Category: Research

Noted: As she adjusted to the disease, Cynthia connected with the ALS Association, an organization formed to advocate for medical research and to help families and patients deal with the disease. At the end of March a group of people toured the Wasiman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and met with Gov. Jim Doyle to ask for more state funding for research.

Cynthia didnâ??t go; itâ??s too difficult, she wrote to the governor, to see other people in other stages of the disease – the stages where she may go.What she also asked for was more money for research, and the Waisman Center, which investigates human development and neuro-degenerative diseases like ALS, is involved in stem cell investigations where much hope is now focused.

Rick Marolt will be giving a talk titled “Why Primate Research at the UW is Unethical” on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. “Whether or not you agree with me, I hope that you will attend and will encourage your friends and colleagues to attend because this topic is very important,” Marolt wrote in an e-mail promoting his lecture.

A young researcher at the University of Wisconsin Law School is launching an ambitious project to find more effective ways of managing criminals who arenâ??t dangerous enough to send to prison. A recent study of Wisconsinâ??s Prison system found that the driving force in Wisconsinâ??s growing prison population is people on probation or parole who violate the terms of their parole or commit new crimes and end up in prison. (Fifth item.)

Anyone who has been in Lake Superior knows the water is cold year round.It may not be quite as cold in the future. Recent studies from U.M.D. and U.W. Madison indicate surface temperatures have been going up around two degrees per decade since the 1980â??s.

The state lab that tests the blood of suspected intoxicated drivers for drugs is facing a backlog of nearly 1,000 samples – and mounting – that threatens public safety, prosecutors and lab officials say. Delays at the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene mean both innocent drivers and serial offenders at risk of harming other motorists are waiting several months longer than needed to receive justice. The hygiene lab, which is part of UW-Madison, does a variety of tests, from testing for swine flu to screenings of newborns for genetic diseases. The drug testing delays at the hygiene lab are similar to a DNA testing backlog at the state Crime Laboratory that drew headlines in recent years.

At the University of Wisconsin, a university-wide conflict plan has been in place since the late 1990s.Under the policy, about 9,000 employees are reviewed at least once a year by the schoolâ??s Conflict of Interest Committee. While about 8,000 report nothing, the remaining 1,000 are broken down, and management plans are created if a conflict is identified. While the University of Minnesota is heading in this direction with the new policy, there are still instances of ambiguity in the documentâ??s language.

About 15,000 years ago, North America was home to an astonishing number of large plant-eating mammals — giant sloths, mastodons, mammoths. A thousand years later, they were all gone, wiped from the face of the Earth with sudden finality.

Today people from all around Wisconsin will gather at the UW-Madison to show off high-tech mapping skills that tell communities everything from the location of fire hydrants to crime patterns. As someone who works with geographic information systems for the UW- Madison, Karen Tuerk, says she never had a job she could easily describe to her mother. She says very simply, GIS is a way to make maps, but â??itâ??s a lot more than that.â? (9th item.)

Donâ??t be surprised if you catch a glimpse of a man wearing 19th century garb on the UW-Madison campus next week. UW-Madison botany professor David Baum said he plans to dress as Charles Darwin — complete with mutton chops and coattails — in honor of the 150th anniversary of “The Origin of Species,” Darwinâ??s seminal book on evolution. Baum has reason to celebrate. In addition to the anniversary, UW-Madison is on the cusp of creating a new institute to study evolution.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.