Category: Research

Michael Budkie, the executive director of Stop Animal Exploitation Now, sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack demanding an independent investigation of the agencyâ??s animal research oversight organizations due to a number of animal deaths in labs across the country in the past year-plus.

We bring this up because some on the UW-Madison campus have argued in recent months that animal research at the university is ethical, in part, due to stringent federal oversight.

But Budkie, whose group opposes primate research for moral and financial reasons, says thatâ??s not the case.

Steven Mixtacki, American TV and Applianceâ??s longtime senior vice president and chief financial officer, has joined the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation as its chief financial and operating officer.

The snow-rimmed hole where the tree once stood looks like any other ragged cavity left behind when fierce winds uproot white pines like ragweed yanked from a widowâ??s flower garden. In it was an old black bear — a male, most likely — who had made it through another hunting season and returned to the dirt cave to hibernate. Bears are studied by to University of Wisconsin students and professors, including professor Tim Ginnett at UW-Stevens Point and graduate assistant Karl Malcolm and Professor Tim Van Deelen at UW-Madison.

A Milwaukee research institute is donating 500 pounds of frozen yellow perch to the Hunger Task Force. Itâ??s the second year that the WATER Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the UW Sea Grant Institute have donated perch to the Milwaukee-based food pantry.

A new study has raised doubts about the creation of “ethical” all-purpose stem cells for use in research and treatments. Embryonic stem cells have the power to develop into any of the 220 cell types that make up the different tissues of the human body, but they are mired in controversy because they must be extracted from cannibalised early-stage human embryos.

Embryonic stem cells have the power to develop into any of the 220 cell types that make up the different tissues of the human body, but they are mired in controversy because they must be extracted from aborted foetuses.

A first head-to-head comparison of human embryonic stem cells with ones grown from skin cells, reported Thursday by biologists, revealed early aging and other abnormalities in the less-controversial alternatives.

Madison fire authorities said a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student burned his right hand after a fire broke out at a laboratory.

The privately-funded Morgridge Institute for Research, part of the public-private Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, plans to recruit 10 principal investigators among 100 researchers and support staffers to be hired over the next five years.

Noted: These true believers come as a flood of new gene crops approaches. The European Union estimates the number of GM traits in crops will quadruple to 120 by 2015. Only half will be made by for-profit companies. Stewart Brand, one of the founders of the back-to-the-land movement, has been arguing fiercely that environmentalists need to drop their anti-GM stance. So has Karl Haro von Mogel, a 27-year-old plant sciences graduate student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, whose blog promotes the technology. “Thereâ??s so much stuff going on that nobody even knows about,” says Von Mogel. “There is this huge potential if we use the science to pursue those things that are possible.”

“Embryonic” and “senescent” arenâ??t supposed to go together any more than “good” and “grief” or other oxymorons, which is why biologist Robert Lanza was “devastated” when he saw what was happening with the human stem cells he and colleagues were trying to grow. Like hundreds of other stem-cell scientists, they had been intrigued and energized by the 2007 discovery that adult cells can be regressed back to an embryonic state simply by inserting four genes into them. The discovery, by scientists at Kyoto University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, seemed to promise a way out of the bitter debates over embryonic-stem-cell research: rather than using human embryos as a source of stem cells, produce them from adult cells.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor has replied to a letter from Dane County supervisors who are concerned about the UWâ??s Primate Research program.

Members of the Dane County Board of Supervisors voiced their concern about UW-Madison experimentation on nonhuman primates in a letter sent to Chancellor Biddy Martin Feb. 5.

Is experimenting on primates ethical?
Yes.
This is the official position recently adopted by the administrative body responsible for overseeing all research involving animals at the University of Wisconsin

Twenty Dane County supervisors sent a letter to UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin on Friday questioning the universityâ??s process for deciding whether monkey experimentation is ethical.

Often when we frown, it means that weâ??re sad or grumpy. But how much does the frown also exacerbate the bad mood? To study this, University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology PhD candidate David Havas tested individuals who had received Botox treatments to stop brow-wrinkling.

The towering coal piles near University of Wisconsin-Milwaukeeâ??s Great Lakes WATER Institute cannot be moved. So the institute, and the future home of UWMâ??s new School of Freshwater Sciences, might be leaving the neighborhood. UWM officials said Monday they are reconsidering plans to build the water school next to the institute, which overlooks the harbor at 600 E. Greenfield Ave.

Itâ??s not a typical event for a church basement, but this Saturday children in the community will be invited to First Congregational United Church of Christ in Madison to watch scientists blow stuff up. The event, called “God Loves Science,” is intended to help kids understand that “science and religion are not incompatible,” said Jeff Rabe, the churchâ??s director of Christian education for children and youth.

Botox injections administered to reduce frown lines may also delay patientsâ?? recognition of anger and sadness around them, according to a study to be published in the journal Psychological Science.

Your facial expressions may help people read you like a book, revealing your inner thoughts and feelings, but it turns out your faceâ??s expressivity also affects your ability to understand written language as it relates to emotions.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison conducted a study with 40 volunteers before and after they had undergone injections of Botox, a powerful nerve poison used to deactivate muscles in the forehead that cause frowning. They found that the inability to frown caused participants to be less able to understand negative emotions.

Itâ??s a version of the classic finding in psychology that facial expressions can produce the very emotion they usually reflect. Called the facial feedback hypothesis, it implies that forcing your lips and cheeks into a smile can make you feel happy and scowling can make you feel annoyed, at least a little. Building on that research, graduate student David Havas of the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to study people who had received Botox treatments that paralyzed one pair of their corrugator muscles, which cause the forehead to constrict into a frown.

The Dane County Board has gotten involved in presidential politics and war in the past.

Now, a majority of board members are weighing in on the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s primate research.

Twenty county board supervisors have sent a letter to UW-Madisonâ??s Chancellor Biddy Martin, asking her to get directly involved in the ethics of monkey experimentation.