Category: Research

UW-Madison scientists and engineers will try to warm Crystal Lake in Vilas County to prevent the spread of an invasive species.

Biochemist Har Gobind Khorana spent 10 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, helping to crack the genetic code, pioneering the field of synthetic biology and earning a Nobel Prize.

UW’s annual Steenbock Symposium, which started Thursday and runs all weekend, honors Khorana’s work with a four-day program on synthetic genes, synthetic life and biological systems.

A Wisconsin Rapids medical center took the national stage this week after becoming the first facility in the world to begin administering what some call a breakthrough skin cancer treatment.
Advertisement

University of Wisconsin Cancer Center Riverview’s chief medical physicist, Yi Rong, presented the new process this week at the 51st annual meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine in Anaheim, Calif.

Riverview was treating three patients with the process as of July 1, said Dr. James Welsh, the center’s radiation oncologist, who initiated the new, less-invasive treatment.

The University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s nearly $840 million research portfolio, one of the top three in the country, will become even larger as federal agencies begin to dole out new stimulus grants.

Already, 90 awards totaling more than $26.5 million have been made to UW-Madison faculty under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Wisconsin projects ranging from stem cell research and new genetic models for cancer to Antarctic weather stations and bioenergy have been funded by the various federal agencies disbursing stimulus funds.

University of Wisconsin-Madison soil scientist Doug Soldat says up to 8,000 gallons of rainwater is enough to keep the lawn green and lush through the driest weeks of summer.

Soldat and graduate student Brad DeBels installed two 4,000-gallon tanks to collect rainwater from the roof of the turfgrass facility’s main building on Madison’s far west side. Water from those tanks is used to irrigate nearby turf via subsurface drip irrigation lines.

Young children may colour trees blue or grass red because their memories can’t “bind” together the colour and shape of an object.

Because the brain stores colour and shape in different groups of neurons, Vanessa Simmering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison suspected that young children have not yet developed the ability to link the information stored in each.

Designed to jolt the nation’s economy, the stimulus package has begun to fuel millions of dollars in research at Wisconsin universities, giving life to projects that otherwise would have been delayed or scrapped.

The process of funding has just begun, but so far projects totaling $35 million have been approved at Wisconsin universities. UW-Madison has won the most grants, with nearly $27 million in funding for 90 proposals. Medical College of Wisconsin projects total about $3.9 million. Marquette University has received almost $3 million, and UWM has awards surpassing $1.6 million.

Two universities in Minnesota and Wisconsin are among nearly two dozen schools nationwide receiving federal funds to enhance their agriculture programs.

The University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are each getting about $150,000. The grants announced Monday comes from a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Do Chicago’s suburbs hold the key to understanding West Nile virus? Tony Goldberg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine, says the Chicago suburbs near Oak Lawn are the perfect laboratory for prying loose the secrets of the mosquito borne West Nile virus.

Can scientists create life?

That’s the Holy Grail of biochemistry and the centerpiece of a four-day symposium July 30 to Aug. 2 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Synthetic Genes to Synthetic Life: On the Exploration and Synthesis of Biological Systems.”

More than 50 researchers, including 1968 Nobel Prize winner biochemist Har Gobind Khorana, who cracked the genetic code while at UW-Madison, will be talking about the advances in science that make it possible to re-engineer cells and create life from scratch.

In what proponents see as a sign of growing strength in the local tech sector, nine companies focused on biotechnology and information technology recently became new tenants of University Research Park or its Near East Side offshoot, the Metro Innovation Center.

A group of local high-schoolers is about to get antsy. Eight students and three staff members from Mound Westonka High soon will be getting up close and personal with leaf-cutter ants when they travel to the rain forests of Costa Rica next week for a 10-day scientific trek.

There, they will get to know the local villagers and participate in hands-on ecological research on the antibiotic-producing ants with scientists from the University of Costa Rica and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Cameron Currie, a UW-Madison researcher, has already impressed the scientific world with his detailed studies of ant species that raise fungus for food. He broke new ground with research that showed the ants produce bacteria that, in turn, produce an antibiotic used to kill parasites on their fungus farms.

The images were indelible, and the words of Neil Armstrong were unforgettable.

