Researchers at the University of Wisconsin have received a $9.5 million grant that aims to prevent another pandemic of swine flu proportions by identifying virus mutations that could infect humans and spread worldwide.
MADISON, Wis. — University of Wisconsin tobacco researchers said that they have encouraging news for smokers trying to quit.
The Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention recently released the findings of a major study that followed smokers in Madison and Milwaukee. The study participants were given five different kinds of treatments to see which worked the best to help smokers quit.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has received a five-year, $9.5 million grant Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant to develop an early warning system for pandemic flu, the school said in a news release Thursday.
Mammoth dung has proved to be a source of prehistoric information, helping scientists unravel the mystery of what caused the great mammals to die out. An examination of a fungus that is found in the ancient dung and preserved in lake sediments has helped build a picture of what happened to the beasts. The study sheds light on the ecological consequences of the extinction and the role that humans may have played in it.Researchers describe this development in the journal Science. The study was led by Jacquelyn Gill from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the US.
One of the great mysteries about North America is what killed off woolly mammoths and other exotic animals that roamed the land after the last ice age. Ideas have ranged from a comet impact and climate change to human hunters. A study published Friday in Science Magazine provides new clues about this â?? cleverly deduced from samples of a fungus that grew on the animalsâ?? dung.
About half the sports stadiums in the country now use the TurboTap, invented by UW-Madison graduate Matt Younkle. The TurboTap was Younkle’s 1996 winning entry created for the Schoofs Prize for Creativity competition held annually by the College of Engineering. It pays a $10,000 top prize and is open to any UW-Madison undergraduate.
UW-Madison is on the cusp of creating a new institute to study evolution. The J. F. Crow Institute for the Study of Evolution would bring together 70 faculty members from seven colleges, formalizing an existing network of researchers who study evolution.
A pair of contenders hoping to join the state symbol club would honor two equally famous Wisconsin traditions: cheese and Harley-Davidson motorcycles. One bill, introduced last week, aims to celebrate Lactococcus lactis, a tiny organism that makes the state’s estimated $18 billion per year cheese industry possible, by naming it the official state microbe. The other would designate Harley-Davidson the Wisconsin state motorcycle. The microbe already has a big fan base at UW-Madison, where bacteriologists have started pushing for the bill by creating a Web page that proclaims, “Support Lactococcus lactis as the Wisconsin State Microbe.”
Ever since Europeans first uncovered mastodon fossils along Big Bone Lick in Kentucky in 1739, the demise of these huge animals and other lumbering contemporaries at the end of the last ice age has been an enduring puzzle to paleontologists. Now, a team of researchers has evidence that woolly mammoths, huge ground sloths, and other Pleistocene giants became extinct earlier than previously thought.
Whenever modern humans reached a new continent in the expansion from their African homeland 50,000 years ago, whether Australia, Europe or the Americas, all the large fauna quickly disappeared. This circumstantial evidence from the fossil record suggests that peopleâ??s first accomplishment upon reaching new territory was to hunt all its all large animals to death. But apologists for the human species have invoked all manner of alternative agents, like climate change and asteroid impacts.
A research team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have studied levels of dung fungus in an attempt to work out exactly when the population of woolly mammoths started to decline. The research found that mammoths started to die out about 15,000 years ago – well before the development of sophisticated spears.Jaqueline Gill, who headed the research team, says the research also rules out the theory that an asteroid could have wiped out the animals.
Woolly mammoths and other large, lumbering beasts faced extinction long before early humans perfected their skills as spearmakers, scientists say. The prehistoric giants began their precipitous decline nearly 2,000 years before our ancestors turned stone fragments into sophisticated spearpoints at the end of the last ice age.
“Some people thought humans arrived and decimated the populations of these animals in a few hundred years, but what weâ??ve found is not consistent with that rapid â??blitzkriegâ?? overkill of large animals,” said Jacquelyn Gill, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the research team.
Mammoth dung has proved to be a source of prehistoric information, helping scientists unravel the mystery of what caused the great mammals to die out. The study sheds light on the ecological consequences of the extinction and the role that humans may have played in it. Researchers describe this development in the journal Science.The study was led by Jacquelyn Gill from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the US.
One of the worldâ??s biggest charitable foundations has awarded close to $10 million to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for influenza virus research.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $9.5 million in a five-year grant to UW-Madison research scientists who are studying viral mutations that could be early warning signs of potential pandemic flu viruses.
Any parent of an autistic child will tell you that their life is forever changed by their childâ??s condition. A recent study in The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders quantifies exactly how different that life can be. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison followed a groups of mothers and their autistic children (adolescents and adults) for eight days. They were interviewed at the end of each day, and saliva samples were taken every four days.
