Dear Editor: Thanks to Todd Finkelmeyer for his article about experiments on monkeys.
Because most local media outlets and editorial boards, including the Wisconsin State Journal, have avoided the ethical, scientific, and financial arguments against these experiments, the public remains uninformed. So cruel, expensive, unnecessary, and fruitless research continues, while more useful and productive research goes unfunded.
After listening to University of Wisconsin-Madison botanist Don Waller talk about the fearsome adaptations of the Venus flytrap, one comes away thankful that the plants, through all their thousands of years of evolution, have remained small enough to dine only on insects.
The Chronicle of Higher Education took another look at “research results that donâ??t surprise us.”
Those who donâ??t pay close attention to such things might be amazed at the amount of research that goes on at an institution such as UW-Madison. To get an idea of the range of work taking place across campus, check out the universityâ??s “Ideas and Discoveries” web page. This page is especially cool because it lets one search for “Ideas and Discoveries” by subject. For example, there are 2,244 articles related to UW-Madison “research” going back to February of 1997.
While most of these findings are both important and interesting, there certainly are studies which cross this desk — or computer screen — that make one wonder why a researcher was given a significant amount of time and money to find the answer to X, Y or Z.
A group of University of Wisconsin limnology students ran into quite the surprise Friday when a set of routine experiments led to the discovery of a new invasive animal species living in Lake Mendota.
The leaves aren’t the only thing changing in the Badger state. Wisconsin’s evolving climate is at the center of a new University of Wisconsin-Madison study.
A group of scientists at the university said they have documented proof that changes are on the way for Wisconsin’s climate in the next century — changes that could make it feel like down south.
MADISON (WKOW) — Students in a Zoology class at UW-Madison discovered spiny water fleas in a sample of water from Lake Mendotaâ??s University Bay.
The students were about one-quarter mile offshore on September 11 when they dipped a small net into the lake and started poking through its contents. The net was intended to catch plankton and when the students asked associate professor Jake Vander Zanden to take a look, he was surprised at what he saw.
MADISON, Wis. — The leaves arenâ??t the only thing changing in the Badger state. Wisconsinâ??s evolving climate is at the center of a new University of Wisconsin-Madison study.
A group of scientists at the university said they have documented proof that changes are on the way for Wisconsinâ??s climate in the next century — changes that could make it feel like down south.
Two UW-Madison climate experts said Wisconsin may be nearing a tipping point with respect to environmental warming at a forum Tuesday in Engineering Hall.
A UW-Madison study challenges the perception that scientists avoid the press and that journalists tend to seek out mavericks.
The image of scientists tucked away in a lab away from the public isn’t just a case of being media shy; it was once the professional culture. Former science writer Sharon Dunwoody says getting information on the record was tough because those who spoke to the press were often ostracized by their peers. Dunwoody says scientists in the 20th Century who were interested in interacting with the public, the iconic example is Carl Sagan, the astronomer from Cornell. These individuals essentially were punished by the scientific culture, they were critiqued. They were told that public communication an unacceptable activity. (Sixth item.)
Rick Marolt has spent parts of the past three years trying to get someone associated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to answer one question: Is experimenting on monkeys ethical?
Itâ??s a hot potato few are interested in handling directly.
So Marolt was a bit surprised this past spring when UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin sent him a letter that directed the 48-year-old business consultant and part-time business lecturer at Edgewood College and UW-Madison to take his inquiry to the All Campus Animal Care and Use Committee, a federally mandated body that must approve all experiments on animals within the university.
Playing a little catch-up with some higher education-related news …
*** Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., released a statement late last week reporting that one of the school’s students had “died of complications related to H1N1 influenza.”
UW-Madison officials earlier last week said there already was a rather large outbreak of those infected with the H1N1 flu on campus, but that for most students it is a mild to moderate illness.
*** Wisconsinâ??s weather could undergo some significant changes in the future if the scenarios being calculated by the “worldâ??s most sophisticated computer climate models” are on the mark, UW-Madison announced in a news release.
The first detailed research on Wisconsinâ??s climate is forecasting a jump in average annual temperatures of 4 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit by midcentury, which could push humans and nature to adapt to weather conditions that at times resemble Missouri today.
The findings are unique for climate research in Wisconsin because researchers are making predictions about the future on a local scale. Climate scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said Monday that warming will be greatest in northern Wisconsin, with the smallest changes taking place in the south along Lake Michigan.
Injections with a steroid improved the eyesight of more than one-quarter of patients suffering from vision-robbing blood clots, a leading cause of blindness, researchers said on Monday.
If you’d like Wisconsin to be a little warmer on the average, just wait 40 years or so.
According to a University of Wisconsin study, the average temperature in the state should rise by between four and nine degrees by the year 2050.