Hundreds of millions watched worldwide as the Apollo 11 astronauts made their mark on the moon forty years ago.

Among those captivated on Earth was University of Wisconsin geochemist Mike Spicuzza. “I was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin sitting in front of my television, watching it on a grainy black and white TV in my kitchen,” said Spicuzza on Monday.

The number of Wisconsin women who smoke during pregnancy has fallen considerably since 1997, following a national downward trend, according to a new report.

According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison study, between 1990 and 2007, the rate of maternal smoking in Wisconsin decreased from 22.9% to 14.9%, respectively, while in the United States, it fell from 18.4% to 10%.

Johnny Burke referenced it in song.

Thousands have tromped up its stairs to get a closer look at the heavens.

And earlier this summer, campus travelers swore at it for forcing another detour.

For its age and history, the Washburn Observatory atop Observatory Drive remains a lively part of Madisonâ??s cityscape. Within just a few weeks, Old Washburn, as it has been fondly called, will be reopened after a two-year renovation and restoration.

For years before Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon, there were many arguments over the makeup of the lunar surface.

Scientists were pretty sure it wasnâ??t green cheese. But one UW-Madison researcher got to prove to naysayers the surface was created by volcanic activity.

Monday, July 20, is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission moon landing.

“They [the National MS Society] have two deadlines a year for putting in applications: August and February. They’re canceling the August deadline because they don’t have enough money to fund grants,” explains Dr. Ian Duncan, a multiple sclerosis researcher at UW-Madison, “This is the first time in their history that this has happened.

“Things are looking grim. It’s really… depressing.”

Duncan leads a team of 9 researchers at the university.

They’re 1 of only 4 groups worldwide to receive a major MS grant that is entering into its final year.

An overseas Chinese student has said at a meeting of prominent environment experts in Beijing that the Chinese government must do more to educate people living in remote and border areas about protecting plants and animals.

Remote and border areas in China were known for their biological diversity, but residents had little knowledge of biological protection, Le Yang, a graduate student at the Department of Landscape Architecture of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, said Thursday.

Most of us have looked up at the stars in wonder. We’ve created glow-in-the-dark galaxies with plastic stars on our bedroom ceilings and traced the constellations with our fingertips. We know that Galileo Galilei was more than just a scientist with a catchy, alliterative name. He was the “father of science,” perhaps, the “father of modern physics,” and also the “father of modern observational astronomy.”

2009, celebrated as the International Year of Astronomy, pays tribute to Galileo’s discoveries, his astronomical observations, and, of course, his telescope. The UW-Madison Astronomy Department brings the party to Wisconsin with a series of events entitled “Galileo under Wisconsin Stars (GuWS). “

Climate models of the past, present and future seem to be in no short supply these days. But a new and dynamic picture of climate change appears in this week’s Science, one that could affect the way future conditions are predicted.

Recent history has been kind to humans, providing a relatively stable climate for about the past 10,000 years. Many previous models have re-created short glimpses of this past.

But, says Axel Timmermann, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, “None of these snapshots were able to capture abrupt climate change and transition,” thereby making them less useful for predicting coming sudden shifts. Even if the near future doesn’t unfold like the 2004 climate-gone-haywire film The Day After Tomorrow, scientists need to be able to produce accurate models of what abrupt change (more likely spanning hundreds or thousands or years, rather than days) would look like and why it might occur, explains Zhengyu Liu, lead author of the study and director of the University of Wisconsinâ??Madison’s Center for Climate Research.

VANCOUVER – North American university students are at high risk of being victimized by “intimate partners” who’ve been drinking heavily, a new University of B.C. study says.

The study, led by UBC researcher Elizabeth Saewyc, says almost 20 per cent of young men and women on subject campuses have reported being targets of “physical or emotional violence (which) is often linked to drinking” in the past six months.

Saewyc worked with researchers at the University of Wisconsin and University of Washington in Seattle to survey more than 2,000 students who attended campus health services for routine appointments. The study was part of a larger project on problem drinking and campus health funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Friday’s article on calorie restriction is a good example of research using monkeys at UW-Madison.

