Category: Research

Don’t judge a book by its cover. Or a slurp of coffee by its cup.

Recent research might yield the latter advice, especially. A taste test showed that the feel of a cup can affect how tasty people find the beverage within it, especially those who have a “high need” for touch when it comes to assessing products.

A need-for-touch scale was developed by Joann Peck, a marketing professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. People with a high or low need for touch fall either above or below the midpoint on this continuous scale. When high need-for-touch people can’t touch products, they become frustrated and lose confidence in their judgments of products, Peck said.

An experiment which scientists say could change the way we see our universe is underway in Switzerland, and researchers right here in Wisconsin have a big part in the project!

Sridhara Dasu is an associate professor of physics at the UW Madison and says, “What this experiment does is to create conditions close to the time of the big bang.” The Large Hadron Collider fired up Wednesday morning in a 17 mile tunnel, 300 feet below Switzerland and France where protons will soon be made to collide near the speed of light. Dasu says, “It’s not that we’re doing something new on the surface of the Earth. The new thing is that we’re creating it in a laboratory conditions that can take a picture, but these events have been happening all the time in Earth.”

After nearly two decades of preparation, dozens of University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists and engineers are eagerly anticipating Wednesday’s scheduled startup of the Large Hadron Collider — billed as the largest physics experiment in history.

This $10 billion endeavor is a collaboration of thousands of scientists and engineers from around the globe, and is expected to eventually revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

“We are taking another step in the exploration of the world around us,” UW-Madison physics professor Wesley Smith, who is directly involved with the project, wrote in an e-mail to The Capital Times. “Since people first walked on Earth, each generation has learned more about the world and passed this knowledge on to the next. Each gain in understanding has resulted in substantial dividends in technology, many completely unpredictable except that they have always followed these gains in understanding.”

Officials and business leaders from both Wisconsin and Japan gathered Tuesday to celebrate the opening of an innovative new Kikkoman research facility in University Research Park.

Gov. Jim Doyle, Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin and University Research Park Director Mark Bugher joined Gov. Akiko Domoto of the Japanese prefecture of Chiba and Kikkoman Chairman and CEO Yuzaburo Mogi to unveil the Kikkoman Research and Development Laboratory.

A few years ago, Constance Steinkuehler — a game academic at the University of Wisconsin — was spending 12 hours a day playing Lineage, the online world game. She was, as she puts it, a “siege princess,” running 150-person raids on hellishly difficult bosses. Most of her guild members were teenage boys.

But they were pretty good at figuring out how to defeat the bosses. One day she found out why. A group of them were building Excel spreadsheets into which they’d dump all the information they’d gathered about how each boss behaved: What potions affected it, what attacks it would use, with what damage, and when. Then they’d develop a mathematical model to explain how the boss worked — and to predict how to beat it.

MADISON, Wis. — The Kikkoman Corp. made a major announcement about a research and development lab in Madison on Tuesday.

The company’s CEO, along with the Gov. Jim Doyle and University of Wisconsin Chancellor Biddy Martin, announced a research and development lab will be located on Madison’s west side in University Research Park.

Dozens of University of Wisconsin scientists will play a role as the world’s largest particle accelerator fires up today. You may have heard that the Large Hadron Collider located near Geneva, Switzerland could bring about the end of the world, as it smashes two beams of protons together at nearly the speed of light. “The concern apparently is creation of a mini black hole,” explains UW Madison mathematician Terry Millar, who calls such concerns “not worth losing sleep over.”

There was less to celebrate on Labor Day 2008 for the working people of the state. The cost of the usual Labor Day barbeque – the food (and gas to get it) – is going up, while wages are not. And that’s for the folks who have a job.

Wisconsin has lost 24,000 jobs since last summer. Manufacturing jobs – some of the highest paying – have taken the biggest hit. We’re in the first sustained period of decline in our median wage since the early 1980s.

These data come from the newly-released State of Working Wisconsin 2008 (find it at www.cows.org) compiled and published biennially by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, a policy institute housed on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The collective impression that the data leave is negative. And, bad as the news is now, it will probably get worse in the coming months. We are likely slipping into a new recession before we fully recovered from the last one.

Advanced Cell Technology, which is struggling to raise money to stay in business, is not the only company pursuing blood cells.

James A. Thomson of the University of Wisconsin, the first person to derive human embryonic stem cells, was a founder of Stem Cell Products, a company formed to pursue making blood products from stem cells. The company has since merged with another he helped found, Cellular Dynamics, which is working on making cells to be used in pharmaceutical research.

Watching what you eat really does help, at least if you do it through a camera lens. That’s the conclusion of a study of dieters’ eating habits comparing the effect of written food diaries with taking a snapshot of each meal.

Food diaries track food consumption during weight loss programmes, but now taking a snapshot of each meal is replacing the laborious task of writing down everything you eat. To see if photos might also prompt healthier eating, Lydia Zepeda and David Deal at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told 43 people to record what they ate for one week in words and as pictures.