â??Like a locomotive with a mouth full of butcher knives.â?
That is how a shark expert, Matt Hooper, described Carcharodon megalodon to the police chief in Peter Benchleyâ??s novel â??Jaws.â? He was referring to the 50-foot-long, 50-ton body and enormous six- to seven-inch-long teeth that made the extinct megalodon shark perhaps the most awesome predator that has ever roamed the seas.
Steroid shots in the eye can help people with blocked retinal veins see better, according to a national study released Monday and led by a UW-Madison ophthalmologist.
Wisconsin is getting warmer, research released Monday from UW-Madison suggests.
Dan Vimont, a UW-Madison professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, said the projection is based in part on climate data from the past 60 years that says Wisconsin has warmed 2.5 degrees on average in the winter and 1.3 degrees on average throughout the year.
Ever since we put solar panels on our off-the-grid cabinâ??s roof five years ago, I have been awed by how they power every electrical need of that building. Pumping water. Igniting the stoveâ??s burners. Lighting. They require no maintenance other than filling storage batteries with distilled water periodically. If we were on the electrical grid, it would make obvious sense to feed our excess power back into the grid.
Noted: Meanwhile, for the past six months researchers in Madison, Wis., have been investigating the idea of turning an electron beam loose in an ionized gas, thereby producing neutrons to direct into a pool of heavy water seeded with molybdenum-98. Some of the neutrons would merge with Mo-98 nuclei, creating Mo-99, explains Paul DeLuca Jr., the University of Wisconsinâ??Madisonâ??s provost and a codeveloper of the idea.
Wisconsin economic development gurus love to tout Madison as one of the worldâ??s rising biotech “hot spots.” But Madisonâ??s biotechnology scene gets an unflattering mention in a new report detailed in the Scientist magazine – for having some of the lowest life sciences salaries in the nation.
Whales have songs, and so do birds, of course. But does music lift the spirits of a swallow? Do humpbacks hum to make themselves mellow?
Although bird songs and many other animal vocalizations have been the subject of intense scientific study, the effect of music on the moods of creatures other than humans has remained mysterious.
But a provocative new study, spawned by an unusual partnership between a cellist with the National Symphony Orchestra and a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has provided some of the first evidence that humans are not the only species whose heartstrings are pulled by music.
Scientists have unraveled the genome of the parasite that sparked the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, revealing why it was such a killer back then and why itâ??s still a scourge today.
Do they even talk? I just ran across new study that suggests they do. First, my own observations, which as any scientist will tell you are very unscientific by virtue of being anecdotal.
Researchers from UW-Madison now have a better understanding of the genomic structure of late blight, a disease that is attacking tomato and potato crops in Wisconsin this year. The studies eventually may result in the discovery of ways to stop the blight.
Mark Krasberg avoids the worst weeks of Wisconsinâ??s harsh winters by lighting out for sunny Antarctica. There, at the bottom of the world, the UW-Madison physics researcher is helping to build a $270 million telescope, called Ice Cube, that promises to bring into focus some of the most violent and intriguing phenomena in the universe.
The University of Wisconsin Primate Research Center is staged to expand their facilities onto land animal rights activists had hoped would be the site for a new museum protesting experimentation on monkeys.
It was the day after Christmas in 2007 when Kurt Saupe finally agreed to head into urgent care. His wife had noticed that the seemingly fit and healthy researcher with UW-Madisonâ??s department of medicine was getting out of breath simply walking up stairs at home, and prodded him to get checked out.
An X-ray showed that much of Saupeâ??s left lung was filled with liquid. Two days later, a needle was inserted between his ribs, and three liters of fluid were drained off.
“And I was feeling much better,” says Saupe, whose name rhymes with “copy.”
But Saupeâ??s wife, a heart failure and transplant specialist with UW Hospital and Clinics, sensed something was very wrong.
Now some of the most prominent scientists in that field have published a new paper on detecting early warning signals before a system changes. Titled “Early-warning signals for critical transitions,” the review paper is in this weekâ??s issue of the journal Nature.
“We began to realize that there was really pretty cool and fundamental thing going on here,” says Stephen Carpenter, one of the paper’s authors and a lake ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW-Madison plans to expand its primate research labs into the space that animal rights activists once hoped would house a museum to protest experimentation on monkeys.
After trying to secure the land for at least four years, University Research Park, which is a research partner with UW-Madison, purchased the lot for $1 million in July from Budget Bicycle Center owner Roger Charly.
Scientists are boldly predicting we may soon have to stop complaining that if we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we cure the common cold?
Researchers have cracked the genetic code for all 99 known strains of the human rhinovirus, the virus that accounts for the majority of human cold infections.
