Category: Research

Cat food could be the unlikely inspiration for important insights into multiple sclerosis and other afflictions of the central nervous system, scientists say.

While looking into why pregnant cats on a special diet of irradiated food began to have problems with movement, including paralysis and vision, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers found that the felines’ nerve fibers had lost the fatty myelin insulation that helps signals pass along these axons.

Whatâ??s the difference between setting fire to a balloon filled with helium and one filled with hydrogen? (One produces a fiery explosion).

How does it feel to hold a cockroach? (â??A little tickle-y,â? according to 9-year-old Alexandra Hei).

What happens when you freeze a racquetball in liquid nitrogen and throw it against a wall? (It shatters).

At 10 a.m. on a frigid January, the lights automatically flicker on in a rat room at the University of Wisconsinâ??Madison’s Research Park. Postdoc Erin Hanlon strolls in, still wearing her scarf from the trip to the lab, where she will spend the next hour or so with Telito, a rat. Telito’s cage is tucked away in a television cabinetâ??like enclosure.

Immigrants bring many things to the U.S., but their lasting contribution to the country has always been their children. NPR’s series Immigrants’ Children looks at that legacy, telling the stories of those children and examining the issues they face.

QUoted: “In 1910,” says Joseph Salmons, a linguist at the University of Wisconsin, “a quarter of the population told the census taker they spoke only German and didn’t speak English â?? a quarter of the population.”

That fact stunned Salmons. When he set out to study the area’s census, church and court records, he had no idea the language had thrived for so long. The year 1910 was already a full generation after the mass migration had dropped off, yet Salmons discovered not only that many in Hustisford and other farm towns were still bilingual, but that a sizeable portion was monolingual.

A UW-Madison discovery that could someday help people with multiple sclerosis came from an unlikely source: pregnant cats.

When Harlan Laboratories in Madison gave irradiated food to cats to study their growth and development, some of the cats who were currently or recently pregnant developed movement disorders, vision loss and paralysis, said Ian Duncan, a neuroscientist on campus.

It may be prickly on the outside, but the sea urchinâ??s spines hide â?? well, if not a heart of gold, at least teeth of calcite.

The urchinâ??s five teeth are very strong and capable of grinding limestone, creating depressions in the rock that the sea urchin can settle in. Since limestone also consists of calcite (a form of calcium carbonate), how can the teeth grind the rock without being ground down, too?

The teeth consist of calcite crystals (including a small amount of magnesium) in the shapes of needles and plates, and a polycrystalline calcite matrix that contains a higher concentration of magnesium. Yurong Ma, Lia Addadi and Steve Weiner of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, with Pupa Gilbert of the University of Wisconsin and other colleagues, show that the magnesium levels increase toward the tip, contributing to the hardness, and that all the elements are aligned in what they call polycrystalline blocks.

Having mastered the ability to roll back a cell’s clock to its embryonic origin, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison cleared a major technical hurdle this week, raising hopes that the technique could usher in a new kind of medicine that exploits the body’s own repair system.

I’ve always been fascinated with words, even have a few favorites that I think create an image as they are uttered. “Moonlight” may mean taking a second job, not an unusual occurrence these days. But to me, it has always conjured up that time of night when all is still and not even the neighbor’s dogs dare to break the silence.

“Bittersweet” is another word that immediately brings to mind that something is both a boon and a bane. Love can be bittersweet and so can victory. But there is no mistaking that if something is termed bittersweet, it is a universal concept that everyone understands.

My love of words extends to familiar sayings and wondering about their origins. That’s one reason I’m pert near in a swivet that the Dictionary of American Regional English is almost complete.

A decline in sun-dimming airborne dust has caused a fast warming of the tropical North Atlantic in recent decades, according to a study that might help predict hurricanes on the other side of the ocean.

About 70 percent of the warming of the Atlantic since the early 1980s was caused by less dust, blown from Saharan sandstorms or caused by volcanic eruptions, U.S.-based scientists wrote in the journal Science.

A decrease in airborne dust and volcanic emissions has contributed to warming the North Atlantic Ocean in the past three decades, a study showed.

About 70 percent of the Atlantic’s warming since 1980, at an average per-decade rate of a half-degree Fahrenheit (a quarter-degree Celsius), was due to less dust blown from African dust storms or to volcanic eruptions, scientists wrote in the journal Science.