The US Department of Energy considers a recent achievement â??a world recordâ? in gas reactor particle fuel use, according to Kathy McCarthy, Deputy Associate Lab Director for Nuclear Science & Technology at Idaho National Laboratory. UW-Madison nuclear engineering students have been strongly contributing to the projects research.
Research from the UW Madison indicates that early voting results in lower turnout.The political scientists found that in Wisconsin, the impact is muted by the fact that the state allows voters to register at the polls.Still, researchers found that early voting reduced the buzz that builds around Election Day, which they say is key to bringing less-dedicated voters to the polls.
Chalk up another effect of climate change: itâ??s getting windier over Lake Superior. The water has warmed faster than the air, creating instability in the air mass that results in stronger winds. Ankur R. Desai of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an author of the study in Nature Geoscience, said the effect was due to ice, or lack of it.
Lake Superior, the worldâ??s largest body of fresh water, is getting windier as the inland sea warms, increasing the danger to shipping and sailing interests.Winds above the lake, which straddles the U.S.-Canada border, have increased 5 percent a year since 1985, according to a study by Ankur Desai, an atmospheric and oceanic sciences researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Sesame Street,” which is celebrating its 40th anniversary, is not just a good show; itâ??s good for you, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison media experts.
“When it comes to educational benefits, the results have been overwhelmingly positive,” says Karyn Riddle, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication. Riddle notes the PBS program is “the most heavily researched show in the history of television.”
Two students from the UW-Madison chapter of Engineers without Borders won a $22,400 award for their work in rural Haiti. Kyle Ankenbauer, a civil engineering student, and Eyleen Chou, mechanical engineering, are working to construct a mini-hydroelectric power generator to provide electricity to a school, library and church in Bayonnais, Haiti.
More than 65 percent of depressed mothers don’t get adequate treatment for depression, according to nationwide study released this fall by the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. The study of 2,130 women found that black, Hispanic and other minority mothers were among the least likely to be helped. Women with health insurance were more than three times as likely to receive adequate care compared to uninsured mothers, the study found.
A $9 million federal grant has been awarded to the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention, to help fund research on smoking addictions, the center’s director said Thursday. The grant will be funded by the National Cancer Institute over five years and will help pay for research on quit-coaching and nicotine medications in Wisconsin clinics.
The aim, says Kristen Joiner, “is to shine a light on whatâ??s happening with our local visionaries,” to bring them together with other regional leaders and engage the public in a cross-pollinated, trans-disciplinary meeting of minds. The agenda: food, water, energy, transportation, the environment, health, education, spirituality, art, music and politics.
A new study raises fresh concerns about Zetia and its cousin, Vytorin _ drugs still taken by millions of Americans to lower cholesterol, despite questions raised last year about how well they work. In the study, Zetia failed to shrink buildups in artery walls while a rival drug, Niaspan, did so significantly. Zetia users also suffered more heart attacks and other problems although the numbers of these events were too small to draw firm conclusions. However, the difference in plaque that Niaspan made in this study “is precisely the same as the difference” that earlier studies found from statins, which are now known to save lives, said Dr. James Stein of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a leading researcher on imaging artery buildups and in the past consulted for Schering-Plough Corp., which used to market Vytorin with Merck.
On visits to Shanghai and Beijing, Obama will encounter not simply a rising global power but a nation that is transforming and challenging the way Americans live overseas and at home, from college classrooms to real estate offices to the ginseng farms of central Wisconsin.
At the University of Wisconsin, as at college campuses across the United States, mainland Chinese dominate the study of science and technology and form the backbone of the engineering, chemistry and pharmacy departments. They receive twice as many doctorates in this country as students from India, the next-closest foreign competitor. And among foreigners, they register by far the most patents in the United States.
Plenty of peopleâ??s Twitter feeds appear to be connected directly to their egos, but one scientistâ??s is actually wired to his brain. In April, University of Wisconsin doctoral student Adam Wilson â?? working with adviser Justin Williams â?? tweeted 23 characters just by thinking.
The Department of Natural Resources is tallying the final number, but already the 2009 black bear harvest is a state record.
Based on a preliminary report, hunters harvested 3,900 bears this fall, topping the previous high of 3,184 in 1998. The record was not unexpected. The DNR issued 7,310 bear kill permits this fall, a 57% increase from 2008 and most in state history. The jump in permits came on the heels of a University of Wisconsin study that estimated the stateâ??s bear population at 26,000 to 40,000, a substantial increase from previous studies.
Scientists have identified a gene that causes loss of hearing in old age, opening ways for more research to develop a drug that can prevent people from going deaf. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US who carried out tests on mice found that a gene called Bak is responsible for deafness.