Another study out this week in Nature Geoscience looks at the question from another angle, focusing on the long retreat of the vast ice sheet that 20,000 years ago covered much of North America during the last Ice Age. Led by Anders Carlson of the University of Wisconsin, a team combines geological records of the ice sheet with climate models of the most likely atmospheric heating to come in this century.

Attempting to lose weight at this time of year can be trying. With the days getting shorter and a marked change in the weather, most of us react as squirrels – instinctively, we want to bulk up for winter, stuff ourselves with carbs and settle down for a long snooze.

A new report says that the best way to curb your calorie intake is the so-called “flash diet”. The University of Wisconsin-Madison revealed last week that would-be weight-watchers who took pictures of their food before tucking in responded to the visual food diary by eating less; the thought of taking a picture of four scoops of Rocky Road ice-cream was a powerful disincentive to eat it.

The stereotype of remote and impatient stepfathers not wanting anything to do with their new wife’s children has been debunked, as a US study reveals stepfathers often make better parents than biological dads.

Stepfathers should be recognised as just as nurturing and caring as biological parents, says Stepfamilies Australia spokeswoman Dolla Merrillees.

Sociologist Lawrence Berger, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, surveyed more than 2000 mothers in at-risk families for his study. Published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, the study found stepfathers were more inclined than natural fathers to agree with the parenting philosophy of the mother, had higher levels of engagement with the children and were more co-operative parents.

Officials with the UW Arboretum are about to unveil an ambitious plan to stem the tide of more than a half-billion gallons of stormwater that every year floods the 1,260-acre property, washing away valuable restored prairies, spreading invasive plants and undoing a heritage that reaches back nearly 75 years.

Are tropical cyclones getting stronger? Three years ago, the massively destructive Hurricane Katrina suggested as much, and two studies pegged global warming as a possible culprit (Science, 16 September 2005, p. 1807). Now another study bolsters the case, finding that the most intense storms have indeed been getting stronger over the past 30 years as the waters that fuel them get warmer.

Just a whiff of an infant can quickly lower a father’s testosterone levels and inhibit the likelihood its father will try any monkey business â?? in marmosets, at least.

The study done by the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center at UW-Madison focused on the small monkeys native to South America and the hormone levels of marmoset fathers.

Men whose serum calcium levels fall within the high end of the normal range are three times more likely to develop fatal prostate cancer, a new report shows.

The results suggest the possibility of a new biomarker for aggressive prostate cancer, the researchers said. But one expert cautioned against reading too much into the study, given the relatively small number of individuals involved.

Gary Schwartz, of Wake Forest University Health Sciences in Winston-Salem, N.C., and Halcyon Skinner, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and NHANES Epidemiologic Follow-up Study to determine the risk of prostate cancer among men with relatively high, but still normal, blood serum calcium readings.

Madison, Wis. – The presence Google and Microsoft has focused more attention on Madison’s information technology status, and the former chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Computer Sciences Department believes Madison is likely to see more technology giants set up stakes here.

Guri Sohi, who is preparing for an academic-year sabbatical in Spain, said more computer professors might be looking for the challenge of driving research for prominent technology firms, but such companies may have to catch them at the right time.

How do you knock down the testosterone in men? Have a baby.

Researchers at UW-Madison have discovered that the scent of a newborn marmoset, a type of monkey, can alter the testosterone level in papa marmoset, making for a calmer, more relaxed dad, which can help in the parenting of the baby marmosets.

The discovery was announced Wednesday by the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center and is published in the Sept. 2 issue of the journal Biology Letters.

This little quarter mile of the Pecatonica River is wild. It smells like forever, and scrub brush crowds to the edge of the water.
But it’s not wild enough.
The Nature Conservancy, the Wisconsin Waterfowl Association, the state Department of Natural Resources and UW-Madison are partners in a project started last week to restore this bit of river about 30 miles west of Madison within the 50,000 acre Military Ridge Prairie Heritage Area in Dane and Iowa counties to its most natural state.

Though it rarely makes front-page news anymore, AIDS continues to be a scourge. While there are treatments for the disease, and researchers are continually working to develop new ones, some individuals can control the disease by themselves.AIDS

Known as elite controllers, these patients are the subject of intense investigation.

Teams of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are trying to understand how this works by studying the elite control process in rhesus monkeys.

PARIS (AFP) â?? Scientists Sunday said they could no longer rule out a fast-track melting of the Greenland icesheet — a prospect, once the preserve of doomsayers, that would see much of the world’s coastline drowned by rising seas.

Seeking help from the past, geologist Anders Carlson at the University of Wisconsin, led a team that delved into sediment left by the Laurentide Icesheet.

MADISON, Wis. — A new study from the University of Wisconsin think tank has bad news for Wisconsin families.

The study from UW Madison’s Center on Wisconsin Strategy said average Wisconsin families continue to get pummeled by national economic issues and local job losses.

After more than a decade of trying to harvest the promise of embryonic stem cells, scientists have hit on a fascinating new approach that sidesteps them entirely. By adding genes to targeted cells in the body, they have been able change the basic makeup of those cells, turning them into potential disease-curing cells.

