Category: Research

A new technique that transforms embryonic and adult stem cells into six types of mature white blood cells could produce blood cells with specific defects for use by researchers studying the development and treatment of disease.The method, devised by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers, could also be used to grow specific types of immune cells to target specific infections or tumors, or to test the safety of new drugs, they said.

An engine which blends diesel and gasoline fuels could potentially be 20% more efficient than traditional gas engines, while also lowering the emissions, say researchers at the University of Wisconsinâ??Madison.

WASHINGTON (WKOW) — U.S. Senator Herb Kohl will meet the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner in Madison on Tuesday to discuss science, food safety, and public health.

Senator Kohl and Commissioner Margaret Hamburg will start off their meeting with a tour of the Babcock Hall Dairy Plant.

Senator Kohl is the chairman of the Senate’s Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee, a group that oversees funding for the nation’s two main agencies responsible for keeping the food supply safe – the FDA and the Food Safety and Inspection Service.

On a warm, breezy day in Oak Lawn, veterinary graduate student Jessica Girard of the University of Wisconsin-Madison removed a robin from a finely threaded net hidden in the shadows of a tree-lined meadow.

Gently, she extended its wings to check for emerging feathers and look for parasites. She took measurements, noting patterns in the feathers indicating the robin’s age. Her fingers traced its orange chest, feeling along the bone for telltale fat deposits that signal a healthy bird.

Girard needed a blood sample from the robin to test the strength of its immune system, and she had to work quickly, before the bird’s stress weakened its immune response. She moved feathers from the bird’s neck, baring translucent skin colored with fine blood vessels. Whispering soothing words, she drew her sample with a needle.

In all, Girard and her colleagues would catch and test four robins, a sparrow, a cardinal and a blue jay this morning as part of a research effort aimed at understanding why certain neighborhoods in the Chicago area are “hot spots” for the West Nile virus.

The Department of Energy Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center GLBRC at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has received $8.1 million in new funding from the U.S. Department of Energy through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to provide crucial support for plant cell wall imaging and sustainability research.

What is the best way to encourage science in Africa?

Some African scientists come to the United States to train and then return to their home countries to teach and perform research (read about two examples here).

James Ntambi took a different approach – after receiving his Ph.D. he remained in the United States and now leads a lab at the University of Wisconsin, where he trains African scientists and teaches Americans what life is like in Uganda.

Bioethics expert R. Alta Charo is joining the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a senior adviser to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg. In an interview Wednesday, Hamburg said that Charo will be involved in many cutting-edge fields. “I expect that we will quickly make use of her as we think about strategies on how to address the review of products in the arena of personalized medicine, in-vitro diagnostics, stem-cell therapies, where she’s already done important work,” Hamburg said.

The Department of Energy has granted $8 million in federal stimulus money to the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center for plant cell wall imaging and sustainability research.

Half will be allocated to plant cell wall imaging and the other $4 million is for sustainability research.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin have developed an engine that runs on a mix of diesel and gasoline that produces fewer emissions and is as much as 20 per cent more fuel-efficient than conventional engines.

Led by mechanical engineering professor Rolf Reitz, a research team at the school presented their findings at a diesel engine conference in Detroit sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Every semester, “service learning” programs send students out to local community organizations to get their hands dirty, putting to use the concepts they learn in the classroom. The intended outcome is a symbiotic relationship between the college and the community. In The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning(Temple University Press), Randy Stoecker, professor of community and environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin, and Elizabeth Tryon, community partner specialist for the Human Issues Studies Program at Edgewood Collegeâ??s School of Integrative Studies, explore the relationship between college and community, asking whether the latter benefits as much as service-learning proponents say.

A forum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Friday is focusing on the risks and benefits of nuclear energy.

The Wisconsin Public Utility Institute daylong workshop will examine the potential of nuclear energy in the face of pressure to replace greenhouse gas-emitting fuels. It will address strategies that utilities can adopt to meet demands for energy but also not harm the environment.

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.
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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.