University of Minnesota leaders Wednesday released a draft conflict-of-interest policy that would ban faculty from a variety of questionable practices, including product endorsements and ghostwriting of research papers. Mentions that researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who have received $20,000 per year from companies cannot conduct industry-funded trials of the companies’ products.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison competitive computing team will head to China. The three-member Wrong Answer team came in first among 201 teams at the North Central North America Regional Programming Contest finals Oct. 31 at UW-Parkside.
Rob Meyer canâ??t help but get excited when he hears President Barack Obama talking about the need for states to start measuring whether their teachers, schools and districts are doing enough to help students succeed.
“What heâ??s talking about is what we are doing,” says Meyer, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s Value-Added Research Center.
If states hope to secure a piece of Obamaâ??s $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” stimulus money, theyâ??ll have to commit to using research data to evaluate student progress and the effectiveness of teachers, schools and districts.
Noted: Of all the evidence supporting the orchid-gene hypothesis, perhaps the most compelling comes from the work of Stephen Suomi, a rhesus-monkey researcher who heads a sprawling complex of labs and monkey habitats in the Maryland countrysideâ??the National Institutes of Healthâ??s Laboratory of Comparative Ethology. For 41 years, first at the University of Wisconsin and then, beginning in 1983, in the Maryland lab the NIH built specifically for him, Suomi has been studying the roots of temperament and behavior in rhesus monkeysâ??which share about 95 percent of our DNA, a number exceeded only in apes.
A UW-Madison student was taken to the hospital Monday after a vial she was working with exploded in the Chemistry Building, according to the UW-Madison Police Department.
Two of the drugs, currently used to treat breast cancer, were found to eliminate the disease in mice.Scientists do not yet know whether they will have the same effect in humans, but are hopeful.â??â??There are many similarities to how cervical cancer develops and manifests itself in women and in mice,â??â?? said Dr Paul Lambert, one of the researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US.
A cautionary e-mail sent to medical and biochemistry researchers last week, prompted by missing equipment, has accused a private microscope service representative of fraudulent behavior, though the representative claims he has done nothing of the sort.
Earlier this year, Minesh Mehta, a cancer specialist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, co-authored a medical article on TomoTherapy, a radiation therapy system developed by researchers at the university.
Any doctor reading the article would have thought Mehta was an unbiased researcher with no conflict of interest or financial stake in TomoTherapy Inc. After all, the journal article said Mehta reported no potential conflicts of interest.But documents obtained from the university tell a different story.Those records show Mehta had told the university he would make more than $20,000 in 2008 working as a TomoTherapy consultant. He also owned stock options in the company.
Mehta was one of at least nine UW physicians whose conflicts listed on financial disclosures to the university did not match what was revealed to the medical world in their published articles.
Just about a year ago, a faulty weld in the nearly $10 billion Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border sparked an electrical surge that melted a connection between two magnets and shut down experimentation weeks earlier than expected. Wesley Smith, a UW-Madison physics professor who has invested much of his career in historyâ??s most ambitious science project, was as disappointed as everyone else involved in the effort. But a year later, Smith and several other UW-Madison scientists and engineers are preparing to leave for France and the home to the collider, the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, once again.
Mainly by nose, said Scott Craven, emeritus professor of wildlife ecology at UW-Madison.
Most doctoral students have their thesis read by around five people, or if theyâ??re lucky, a slightly wider audience of peers in their specialty. But one demanding class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is changing that. The students in this class are making movies.Tales of Planet Earth is a three-day environmental film festival beginning Friday that will air seven short films created by UW students along with more than 30 professional films over the weekend.
Thereâ??s been plenty of talk about education this week in Wisconsin. At the UW-Madison campus on Saturday, the focus was on getting girls interested in math and science.
The University of Wisconsin will host the annual Expanding Your Horizons conference geared toward sparking young womenâ??s interests within science fields in an effort to decrease the gap between women and men within these fields Saturday.
Author: Maria Cancian, Russell Sage Foundation and University of Wisconsin. Marriage promotion policies will not solve the poverty problem. While financial incentives or relationship-skills programs may help some couples, there is no evidence that government policies can substantially increase marriage rates. And many single mothers would be poor even if they married the fathers of their children, because both the mother and father have limited economic prospects.
In 1959, a small group of about 20 high school girls met with women researchers at UW-Madison to learn about science careers. Then, it was rare to see a woman in a lab coat on college campuses.
Timothy Baker has a problem with psychology today. He thinks it bears a dangerous resemblance to the medicine of yesteryear: anecdotal, unscientific, as likely to hurt as help. “[D]espite compelling research support for the merits of specific interventions for specific problems, clinical psychology, as a field, has failed to embrace these treatments,” writes Baker, a professor of medicine at the UW-Madisonâ??s School of Medicine and Public Health, in a paper thatâ??s generating national attention and controversy.
