Category: Research

Seven great ideas that germinated or came to full flower in the Badger State in 2008, including stem cell advances and the Wisconsin Genomics Initiative.

This video introduction to Science’s year-end special issue features Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, George Daley of Harvard University, and Science’s Gretchen Vogel reviewing some of the work that led studies in reprogramming cells to be tagged the top scientific story for 2008.

A new sweetener developed and patented by the UW-Madison is close to hitting the market, where it would compete with aspartame as well as regular sugar products. But some people are soured by its potential, and are accusing its makers of â??bio-piracyâ?. Brian Bull explainsâ?¦(Audio, tenth item.)

U.S. scientists have created the first human model for studying a devastating nerve disease, which allows them to watch how the disease develops and could help researchers find a way to treat it.

Using skin cells from a child with spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disease that attacks motor neurons in the spinal cord, researchers grew batches of nerve cells with the same genetic defects. The finding allowed scientists to watch the nerve cells die off.

A University of Wisconsin-Madison engineer has been honored with the country’s highest honor for scientists at the beginning of their research careers, the UW announced.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Associate Professor Zhenqiang Jack Ma was among 67 researchers honored with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers at a White House ceremony on Dec. 19.

Using a simple skin biopsy from a young boy with a deadly genetic illness, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have provided the first demonstration that reprogramming can offer researchers an unprecedented view of human disease.

The skin cells came from a boy with spinal muscular atrophy, or SMA, an illness that is similar to Lou Gehrig’s disease, but afflicts children. The disease kills motor neurons until muscles stop working. Children become immobile, dependent on respirators and feeding tubes, and eventually die. The boy, whose biopsy the scientists used, ultimately died of SMA at age 3.

U.S. scientists have created the first human model for studying a devastating nerve disease, which allows them to watch how the disease develops and could help researchers find a way to treat it.

Using skin cells from a child with spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disease that attacks motor neurons in the spinal cord, researchers grew batches of nerve cells with the same genetic defects. The finding allowed scientists to watch the nerve cells die off.

“Now we can start from the beginning of development and replay the disease process in the lab dish,” Clive Svendsen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said in a telephone interview.

A decade after he became the first person to isolate and grow human embryonic stem cells, University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist James Thomson was one of three stem cell researchers awarded the 2008 Massry Prize, an honor that has proved a frequent precursor to the Nobel Prize.

Since 1996 when the prize was established, eight of its 21 winners have gone on to receive the Nobel.

Climate change dogma posits that the invention of the steam engine and the advent of the coal-fueled industrial age marked the beginning of human influence on global climate. But a radical new climate theory contends that the Earth would currently be experiencing an ice-age if it weren’t for the fact that humans began planting crops and clearing forests thousands of years ago.

“This challenges the paradigm that things began changing with the Industrial Revolution,” says Stephen Vavrus, a climatologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Climatic Research. “If you think about even a small rate of increase over a long period of time, it becomes important.”

Global warming didn’t start with the industrial revolution, but began 5,000 to 8,000 years ago with large-scale agriculture in Asia and extensive deforestation in Europe, according to new research by University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists.

An international team of scientists is working under Antarctica’s snow-covered surface to build the world’s largest neutrino telescope.

The telescope — called “IceCube” — will occupy a cubic kilometer of Antarctica when it is completed in 2011, said University of Delaware Professor Thomas Gaisser, one of the project’s lead scientists.

“IceCube will provide new information about some of the most violent and far-away astrophysical events in the cosmos,” said Gaisser, who is managing the deployment of the telescope’s surface array of detectors, known as “Ice Top.”

Consider yourself lucky. It could be much, much colder outside — like ice age cold.

You think ethanol from corn kernels is environmentally friendly? How about gasoline made from cornstalks? Bioforming, a new catalytic technique for converting biomass materials into fuels and chemicals, resembles the alchemy used to turn garbage into energy in Back to the Future. But it actually seems to work.

Co-inventor Randy Cortright was a scientist at the University of Wisconsin when he developed the process in 2001; he left the following year to found Virent and commercialize his findings. Virent can already produce small amounts of fuel from stalks, and Cortright says the process would also work with anything from wheat straw to sugarcane stalks to switchgrass. Grass in; gas out.