“Volcanoes and dust storms are really important if you want to understand (climatic) changes over long periods of time,” said the study’s lead author Amato Evan, a researcher with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Under Milwaukeeâ??s Parental Choice Program, abbreviated MPCP, thousands of low income families can use taxpayer money to send their children to private and even religious schools. The money is subtracted from the budget of the Milwaukee Public School system. Proponents want parents to have a choice as to where their children are educated, believing student achievement will follow.

John Witte of UW-Madison is one of the researchers examining the programâ??s impact. He delivered the bottom line.

On a bone-chilling night in late January, a capacity crowd of roughly 400 people packed the main auditorium at First Unitarian Society on Madisonâ??s west side.

The man everyone came to see was selected by Time magazine in 2006 as one of the worldâ??s 100 most influential people. Heâ??s in regular contact with the Dalai Lama. His work has made him a veritable rock star in the world of neuroscience.

Yet UW-Madison researcher Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D., known simply as “Richie” to friends and colleagues, seemed to genuinely enjoy taking questions from the public just as much as he might from scientific colleagues.

The UW-Madison scientists who created a new kind of stem cells two years ago have removed a major obstacle to using the cells to develop treatments: genetic mutations that could cause cancer.

To make the cells â?? called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells â?? scientists put key genes into skin cells to reprogram the cells back to their embryonic states.

A study shows few performance differences between voucher students and those in Milwaukee Public Schools. UW-Madison’s Dr. John Witte says the study shows no significant differences between students in Milwaukee Choice schools and Milwaukee Public Schools.

Joshua M. Hare, a cardiac specialist at the University of Miami, certainly counts himself among the many stem-cell researchers who are eager and excited by President Obama’s expansion of federal support for studies using cells from human embryos.

He’s just not sure that embryos will actually work any better than the more common and less controversial source of stem cells that he’s already using.

Although Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos is talking up the idea of converting almost the entire public school system to a year-round schedule, a new study of MPS schools finds mixed evidence, at best, that it increases academic success.

The study, conducted by Bradley R. Carl, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher, finds little difference in the annual improvement between students on year-round schedules and those on the traditional September to June calendar.

After 120 years, the end is finally near.

“There is nothing like it anywhere else,” said Joan Houston Hall.

In 1889, the American Dialect Society began to write the Dictionary of American Regional English. For 80 years, the project moved along without much direction. Until UW Madison professor Frederick Cassidy took it over.

Cassidy created questionnaires and sent them out to 1002 communities all around America asking questions to discover regional dialects. For example, if you were playing hopscotch in Missouri what would you be doing? You’d be playing ‘hop-skit’. In New York you would run outside to play ‘potsy’. And in Indiana you’d be playing ‘hippity-hop’.

As university research projects go, compiling the Dictionary of American Regional English was a challenging and sometimes hazardous one: It took more than four decades, and thousands of interviews, conducted by researchers who were sometimes chased out of rural communities by suspicious locals.

Finally, though, their monumental effort to chart the idiosyncrasies of regional speech in the US is, as they might say in the south, fixin’ to be done.

The final volume, covering the letters S to Z – and revealing, at long last, the meaning of the Maine word “whiffle-minded” (vacillating) – has received a government grant that should see it being published by the end of next year, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who have been working on the dictionary since 1965.

Interviewed: Tracy Perkins is the Administrative Director for the University of Wisconsin Eye Research Institute in Madison. The UW Eye Research Institute brings together researchers from seemingly divergent disciplines to look for answers to eye-specific diseases and conditions. She tells us how the multi-disciplinary approach works.

Andrea Mason is an assistant professor in the department of kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Her research into sensory feedback is part of the work being done at the UW Eye Research Institute. Mason explains how her research relates to the study of vision. (Audio.)

Teeth from exhumed skeletons of crew members Christopher Columbus left on the island of Hispaniola more than 500 years ago reveal the presence of at least one African in the New World as a contemporary of the explorer, it was announced.

A team of researchers is extracting the chemical details of life history from the remains found in shallow graves at the site of La Isabela, the first European town in America, said T. Douglas Price, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of anthropology and leader of the team conducting an analysis of the tooth enamel of three individuals from a larger group excavated almost 20 years ago there.

Noted: A recent study debunks the idea that our immigrant ancestors quickly learned English and the American ways. Researchers Joseph Salmons, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Miranda Wilkerson, now an assistant visiting professor at Western Illinois University, discovered that many immigrants ignored English and relied solely on German schools, churches and business for decades and two or three generations.