“That’s why we’ll never have a vaccine for the common cold,” lead author Ann Palmenberg, professor of biochemistry and chair of the Institute for Molecular Virology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in announcing her team’s work.
â??Muskrat Loveâ? may have been a hit in the 1970s, but â??Cotton-Top Tamarin Affiliativeâ? doesnâ??t have quite the same Top-40 potential — unless you happen to a primate. The “song” — part of a collaboration between a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and a musician — certainly got some Wisconsin-based Cotton-Tops, small monkeys normally found in the forests of northern Columbia, going. The researchers described how music could influence the monkeyâ??s behavior in a study published in this weekâ??s Biology Letters journal.
The University of Wisconsin, Madison, is one of the countryâ??s leading centers of public biopharmaceutical research, and the campus has spawned dozens of spinout companies based on University research. For this, the citizens of Wisconsin should be grateful; and, even more so, hopeful.
Music has great power to alter our emotions â?? making us happy or sad, agitated or calm. Psychologists have tried in vain to figure out why that happens. Now, a composer says he’s has a clue. And he got it by writing music not for humans, but for monkeys.
David Teie plays cello with the National Symphony Orchestra and even on occasion with the heavy metal band Metallica. He’s also a composer.
They have wild shaggy manes that are perfect for tossing about and are known to bite the heads off rodents.
Unsurprising, then, that tamarin monkeys are big heavy metal fans.
When a group of cottontop tamarins were played a variety of types of music, from classical to jazz, only the songs by hard rock bands such as Metallica caused them to react.
Music may have charms to “soothe the savage breast,” but that doesn’t mean the same music that soothes humans will charm other species. Monkeys, for example, aren’t much affected by human music.
To find out whether any kind of music could affect a monkey’s mood, a musician and a primatologist created tunes tailor-made for cotton-top tamarins. They report that the experiment worked – but the melodies are unlike anything you’ve ever heard.
Music inspired by the soothing calls of contented monkeys relaxes the animals when it is played back to them, researchers have discovered.Researchers composed “monkey melodies” to investigate whether non-human primates are capable of responding to music with the same emotions as people.
Music has great power to alter our emotions â?? making us happy or sad, agitated or calm. Psychologists have tried in vain to figure out why that happens. Now, a composer says heâ??s has a clue. And he got it by writing music not for humans, but for monkeys.
â??Different species may have different things that they react to and enjoy differently in music,â? said psychologist Charles Snowdon of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who published the paper Tuesday in Biology Letters with composer David Teie of the University of Maryland. â??If we play human music, we shouldnâ??t expect the monkeys to enjoy that, just like when we play the music that David composed, we donâ??t enjoy it too much.â?
A study of monkeys over a twenty-year period suggests that eating less may extend life and prevent disease. American researchers said they believe their findings could apply to people as well. Their study was published in the journal Science.
Richard Weindruch of the University of Wisconsin in Madison and his team did the research. They tested the effects of calorie restriction in seventy-six rhesus monkeys over twenty years.
A UW-Madison safety expert said new techonology holds promise of reducing red light violations and the danger they cause.
The technology is geared for situations, similar to Rep. Fred Clark’s red light running earlier this month. Clark (D-Baraboo) was cited for a red light violation after his SUV entered a Madison intersection and slammed into a bicyclist and significantly injured him. The collision was captured by a Madison metro bus on-board camera, with the tape first shown on WKOW-TV Friday.
A new report shows some signs of hope with Wisconsinâ??s unemployment trend. Since April the rate of unemployment has leveled off after steady decline, according to the Center on Wisconsin Strategyâ??s Job Watch. COWS Associate Director Laura Dresser says nationally heavy months of jobs loss from September to March affected industries including manufacturing, financial services and retail.
Cited: “In 1974, oncologist Wac{lstrok}aw Szybalski of the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison coined the term “synthetic biology” as a way to describe biologists shuffling genes among organisms.”
Author Michael Pollan, one of the major architects of the current movement to create a more sustainable, environmentally sound food system, will give a free talk to the public at the Kohl Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Thursday, Sept. 24. The talk will be at 7 p.m., with doors opening at 6 p.m.
Pollan is the author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” which is the focus of the University’s Go Big Read common-reading project.
The University of Wisconsin – Madison will host author Michael Pollan, whose book “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” is the focus of the Go Big Read common-reading project.
Pollan will give a free public talk on Thursday, September 24, at the Kohl Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The retina is a lush layered field of tissue lining the back of the eye, a complex mix of specialized cells that serve as a transfer station where light signals are absorbed and sent to the brain to be translated into sight.
Researchers from University of Wisconsin, Madison have now created these unique retina cells from lowly skin cells — opening the possibility that patients with damaged or diseased retinas might some day be able to grow themselves a cure from their own skin.