US research may pave the way for a drug to cut the permanent damage caused by a heart attack.

The researchers from UW-madison and Cornell University found that blocking a specific protein in mice was enough to cut potentially crucial scarring significantly.

A surge of interest – and funding – is likely in 2009 for efforts to cut energy use, develop next-generation biofuels and expand renewable energy sources such as wind power, energy experts say.

But don’t look for a rapid acceleration of plans to build new nuclear reactors, the experts said in assessing President-elect Barack Obama’s choices to lead his administration’s energy policy.

Experts say energy policy is going to take a greener hue, and they say an economic stimulus package may have its own green tint now that Obama has named his key energy and environment policy advisers.

Junying Yu now assumed she had no chance. Her scientific rival in Japan, Shinya Yamanaka, had sent mature mouse cells back to their embryonic origin. All that remained was for the work to be published. Soon he would do the same with human cells.

In 2003, Yu and her supervisor, UW stem cell pioneer James Thomson, had set out to reprogram human cells, unaware that Yamanaka was chasing the same improbable goal. If they succeeded, the scientists would capture the power of human embryonic stem cells without the ethically contentious destruction of embryos.

In the summer of 2007, University of Wisconsin-Madison stem cell pioneer James Thomson and dozens of scientists around the globe raced to turn back the clock and send mature human cells back to their embryonic origin. At stake was a new kind of medicine that could bring hope to millions. This link takes you to the Journal Sentinel’s series on the state of cell science.

In a small office in Madison’s University Research Park, a three-person staff is running an innovative graduate program aimed at bolstering the state’s growing biotechnology sector.

The 5-year-old University of Wisconsin-Madison program says it turns out well-rounded biotech company leaders and tries to keep many of them in Wisconsin.

Advanced parental age, of both the mother and father, may boost the risk of autism in their children, according to new study.

“What we found was that actually it’s both parents age, and when you control for one parent’s age you still see the effect of the other parent’s age, and vice versa,” said Dr. Maureen Durkin of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison.

U.S. research at Cornell and UW-Madison may pave the way for a drug to cut the permanent damage caused by a heart attack.

The researchers found that blocking a specific protein in mice was enough to cut potentially crucial scarring significantly.

As the economic recession takes hold, public and private universities alike are facing budget cuts forced by state revenue shortfalls and declining endowment values. In response, chemistry departments are freezing hiring and trimming budgets for seminars and equipment; they also may have to reduce graduate student enrollment.

States have been hit hard by the recession, with some reporting revenue shortfalls of billions of dollars. The University of Wisconsin, Madison, could be looking at a cut of 10â??15% for 2009.

The budget cuts come on top of what has been a particularly difficult period for federal research funding, says UW Madison chemistry Chair Robert J. Hamers. He adds that the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which handles patent royalties and typically has funds available as a short-term safety net for faculty who lose funding, has also suffered from investment losses

University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers say they have started a groundbreaking study of financial aid involving nearly 6,000 Wisconsin college students.

The goal of the study is to learn more about how financial aid affects low-income students during college and beyond.

Those who have a brother or sister with a mental illness or a low IQ can be influenced by their illness, according to a new study, possibly putting them at higher risk for bouts of depression and other challenges during their lives.

Data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a 46-year report that includes 5,800 pairs of siblings, was used for the study, published in the December issue of the Journal of Family Psychology. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Georgia State University focused on 351 men and women who had at least one brother or sister with a low IQ (85 or below) or a mental illness that included a depressive or anxiety disorder. A group of 791 people who didnâ??t have a mentally disabled sibling acted as a control group.

Three studies published this week that assessed public views toward nanotechnologyâ??the study, manufacture and manipulation of the infinitesimally smallâ??show that people are generally in favor of the technology, but have some reservations based on religious and culture differences. Study participants also questioned whether those engaged in nanotechnology research could be trusted to control its use.

A team of scientists from the United States and Uruguay may have found a way to delay the onset of chronic neuron-killing diseases such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, according to one of the researchers.