“After 50 or more years of living in the United States, many speakers in some communities remained monolingual (in German),” the authors wrote. In one town, the Irish immigrants new to America learned German to fit in.

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 UW-Madison scientist whose recent work has discovered a potential upside to the notorious bugs.

There are no signs that point to the 10,000-year-old mastodon skull; no guided tours that take you past the giant sea turtle skeleton.

The specimens sit behind closed doors on the top floor of a nondescript UW-Madison building, locked in rooms next to mountain lion skins, tapir skeletons and the preserved carcasses of extinct passenger pigeons.

Hardly anyone knows about the zoological museum on the fourth floor of Noland Hall, and thatâ??s the problem.

If you don’t know a stone toter from Adam’s off ox, or aren’t sure what a grinder shop sells, the Dictionary of American Regional English is for you.

The collection of regional words and phrases is beloved by linguists and authors and used as a reference in professions as diverse as acting and police work. And now, after five decades of wide-ranging research that sometimes got word-gatherers run out of suspicious small towns, the job is almost finished.

Joshua M. Hare, a cardiac specialist at the University of Miami, certainly counts himself among the many stem-cell researchers who are eager and excited by President Obama’s expansion of federal support for studies using cells from human embryos.

He’s just not sure that embryos will actually work any better than the more common and less controversial source of stem cells that he’s already using.

From their graves on the swampy coast of the Dominican Republic, the skeletons of men who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to the New World are giving up secrets to researchers from UW-Madison and the Autonomous University of the Yucatan.

T. Douglas Price, a UW-Madison anthropologist, and James Burton, who manages the Laboratory for Archaeological Chemistry, are using techniques they created and perfected to learn more about the crew members, including where they came from, what they ate and possibly even their long-lost identities.

Noted: That would be another step on the way to growing new livers for people. With colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Bhatia is trying to coax hepatocytes from so-called induced pluripotent stem cells–adult cells that can be reprogrammed into stem cells. Meanwhile, she’s working on a three-dimensional structure to hold and grow the nascent liver and trying to figure out how to attract blood vessels to it.

For all the past week’s headlines about embryonic stem cells’ medical promise there is a sobering reality: The science to prove that promise will take years, probably too long for many of today’s seriously ill.

On his desk at Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard stem cell researcher Dr. George Daley keeps a file about 3 inches thick of e-mails and letters from patients and families who hope his work could help them. They are both inspiration and caution.

As governments get ready to spend federal stimulus dollars, a scientific panel recommends planning ahead for a warmer and wetter climate.

Most climate scientists predict that global temperatures will continue to go up, and that in some locations, including parts of Wisconsin, there will be more rainfall and flooding problems. A panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences and other agencies recommends that government and civic leaders pay attention to the climate forecasts. Panel member Jonathan Patz, a professor of environmental studies at the UW-Madison, says for example, sewage treatment plants may need to be bigger. He says if changes arenâ??t made, more contaminants could get into surface water. (Fifth item.)

Jon Blais and Jeff Kaufman are two men who refused to fade away and die quietly.

Blais inspired an army of athletes by finishing the 2005 Ironman Hawaii in a heroic effort, the only athlete diagnosed with ALS to complete the grueling endurance race.

Kaufman has survived with the fatal disease for 20 years, breathing with a ventilator and utilizing his still-sharp mind to coordinate a gala that generates more than $250,000 annually to support research being done at the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is certain to set off a scramble among scientists throughout the country – including those at the state’s two medical schools and other universities – with promising projects in need of funding.

The emergency spending bill includes $8.2 billion for research and $1.8 billion for construction projects and equipment.

That could mean tens of millions of dollars for the Medical College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health.

President Obama yesterday signed an executive order to once again permit the use of federal taxpayer money to fund research on *new* embryonic stem cell lines. Opposed to that move is the group “Wisconsin Right to Life”, Executive Director Barbara Lyons joined WPRâ??s Terry Bell for moreâ?¦(8th item, audio.)

We welcome President Obamaâ??s decision to lift the Bush administrationâ??s restrictions on federal financing for embryonic stem cell research. His move ends a long, bleak period in which the moral objections of religious conservatives were allowed to constrain the progress of a medically important science.

President Barack Obama is ending former President George W. Bush’s limits on using federal dollars for embryonic stem cell research, a move that could bring Wisconsin even more into the forefront in the area.

Obama was to sign an executive order on stem cells and memo on science Monday in an East Room ceremony.