According to the National Institutes of Health’s Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool, since 1994, the earliest year for which financial data on this project are available to the public, Richard Weindruch has received nearly $17 million to study the effects of dietary restriction on monkeys.

Weindruch and his colleagues claim that eating fewer calories will make us healthier and might allow us to live longer. The university’s press office summed up its release with the admission that people are longer lived than rhesus monkeys, and no similar study with human subjects is currently under way, so what’s the point?

If you think all the warnings about swine flu this spring turned out to be a lot of hubbub over a relatively routine illness, think again. Reports in the past week from UW-Madison, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization show why it’s prudent for doctors, families, schools and governments to be on guard.

Scourge. Epidemic. Pest.

All are words often used to describe the pine beetles currently wreaking havoc across large tracts of North America’s forests.

Yet nature is too complex for good-versus-evil characterizations, says Cameron Currie, an Edmonton-born scientist and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. whose recent work has discovered a potential upside to the notorious bugs.

Letâ??s take the bad news first.

A new report released today by the journal Nature finds that the new H1N1 flu has quite a talent for making its way deep into the lungs. Once there, the so-called swine flu churns out copies of itself, producing symptoms such as bronchitis, alveolitis and pneumonia.

H1N1_flu_virus_09_sThe researchers, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Tokyo, infected mice, ferrets, monkeys and pigs with four variants of H1N1, along with a version of the seasonal flu for comparison. Unlike the pandemic strains, the seasonal flu did most of its damage in the upper respiratory tract.

The way swine flu multiplies in the respiratory system is more severe than ordinary winter flu, a new study in animals finds.

Tests in monkeys, mice, and ferrets show that swine flu thrives in greater numbers all over the respiratory system, including the lungs, instead of staying in the nose and throat like seasonal flu.

The new H1N1 influenza virus bears a disturbing resemblance to the virus strain that caused the 1918 flu pandemic, with a greater ability to infect the lungs than common seasonal flu viruses, researchers reported on Monday.

Tests in several animals confirmed other studies that have shown the new swine flu strain can spread beyond the upper respiratory tract to go deep into the lungs — making it more likely to cause pneumonia, the international team said.

Swine flu is more dangerous than regular flu and could cause an especially deadly flu season in the United States this winter, UW-Madison research suggests.

The swine flu virus, also known as H1N1, infects cells deep in the lungs of animals, a study by campus virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka found. That could explain why swine flu has caused serious cases of viral pneumonia in healthy people, something normal flu generally doesnâ??t do, he said.

Another worrisome finding: Only the very elderly â?? people born before 1918 â?? appear to have any natural protection to the new virus, Kawaoka said. Previous reports have suggested that the immune systems of people older than 60 could help ward off swine flu.

Most people accept that death and taxes are inevitable. But that doesnâ??t mean you should not try to postpone them. A good accountant can help with the latter, but the usual prescription for the former is a way of life that avoids excess.

For a country in which roughly 200 million people are overweight or obese, scientists today have discouraging news: Even those who maintain a healthy weight probably should be eating less.

Evidence has been mounting for years that the practice of caloric restriction — essentially, going on a permanent diet — greatly reduces the risk of age-related diseases and even postpones death. It has been shown to significantly extend the lives of yeast, worms, flies, spiders, fish, mice and rats.

Cutting calories may delay the ageing process and reduce the risk of disease, a long-term study of monkeys suggests.

The benefits of calorie restriction are well documented in animals, but now the results have been replicated in a close relative of man over a lengthy period.

Over 20 years, monkeys whose diets were not restricted were nearly three times more likely to have died than those whose calories were counted.

Eat less, live longer? It seems to work for monkeys: A 20-year study found cutting calories by almost a third slowed their aging and fended off death. This is not about a quick diet to shed a few pounds.

Scientists have long known they could increase the lifespan of mice and more primitive creatures â?? worms, flies â?? with deep, long-term cuts from normal consumption.

Now comes the first evidence that such reductions delay the diseases of aging in primates, too â?? rhesus monkeys living at the Wisconsin National Primate Center. Researchers reported their study Friday in the journal Science.

Eating less helped monkeys live longer and prevented disease in a study that holds promise for humans hoping to stay young.