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, scientists at the University of Wisconsin found that by increasing a protein called Nrf2 the lifespan of Lou Gehrig’s disease sufferers can be extended and onset of the disease delayed.

Scientists have discovered extraordinarily precise data on rainfall in the Mediterranean region from 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D. which suggests that the fall of the Roman and Byzantine empires may have been partly caused by climate change.

It is not likely to end the debate among historians, some of whom believe the fall was more of a transformation than a collapse, but it is a tantalizing bit of evidence. And the way it was collected is as intriguing as the fact that researchers can now analyze rainfall on a year-to-year basis, season to season, even many thousands of years ago.

For more than 15 years geology professor John Valley of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been studying stalactites from a cave near Jerusalem, along with scientists at the Geological Survey of Israel and Hebrew University. His Israeli colleagues have dated some of the stalactites to about 185,000 years ago, and they have reconstructed broad climate fluctuations over many years because the formation of the calcite deposits depends partly on rainfall.

It’s 40 degrees F below zero (with the wind chill) at the South Pole today. Yet a research team from the University of Delaware is taking it all in stride.

The physicists, engineers and technicians from the University of Delaware’s Bartol Research Institute are part of an international team working to build the world’s largest neutrino telescope in the Antarctic ice, far beneath the continent’s snow-covered surface.

Dubbed â??IceCube,â? the telescope will occupy a cubic kilometer of Antarctica when it is completed in 2011, opening super-sensitive new eyes into the heavens.

Direct climate data from the past is not readily available. We cannot measure the humidity on June 14th, 267 AD; in order to get around this, a variety of indirect techniques are used.

Religious beliefs are important to public support of nanotechnology, as well. Dietram Scheufele from the University of Wisconsin-Madison led a research team that found a correlation between the strength of religious beliefs and the acceptance of nanotechnology across Western nations.

As Wisconsin observed the 10-year anniversary of James Thomson’s embryonic stem (ES) cell discovery, some wonder whether the ensuing controversy over the destruction of human embryos has been worthwhile. In those 10 years, no therapies have come from the discovery, so were opponents correct that this research was not only unethical, but also irrelevant?

For the past four years, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a primate sanctuary for retired research monkeys has been trying to raise awareness and money for its cause.

On Sunday, Primates Incorporated held a pancake breakfast at the Wil-Mar Neighborhood Center on Jenifer Street. Complete with vegan pancakes and tofu scramblers, and with entertainment provided by the Trinity Irish Dancers, those in attendance were asked to donate to the cause. Amy Kerwin, the group’s board president, said events like Sunday’s breakfast are held more to keep the community engaged and aware of the group’s cause, not necessarily to raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary to build a primate sanctuary.

Attitudes to nanotechnology may be determined by religious and cultural beliefs, suggest researchers writing in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Professor Dietram Scheufele from the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin, who led the research, said religious belief exerted a strong influence on how people viewed nanotechnology.

Geologists say a discovery in a cave near Jerusalem suggests climate change may have caused the fall of the Roman and Byzantine Empires.

Geochemical analysis of a stalagmite from Soreq Cave in the Stalactite Cave Nature Reserve reveals increasingly dry weather from A.D. 100 to A.D. 700 that coincided with the fall of both Roman and Byzantine rule in the region, the University of Wisconsin-Madison said Friday.

A scientific team led by UW-Madison researchers says that the decline of the Roman and Byzantine empires in the Eastern Mediterranean more than 1,400 years ago may have been driven by extreme climate change.

Based on chemical information in calcite from a cave near Jerusalem, the American and Israeli geologists pieced together a detailed record of the area’s climate from about 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D.

With President-elect Obama poised to lift the ban on federal funding for new embryonic stem cell research… Wisconsin scientists could be among those to benefit. But Jamie Thompson — the U-W Madison researcher who pioneered the field — says the immediate gains could be limited at first.

President Bush signed an executive order back in August of 2001 banning federal funding from being used on researching embryonic stem cell lines created after that date. Federal funding was still provided for stem cell lines created before the ban. (Second item.)