Category: Research

Wisconsin is the focal point of stem cell science this week. But is the state falling behind? Madison is hosting the World Stem Cell Summit through Tuesday. Ed Fallone is president of the nonprofit group Wisconsin Stem Cell Now. “It’s a great opportunity for us to use the increased public interest in the topic . . . to get the information out to the public, so that people can learn more about stem cell research and participate in the debate in an informed manner,” says Fallone, referring to a primer on stem cell research in Wisconsin, produced by his group. It’s aimed at the general public and addresses questions on science, funding, ethics and advocacy

More than 800 people are expected to meet in Madison for the World Stem Cell Summit.

One attendee is turning a personal tragedy into advocacy for medical research and treatment.

Indy Car racer Sam Schmidt’s life changed forever when he suffered a crash 8 years ago. The accident left him paralyzed from his chest down.

Monsanto Co. has given $1 million to support doctorate-level graduate students in the plant-breeding and plant-genetics program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.

Scientists dispatched the Stardust science probe to get a look at material they thought had formed in the far outskirts of the solar system. Instead, they uncovered proof that the same type of particles forged near the sun ended up in a frozen comet’s body.

University of Wisconsin’s Noriko Kita and colleagues used a unique ion microscope to probe the tiny grains, the largest of which is about one-thousandth of an inch across. They found oxygen isotope ratios that closely resemble materials in asteroids, meteorites and even the sun itself.

(MADISON) Scientists have taken another step toward developing cost-effective ways to turn plants and other biomass sources into alternatives to fossil fuels.

One challenge has been to remove most of the oxygen atoms to form molecules that will burn. UW Madison chemical engineering professor James Dumesic says in the laboratory, he and some UW colleagues have found a way to make that happen, by passing sugars over catalysts â??consisting of nano-particules of precious metalâ?, in a process that helps remove oxygen atoms from sugar molecules. (Tenth item.)

A team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has developed a process that creates transportation fuel from plant material.

The alternative fuels developed by UW chemical and biological engineering professor James Dumesic and his team look a lot like the gasoline and diesel fuel used in vehicles today. That’s because the new fuels are identical at the molecular level to their petroleum-based counterparts. The only difference is where they come from.

Not, unsurprisingly, the web ads that are driving a lot of chatter.

In fact, the Wisconsin Advertising Project and TNS-CMAG report, Obama aired more negative spots than McCain.

“In the first week of advertising after the conventions, Obama aired a higher percentage of negative ads than did McCain. 56 percent of the McCain campaign ads were negative, while 77 percent of Obamaâ??s ads were negative,” according to the report.

Madison, Wis. – The entire ecosystem of the stem cell community will converge on Madison next week during the 2008 World Stem Cell Summit, where the unpredictable field of stem cell research will be celebrated.

Researchers, the biotech industry, pharmaceutical companies – even nonprofit organizations and grass roots citizens and patients – will be among the stakeholders and the roster of speakers and presenters. The event comes to Madison on the 10th anniversary of a key research breakthrough by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor James Thomson, who first isolated human embryonic stem cells.

Results of the Big Ten Battleground Poll, an innovative new project that tests voter sentiment in the eight Big Ten states that are key to this closely fought presidential campaign, will air this Thursday on the Big Ten Network.

The results of the unique regional poll — a partnership involving eight Big Ten universities — will be unveiled in a 90-minute show called “Big Ten Battleground: Campaign 2008” at 3 p.m. on the Big Ten Network.

A new manufacturing technique could overcome the technological limitations currently facing the microelectronics and data-storage industries, and pave the way for smaller electronic devices and higher-capacity hard drives.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies have developed a technology that combines lithography techniques traditionally used to print, or pattern, microelectronic circuits with self-assembling materials called block copolymers. These consist of two or more chemically different polymer segments, or blocks, connected by a junction point.

Johns Hopkins University again tops all U.S. colleges and universities for research expenditures, spending $1.55 billion in fiscal year 2007.

The National Science Foundation ranked the university first among 20 U.S. academic institutions, marking its 29th year in the No. 1 slot. The university spent nearly $1.49 billion on research in fiscal year 2006.

The University of California, San Francisco, with $843 million, and the University of Wisconsin, with $620 million, ranked behind Johns Hopkins University in research expenditures.

(MADISON) California has one of the largest amounts of public funding for stem cell research. A conservative think tank questions such funding in a report that highlights Wisconsin’s more modest financial support for such research.

Later this month, Madison will host the World Stem Cell Summit. States and nations with plenty of taxpayer funding for that purpose will be showcased along with states that don’t bankroll that type of science, instead leaving it to private companies to come up with the cash.

The role of Wisconsin taxpayers in funding stem cell research is small. This fact is lauded by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which noted UW Madison researcher James Thomson’s 1998 discovery of human embryonic stem cells was privately funded. The Institute notes embryonic stem cell research is speculative and politically controversial; therefore it says government should leave it to the private sector. (Third item.)

The strongest hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean have become more intense because of global warming over the past 25 years, says a new study in the current edition of the journal Nature. The findings add fuel to the simmering argument in the meteorological community about Earth’s changing climate and its relationship to the power of tropical systems worldwide.

Scientists from Florida State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison analyzed satellite data from nearly 2,000 tropical cyclones around the world from 1981 to 2006 and found that the strongest storms are getting stronger, especially over the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

Madison, Wis. – After 35 years of producing soy sauce and related products in Wisconsin, perhaps it was no surprise that Kikkoman Corp. would choose Madison’s University Research Park as the site for its new research and development lab.

No surprise, that is, until you think about the range of global choices available to Kikkoman.

Sangtae “Sang” Kim, a scientist from Purdue University with a background in the pharmaceutical industry, was named executive director of the Morgridge Institute for Research, the private part of a $150 million public-private research building under construction on the UW-Madison campus.

Kim, a professor of mechanical and chemical engineering at Purdue, will begin his duties as leader of the Morgridge Institute Oct. 1. The international search for a director took about a year-and-a-half to complete.

Sangtae Kim, who currently serves as a professor of both mechanical and chemical engineering at Purdue University, was named the executive director of the new Morgridge Institute for Research — the private half of the twin Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.

Kim, who served as the chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering at UW-Madison from 1995-97, will begin his duties as leader of the Morgridge Institute on Oct. 1.

Former UW-Madison professor Sangtae Kim will become executive director of the new Morgridge Institute for Research, the university announced Thursday.

Kim, who is currently a chemical and mechanical engineering professor at Purdue University, will assume his new role on Oct. 1.

MADISON, Wis. — It could open the doorway to a whole new world or at least a new understanding of it.

The world’s largest atom smasher is now up and running in Europe — thanks in large part to the ongoing work from University of Wisconsin scientists and engineers.

How does mass form? Are there other dimensions out there? Those are some of the big secrets UW staff and other scientists worldwide are hoping to unlock now that the world’s largest particle accelerator is up and running underground near Geneva, Switzerland.

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.