U.S. scientists, who already knew that cutting calories prolonged the life of rodents and worms, first began to investigate the effect on rhesus monkeys in 1989. Their findings are published in the journal Science today.

Researchers have found that reducing calories by as much as 30 per cent â?? just above malnutrition levels â?? could reduce risks of developing heart disease or cancer by half and increase lifetimes by nearly a third.

The extreme diet could add an extra 25 years to the average life in Britain with the vast majority of people living to their 100th birthday.

Sharply cutting calories in the diets of rhesus monkeys was found to reduce aging-related deaths, according to a study that followed 76 monkeys for two decades.

The findings, published Thursday in Science magazine by researchers at the University of Wisconsin, give new impetus to researchers and companies, including GlaxoSmithKline PLC, that are searching for a drug to mimic the beneficial effects of a meager diet in humans without the feeling of near-starvation.

Wisconsin researchers reported yesterday that rhesus monkeys on a low-calorie diet live longer and healthier lives, a finding two decades in the making that suggests such diets might slow aging in people, too.

Scientists have long known that dramatically cutting calories can extend the lives of yeast, flies, and rodents, discoveries that have sparked a fevered quest for a human fountain of youth. The new study in monkeys, a genetic cousin of humans, gives researchers hope that they are on the right track.

A University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of bacteriology has been awarded the nation’s highest honor for researchers beginning their independent careers.

Cameron Currie is one of 20 winners of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. The honor was announced by the UW-Madison news service on Thursday.

A long-awaited study of aging in rhesus monkeys suggests, with some reservations, that people could in principle fend off the usual diseases of old age and considerably extend their life span by following a special diet.

The results from one of the two studies, conducted by a team led by Ricki J. Colman and Richard Weindruch at the University of Wisconsin, were reported Thursday in Science. The researchers say that now, 20 years after the experiment began, the monkeys are showing many beneficial signs of caloric resistance, including significantly less diabetes, cancer, and heart and brain disease. â??These data demonstrate that caloric restriction slows aging in a primate species,â? they conclude.

Could eating less extend your life?

New research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison indicates that it seems to work for monkeys.

A 20-year study of rhesus monkeys found cutting calories by almost a third slowed their aging and fended off death.

It backs up what scientists have long known about mice, worms and flies, that their lifespan can be extended by deep, long-term cuts in what should be normal consumption.

Scientists at U-W Madison say eat less, live longer and healthier.

It’s called “Caloric Restriction” and it’s nothing new.

“It’s been known since 1935 that a reduction in calorie intake can increase the lifespan of laboratory rats and keep them healthier for a longer period of time.”

The secret to a disease-free long life may be simple, a new study says: Eat a third less food.

But for most people that is no easy task, so scientists have turned to monkeys to learn what a severely restricted diet can do.

The answer, from a 20-year study at UW-Madison: Monkeys that eat 30 percent fewer calories than normal are three times less likely to develop or die from age-related diseases at any given time than other monkeys.

The secret to a long, disease-free life may be as simple as pushing yourself away from the dinner table before eating too muchâ?¦at least if you’re a monkey.

Working with rhesus monkeys for 20 years, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that severely restricting calories led to significantly fewer deaths from natural causes as well as less diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease and brain shrinkage.

Cellular Dynamics International’s disclosure Wednesday that its researchers have generated stem cells from ordinary human blood samples holds enormous promise in the emerging field of personalized medicine.

A study last year estimated Wisconsin’s bear population at 33,657 – almost triple the number of bears thought to be living in the state.

The work was done by Timothy R. Van Deelen, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and graduate student David MacFarland. Previous DNR estimates had placed the population at 13,000.

Gov. Jim Doyle defended his travel documentation Tuesday in response to a news report that concluded his travel records didn’t meet state standards.

“Nothing I do is secret or undocumented, as they claim,” Doyle said in a meeting with The Post-Crescent editorial board.

A committee of UW-Madison officials recently selected the five research themes and faculty leaders that will guide UW-Madisonâ??s new research facility, the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.

The institute, which is currently under construction on University Avenue, will focus on research intended to improve human health. The five selected areas of focus are epigenetics, tissue engineering scaffold research, health technology design, optimization of biology and medicine, and systems biology.