly illegally performing decompression experiments on sheep.
Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard said he wouldnâ??t prosecute UW-Madison for violating state law in sheep experiments, so two animal rights groups are attempting to file the criminal charges themselves. The groups – Madison-based Alliance for Animals and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – are allowed to do so under a little-used state statute. They filed a petition Tuesday asking a judge to allow them to prosecute five UW-Madison officials and several researchers.