A large number of U.S. children live or will live with a “social father,” a man who is married to or cohabiting with the child’s mother, but is not the biological father. A new study in the Journal of Marriage and Family examined differences in the parenting practices of four groups of fathers according to whether they were biologically related to a child and whether they were married to the child’s mother. Researchers found that married social fathers exhibited equivalent or higher quality parenting behaviors than married and cohabiting biological fathers.

Led by Lawrence M. Berger, PhD, MSW, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, participants were drawn from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal study of children born in 20 large U.S. cities in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Sample children were mostly born to unmarried parents and had been followed from birth to approximately age 5.

Let the bio-nano-info-tech contest begin.

UW-Madison on Wednesday launched a competition to select scientists for the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the public part of a $150 million public-private research building going up on the 1300 block of University Avenue.

Campus leaders have picked three research themes for the institute: biotechnology, nanotechnology and information technology.

You need not hold a Ph.D. in microbiology or a subscription to â??Natureâ? to have heard of Dr. James Thomson. He’s the â??fatherâ? of human embryonic stem cell research, internationally acclaimed for his work and arguably Wisconsin’s most famous living scientist.

But have you heard of Clive Svendsen, Timothy Kamp, Ian Duncan, Jon Odorico, Gabriella Cezar, or Alta Charo?

Let the bio-nano-info-tech contest begin.

UW-Madison on Wednesday launched a competition to select scientists for the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the public part of a $150 million public-private research building going up on the 1300 block of University Avenue.

Campus leaders have picked three research themes for the institute: biotechnology, nanotechnology and information technology.

Twenty-five years after it was established in 1983, the School of Veterinary Medicine is still the youngest school on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. And it is the second-youngest veterinary medical school in the nation.

But don’t let its youth fool you. Wisconsin’s veterinary medical school has accomplished a lot in a short amount of time.

More information technology companies could be joining Google and Microsoft in opening offices in Madison.

A number of professors in the University of Wisconsin-Madison computer science department are at the point in their careers where they’re interested in business ventures and industry collaborations, said Guri Sohi, a professor in the computer sciences and electrical and computer engineering departments and former chairman of the UW-Madison computer science department.

TOKYO (AFP) â?? Japanese scientists said Friday they had derived stem cells from wisdom teeth, opening another way to study deadly diseases without the ethical controversy of using embryos.

Researchers at the government-backed National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology said they created stem cells of the type found in human embryos using the removed wisdom teeth of a 10-year-old girl.

In a dark, damp corner of a University of Wisconsin-Madison laboratory, Jenny Boughman dropped a 3-inch, three-spined female fish into a fish tank, and waited.

She sat perfectly still as she watched a male fish swim out slowly from its nest, beneath a cracked flower pot.

At first, the male didnâ??t notice the female among the strips of floating green, plastic table cloth that Boughman had ripped up to mimic a seaweed-like plant.

Then he spotted her. He zigged left and zagged right â?? the fish equivalent of strutting his stuff.

Remember back in the old days when we used to fret about how girls weren’t doing as well in school as guys were, especially in math and science?

Gender gap? What gender gap? That’s the message in a new study by five professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, Berkeley. Comparing math test scores of 7 million students in 10 states from 2005 to last year, it found that girls and boys do equally well.

Madison, Wis. – Using three cells lines derived from a new reprogramming technique, the WiCell Research Institute is starting its own stem cell bank.

WiCell, a support organization for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is launching the bank to distribute cell lines beyond the 21 lines eligible for federal funding and distribution through the National Stem Cell Bank.

The WiCell Research Institute, affiliated with UW-Madison, announced Thursday that it has created the WiCell Bank to distribute stem cells such as those created from skin cells last year by campus researcher James Thomson.

Explaining the mysterious and sometimes perplexing differences between males and females would seem to be beyond even the province of as exacting a discipline as science.

I wonder whether UW System President Kevin Reilly and emeritus President Katharine Lyall actually believe that the UW is a “national leader in accountability”?

The WiCell Research Institute in Madison is starting its own stem cell bank to distribute cell lines beyond the 21 eligible by law for federal funding.

Could tracking dust storms over Africa help predict hurricanes in the U.S.? Amato Evan thinks so. The University of Wisconsin researcher and his team have connected the dry, windswept plains of the Sahara to the intensity of the Atlantic hurricane season.

The hurricanes that hit North America and the Caribbean are spawned in the warm surface waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Dust from North Africaâ??generated by storms blowing from east to west across the Saharaâ??flows across the West African coast and out over the North Atlantic, “robbing the ocean of the sunlight that helps it to maintain its temperature or to warm in the summer,” Evan explains. Higher dust density over the Atlantic means cooler sea surface temperaturesâ??and weaker storms.

What are your chances of contracting West Nile Virus? Pretty low, but that’s no reason to let your guard down. Wisconsin has had one human case of the mosquito-borne illness so far this year. UW-Madison entomology professor Susan Paskewitz notes there’s one particular species — Culex — which carries the disease.