The first accounting of women with breast cancer in situ in the United States finds that in 2005 there were 610,171 survivors, but that by 2016 that number is expected to increase to more than 1 million.
Breast cancer in situ now accounts for 20 percent of newly diagnosed breast cancers. It is the early stage of the disease, when it is still confined to the layer of cells in the ducts or lobules of the breasts.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers Brian L. Sprague and Amy Trentham-Dietz noted that while there were 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in the United States in 2005, the number of breast cancer in situ survivors was unknown. Their research is reported in the Aug. 26 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Time Magazine names Wisconsin-based Pollster.com one of the 50 Best Websites of 2009.
The advantage of Pollster.com, according to website co-founder Charles Franklin who is a political science professor at UW-Madison, is that it fills a â??new media nicheâ? with very specific, unbiased political polling data, which he says, had never been done by traditional media.
The American Chemical Society, the worldâ??s largest scientific organization, has named Wisconsin State Journal reporter Ron Seely as the recipient of its 2010 national science reporting award.
Seely was announced as the winner of the James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public at the ACS national meeting in Washington, D.C. One of the most prestigious prizes in science reporting, the award recognizes “outstanding reporting directly to the public, which materially increases the publicâ??s knowledge and understanding of chemistry, chemical engineering, and related fields.”
(Chemistry professor Bassam Shakhashiri, William T. Evjue Distinguished Chair for the Wisconsin Idea and director of the Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy, is quoted. Seely has been a senior lecturer in life sciences communication in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.)
One possible treatment for people with neurological problems ranging from brain trauma to multiple sclerosis may lie on the tip of the tongue.In experiments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, neuroscientist Yuri Danilov and his colleagues have been studying for the past several years how electrical stimulation of the tongue can bring about dramatic improvements in people whose ability to balance, walk and stand has been damaged in ways that leave them virtually helpless without a walker or crutches.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have reprogrammed skin cells and turned them into different kinds of retinal cells, a remarkable demonstration that mimicked the early development of a key part of the human eye and raised hopes for treating disorders that rob millions of their vision.
Scientists genetically â??reprogrammedâ? human skin cells to possess the same properties as those that make up the retina.
The process involved first turning them into pluripotent stem (IPS) cells, which have the potential to develop into virtually every kind of tissue in the body.
Study leader Dr David Gamm, from the University of Wisconsin, said: â??This is an important step forward for us, as it not only confirms that multiple retinal cells can be derived from human IPS cells. but also shows how similar the process is to normal human retinal development.
University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists have grown multiple types of retina cells from two types of stem cells, they reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The team led by Dr. David Gamm, an ophthalmologist, and Jason Meyer, a research scientist, said the development could lead to cell therapies, grown from a patientâ??s skin, that repair damaged retinas.
With so many options on the market for programs, pills and treatments to help you kick the habit, how can you tell which is the best method to use? Time asked Dr. Michael Fiore, a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and founder of the schoolâ??s Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention.
Maureen Durkin is an epidemiologist, professor of population health sciences and pediatrics and Waisman Center investigator at UW-Madison. Sheâ??s also a principal investigator for the National Childrenâ??s Study in Waukesha County, one of seven pilot sites for the study, which will follow the health of children before they are born to age 21.
A notorious plant disease that destroyed the Irish potato crop decades ago has been found in two commercial potato fields in Wisconsin.
Plant pathologist Amanda Gevens of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said it’s a community problem because each infected plant puts more spores into the air, which threatens to infect more plants.
In the future, cars and trucks could run on a special cocktail of gasoline and diesel fuel, boosting fuel efficiency and cutting pollution.A University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher has developed technology that takes advantage of the best attributes of both fuels to help engines run more efficiently.
Extreme binge-drinking may be putting college students at significant risk of accidents and injuries, a new study suggests.
The fact that heavy drinking often leads to accidents and injuries is no secret, but the findings show that the risks continue to “grow rapidly” the more students drink, according to Dr. Marlon P. Mundt and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin -Madison have developed a synthetic protein that could prevent human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV.
HIV and several other human viruses rely on interactions between proteins and the virus to infect a healthy cell. The new discovery could develop proteins that block a virus from hurting healthy cells.
West High School student Tulika Singh spent part of her summer studying epilepsy in rodents â?? an experience that made her feel like a contributor to research being conducted at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
Singh, who will be a senior this year, was one of 15 students in a Research Apprentice Program based at the school.
Charles Plueddeman clings to the hope that the disease will be cured.
Until then, Plueddeman will continue to closely monitor research and keep tabs on medical breakthroughs that can improve the quality of life of those who are afflicted with diabetes. That includes his 10-year-old daughter, Mabel, a fifth-grader from Oshkosh who has been living with the disease since age 2. Plueddeman was encouraged to hear about a study that is under way at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
