Category: Research

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.

Michigan State University scientists have identified a protein required for photosynthesis that could ultimately lead to plants designed for biofuel production.

Professor Christoph Benning and other MSU researchers discovered the protein that is necessary for development of chloroplasts — the machinery of photosynthesis, which uses light and energy to convert carbon dioxide into carbohydrates for plant food and oxygen.

UW-Madison bacteriology professor Tim Donohue, director of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, is quoted.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, often mentioned as a potential running mate for Sen. John McCain, promoted McCain’s energy policy and critiqued his rival’s as he campaigned across Wisconsin on Monday.

Pawlenty said Democratic Sen. Barack Obama would “slam the door shut” on additional nuclear power and offshore drilling if elected president because of his conditional support for those options.

McCain’s plans to open more U.S. coastal waters to exploration for oil and gas and to add 45 nuclear power plants by 2030 would do more reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, he said.

“Sen. McCain’s proposal is bold, it’s aggressive, it’s an all of the above approach,” Pawlenty told reporters at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he toured a nuclear reactor used for research. “Sen. Obama has taken a very minimalist, or none of the above, or very few of the above approaches.”

Mentions that researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison looked at a random sample of 2,000 chat room posts about “World of Warcraft” to see what the players were discussing. The game is set in a fantasy world where players hunt, gather and battle to move their characters to higher levels. Players who work together succeed faster.

BOSTON (AP) — Parents, don’t put away those video games just yet – today’s gamer may be tomorrow’s top surgeon. Researchers who gathered in Boston for the American Psychological Association convention detailed a series of studies suggesting video games can be powerful learning tools – from increasing younger students’ problem-solving potential to improving the suturing skills of laparoscopic surgeons.

One study even looked at whether playing “World of Warcraft,” the world’s biggest multiplayer online game, can improve scientific thinking.

The conclusion? Certain types of video games can have benefits beyond the virtual thrills of blowing up demons.

When bacteria start talking, bad things happen.UW chemist

Many bacteria release chemical signals in search of their â??friends.â? When chemical levels remain low, the bacteria donâ??t make much mischief. But when the bugs congregate, chemicals build up, which alerts the microbes that there are enough of them to kick off an infection.

These collective infections can be especially severe and hard to treat. But Helen Blackwell, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of chemistry, thinks sheâ??s found a way to stop these bacterial social gatherings before they start.

http://www.channel3000.com/health/17205528/detail.html
MADISON, Wis. — Researchers at the University of Wisconsin may have found the answer to why aging men get prostate cancer, the most commonly found cancer in men.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 190,000 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer and roughly 29,000 die each year from it. Nearly one in six men will be diagnosed with the disease, making it the most common cancer detected in American men.

An iPod equipped with a tiny disk drive can hold up to 200 hours of video, or 40,000 songs.

In other words, not nearly enough.

The continuing effort to squeeze more digital material into ever smaller devices has taken a big step forward at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where researchers have helped develop a novel technique for making computer chips.

UW-Madison scientists are working on a way to make your cell phone and other high-tech devices even smaller and more powerful.

Theyâ??ve come up with a way to assemble microscopic patterns onto the chips used in the disk drives of those gadgets. Some experts say the technique has the potential to mass produce smaller drives at a reasonable price.