What did The Wisconsin State Journal not know and when didnâ??t it know it? On Oct. 23, the paper ran a story on the UW-Madisonâ??s push to create a new high-ranking post, vice chancellor for research, to address woes including aging facilities and a “major action” violation by an animal research lab on campus.
President Barack Obamaâ??s appearance in Madison Wednesday also marked the one-year anniversary of his historic election victory.
Since that night, Obama has dealt with many significant and complicated issues. The debates regarding health insurance reform and the economic stimulus have raged through the halls of Congress, and their effects have been felt in Wisconsin.
A scientist warns the fish are moving faster than the federal government when it comes to keeping the predatory Asian carp out of Lake Michigan waters. Last spring, a $9 million electronic barrier was installed in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to keep the Asian carp from swimming into Lake Michigan and wreaking havoc on the lakeâ??s eco-system. University of Wisconsin biologist Phil Moy, whoâ??s working on the barrier project, says the barrier is effective but needs some routine maintenance. “Thereâ??s no problem with the barrier. Itâ??s just scheduled to go for maintenance, just like changing the oil in your car.”
A Madison company says it has developed a better way to keep in touch with friends and family in other countries. JumperTel Communications says its “plug and play” phone system is inexpensive and easy to use. JumperTel says. Of the seven company founders, all but one are UW-Madison graduates, and executives for the company’s investor, Optimo Investments, an investment firm in Abu Dhabi, are UW grads.
A study by the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention found the most effective way for smokers to quit smoking is to combine an over-the-counter nicotine replacement patch and a nicotinereplacement lozenge in daily treatment.
Biddy Martin apologized to the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s Faculty Senate Monday evening for the way in which her administration rolled out a proposed reorganization of the Graduate School.
The round of applause she received following this concession at Bascom Hall would seem to indicate many are ready to forgive Martin for her first significant public relations misstep as chancellor at UW-Madison.
Faculty, staff and students on campus were generally irked when Martin and Provost Paul DeLuca unveiled a plan to create a new office separate from the Graduate School that would manage UW-Madisonâ??s approximately $900 million in research projects.
Giving up cigarettes is no easy task, but smokers motivated to quit can make it easier by using a nicotine patch combined with a nicotine lozenge, gum or nasal spray, according to a new study.Smoking cessation aides are known to be helpful, but thereâ??s very little data on which products are most effective. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison have filled in that gap with a head-to-head comparison of five different strategies.
After voicing their opinions without restraint Monday, the Faculty Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution to slow down implementation of Provost Paul DeLuca Jr.â??s proposal to restructure the University of Wisconsin graduate school.
The Faculty Senate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison has voted overwhelmingly to urge the administration there to slow down a proposed reorganization of the institutionâ??s Graduate School that would change how the campus handles research.The proposed reorganization would establish a separate office, overseen by a new vice chancellor, to manage the research being performed by various graduate programs.
UW-Madisonâ??s Faculty Senate almost unanimously approved a resolution Monday opposing any action to restructure the graduate school until a thorough, shared governance process is completed.
UW-Madison physician Suresh Chandra, founder of the Combat Blindness Foundation, has been leading trips to the developing world for 25 years with the goal of eradicating preventable blindness.
Gregg Mitman thought Tales from Planet Earth would be a one-shot deal. The UW-Madison history of science professor and interim director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies was a principal organizer of the 2007 environmental film festival. “Opening night, there was a line two blocks long waiting to get into the Orpheum,” he remembers. He had anticipated 500 people might show up that first night. Instead, more than twice that number turned out. By the end of the festival, total attendance was estimated at 3,500.
Quoted: Paleontologist Joe Skulan, an assistant faculty associate in the department of geology and geophysics at UW-Madison.
Future doctors and nurses are learning about acupuncture and herbs along with anatomy and physiology at a growing number of medical schools. Itâ??s another example of how alternative medicine has become mainstream. The federal government has spent more than $22 million to help medical and nursing schools start teaching about alternative medicine. Jimmy Wu, a newly graduated doctor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was raised in a family originally from Taiwan, said traditional healing practices are “very much ingrained” in how he thinks about sickness and health. Wu spent a summer in Beijing with a university faculty member observing traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture, and hopes to include these in a family medicine practice someday. With so many people using alternative care, “it is important that it be treated more than just an afterthought” by medical schools, Wu said.
Hector DeLuca has seen his share of contentious campus issues since arriving at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for graduate school in 1951. There were the Vietnam War protests in the 1960s and the heated debates over merging UW-Madison and the Wisconsin State Universities into the University of Wisconsin System in the early 1970s.
