Category: Research

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is taking advantage of its location to create a geothermal heating and cooling system for the new Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.

Geothermal systems use the earth’s mass and stable temperature to produce or absorb heat.

Building project manager George Austin said the institutes’ location between two lakes makes it ideal for such a system because there’s water moving under ground that will conduct heat and cooling well.

Dartmouth College, the University of New Hampshire and University of Wisconsin have signed new agreements on polar research.

The agreements create two new entities regarding ice coring and drilling that are vital to polar research.

The first entity is the Ice Drilling Program Office at Dartmouth, with collaborations at UNH and UW. It will provide scientific leadership and oversight of ice coring and drilling funded by National Science Foundation.

The ground far below much of Madison is particularly efficient for creating geothermal heating and cooling, and the new Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery on the UW-Madison campus is taking advantage of that fact.

Drilling started Monday on 75 bore holes about 300 feet deep below the site of the huge research facility being constructed on the 1300 block of University Avenue.

U.S. researchers suggest brain scans may help predict how anxiety disorders patients react to drug therapy.

“Hopefully we’ll be able to use that eventually to determine what kind of treatment to provide to people,” lead author Jack Nitschke, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health said in a statement.

Recent stem cell headlines are all about how adult cells can be reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which was recently hailed as the biggest scientific breakthrough of 2008. All of this attention to iPS cells and hardly a word about embryonic stem (ES) cells, which raises a question:

In the largest study of its kind, researchers have shown that the risk of autism increases for firstborn children and children of older parents.

The risk of a firstborn with an autism spectrum disorder triples after a mother turns 35 and a father reaches 40.

Two researchers at the University of Wisconsin – Madison have published a study showing that America has a long history of (dare I say it?) multiculturalism. The researchers are Joseph Salmons, a German professor, and Miranda Wilkerson, a Ph.D. graduate in German.

Stem-cell research is entering a new phase: Research breakthroughs in Wisconsin and elsewhere have made it possible to send adult human cells back to their embryonic origins. Much work remains, but the prospect for clinical tests using this new pathway are drawing closer – and Wisconsin has the R&D team to be a leader. Stem cell research in Wisconsin has been privately financed, for the most part, but President-elect Obama may make it easier to obtain federal research dollars. Finally, the economic slowdown has enhanced Wisconsin’s position in an unexpected way. The California stem cell initiative, which is largely publicly financed, has hit on hard times. Wisconsin’s more cautious approach seems all the wiser now.

Engineers at UW-Madison are teaming up with the National Science Foundation and two other universities to support ice-core drilling in Antarctica. The research is used to study climate change.

The Ice Drilling Program Office will oversee polar research at Dartmouth College, the University of New Hampshire, and UW-Madison. Emeritus professor of Geophysics Charles

Bentley says the new group will establish an annually updated five-year plan, to help them be more responsive to what researchers will need in the future. (11th item.)

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?.

For nearly 15 years, UW scientists have worked with the pulp of a berry from West Africa, to create brazzein. Fariba Assadi-Porter, whoâ??s been on the project since 1996, says the substance has great commercial potential. She says it has sweet properties very close to sugar without an aftertaste effect found in other products. Assadi-Porter adds its properties also make it potentially ideal for baking and not just soft drinks. (16th item.)

Three key genes can turn a regular flu virus into a super killer like the strain that devastated the world 90 years ago and one that could come again, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers found in a study involving ferrets.

Three key genes can turn a regular flu virus into a super killer like the strain that devastated the world 90 years ago and one that could come again, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers found in a study involving ferrets.

The discovery by a team led by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka could help scientists better recognize new flu strains capable of causing a global epidemic, or pandemic, and develop drugs to ward off any kind of flu, the researchers said.

Researchers have found out what made the 1918 flu pandemic so deadly — a group of three genes that lets the virus invade the lungs and cause pneumonia.

They mixed samples of the 1918 influenza strain with modern seasonal flu viruses to find the three genes and said their study might help in the development of new flu drugs.

A US-Japanese research team announced it had isolated three genes that explain why the 1918 Spanish flu, believed to be the deadliest infectious disease in history, was so lethal.

The pandemic killed between 20 and 50 million people — more than in all of World War I, which ended in November 1918 — and spread around the world.

“Conventional flu viruses replicate mainly in the upper respiratory tract: the mouth, nose and throat,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka, who co-authored the study along with Masato Hatta, also of UW-Madison.

Gabriela Cezar, UW-Madison stem-cell researcher: How are the brains of people with autism different? UW-Madison stem-cell scientist Gabriela Cezar, whose goal for 2008 was to study tissue samples from 20 autistic patients, says the results have been “compelling.” She hopes to publish the findings in early 2009 and expand the study.

This year, scientists achieved a long-sought feat of cellular alchemy. They took skin cells from patients suffering from a variety of diseases and reprogrammed them into stem cells. The transformed cells grow and divide in the laboratory, giving researchers new tools to study the cellular processes that underlie the patients’ diseases. The achievement could also be an important step on a long path to treating diseases with a patient’s own cells

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.