Neither Wisconsin’s economy nor its environment can thrive for long if the state continues to depend so overwhelmingly on nonrenewable, imported energy sources that contribute to climate change.
That warning should enlighten policymakers and voters as the debate accelerates over the recommendations from Gov. Doyle’s Global Warming Task Force.
When Doug Weibel spotted an $85 microscope at Toys â??Râ? Us, he immediately bought it and brought it home for his children. His children started magnifying everything they could get their hands on – wires, sponges, insects – capturing images and recording movies on a computer linked to the microscope.
It struck Weibel, however, that this was not only fun, but also educational.
Last December, Weibel, an assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, decided to start an outreach program called MicroExplorers to bring microscopes to classrooms and after-school activities.
UW-Madison has lost a key environmental researcher to the University of Minnesota.
If this was an isolated case, it would be one thing. But this has happened before. And it will happen again as long as salaries for UW campuses do not keep up with peer institutions.
And it will keep up as long as there is wrong-headed anti-university actions taken by legislators from both political parties.
New light has been cast on the selection process for a national, multi-million dollar biolab facility, which included Wisconsin. Documents obtained and reviewed by the Associated Press show that the favored site chosen for the lab ranked much lower than the Badger State and five others. Brian Bull reportsâ?¦(Audio.)
Farms cover nearly half the land in Wisconsin, creating an immense stress on the natural biodiversity of the stateâ??s landscape.
But farms can also drastically increase the diversity of plants, birds and beneficial insects by incorporating uncultivated land, University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists reported this week at the Ecological Society of Americaâ??s annual meeting in Milwaukee.
To keep troops from being stranded and easily ambushed on the battlefield, the Army is working with researchers to develop tires for their Humvees that can better withstand roadside attacks. One such design comes from Resilient Technologies, LLC, based in Wausau, Wis., and the University of Wisconsinâ??Madison’s Polymer Engineering Center. With a four-year, $18-million grant from the Pentagon, Resilient is working to create a “non-pneumatic tire” (NPT) technology, called that because it doesn’t require air.
Wisconsinites have a higher risk of death than people living in southern states because we get less Vitamin D due to our lower exposure to the sun, according to a new study.
Albert Einstein College in New York tracked 13,000 people in their 40â??s for about nine years. Those with the lowest Vitamin D levels had a 26 percent greater chance of dying early than those with the highest levels.
Itâ??s not unusual for Wisconsinites to have Vitamin D levels in the low range, especially when itâ??s not summer. Neil Binkley of UW-Madison says Vitamin D deficiency is an epidemic in many parts of the world, including ours.
When Aldo Leopold spoke on June 17, 1934, at the dedication of the UW Arboretum, he stood in the middle of two square miles of derelict farmland.
There was no rumble of traffic from the Beltline because the Beltline did not exist. To the south was nothing but more farmland. There were a few housing developments nearby but mostly the city and the Arboretum’s parent university were miles away across more fields and woodlots.
Q. How do maglev trains work?
A. Maglev is short for magnetic levitation, which means maglev trains hover centimeters above a guide rail under the force of powerful electromagnets.
“It’s almost like being on an airplane. You’re just floating above the track,” says Giri Venkataramanan, an electrical engineering professor at UW-Madison.
Farms cover nearly half the land in Wisconsin, creating an immense stress on the natural biodiversity of the stateâ??s landscape.
But farms can also drastically increase the diversity of plants, birds and beneficial insects by incorporating uncultivated land, University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists reported this week at the Ecological Society of Americaâ??s annual meeting in Milwaukee.
Wisconsinâ??s gray wolves may be thriving, but theyâ??re still steering clear of human-altered landscapes.
A new model presented last week by University of Wisconsin-Madison ecologists David Mladenoff and Sarah Pratt indicates that wolves are least successful at living where roads and farms are abundant.
The Homeland Security Department swept aside evaluations of government experts and named Mississippi – home to powerful U.S. lawmakers with sway over the agency – as a top location for a new $451 million, national laboratory to study some of the world’s most virulent biological threats, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press.
Mississippi’s lawmakers include the Democratic chairman of the department’s oversight committee in the House and the senior Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is expected to approve money to build the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility at one of five sites being considered. The two lawmakers said they were unaware of the Homeland Security evaluation system that scored the Mississippi site so low.
The disclosure is the latest example of what critics assert is the Bush administration’s politicizing of government decisions, such as efforts to steer science over global warming at the Environmental Protection Agency and hiring and firing practices at the Justice Department.
“It is very suspicious,” said Irwin Goldman of the University of Wisconsin, a leader of the unsuccessful effort to build the lab in Madison. His community’s offer was among nine sites rejected even though the government scored it more highly than Mississippi’s. “We wondered how everybody else did. It’s interesting to know that we came out ahead of one that was short-listed.”
Reading a book with “quantum mechanics” in the subtitle makes me feel smart. Especially smart. Possibly smarter than anyone around me. I noticed this unattractive effect while reading “The Black Hole War” on a long airline flight, when I caught myself sneering at the beach-book passenger in the next seat.
Deborah Blum is a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of “Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death.”
WASHINGTON — Stepfathers make slightly better parents than married biological fathers, researchers found in a new study of at-risk urban families.
Lawrence Berger, the study’s lead author, cautioned that the findings applied only to so-called fragile families, defined as low-income urban families prone to nonmarital births.
Berger is an assistant professor at the social work school of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Harvard scientists say they have created stems cells for 10 genetic disorders, which will allow researchers to watch the diseases develop in a lab dish.
This early step, using a new technique, could help speed up efforts to find treatments for some of the most confounding ailments, the scientists said.
Harvard scientists have reprogrammed the cells of patients with various genetic illnesses back to an embryonic state, creating a bank of cells that researchers can use to study and fight disease.
The 20 new cell lines span 10 different diseases and conditions, including Parkinsonâ??s and Down syndrome. They will offer scientists the chance to watch diseases progress in a laboratory dish and give researchers new targets for drugs
Harvard University scientists have made lines of stem cells, able to turn into any other cell in the body, from bits of skin or blood of 10 patients with genetic diseases including muscular dystrophy and juvenile diabetes.
The findings will help researchers decipher the workings of these diseases, enabling them to study what happens as cells that carry a condition’s genetic seeds develop and age. The lines will be made available for a “nominal fee” to researchers around the world, the Harvard scientists said.
According to a new UW-Madison study, the prions that cause mad cow disease are not destroyed by conventional sewage treatment and could end up contaminating water and fertilizer. This may be of interest to folks ’round here, given that the state Department of Natural Resources has for the past few months been dumping the carcasses of deer with chronic wasting disease (CWD) in the county’s Rodefeld landfill, from which leachate is pumped into the sewerage treatment plant.
But, it turns out, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about!
It has been a long road, but one goal of the UW-Madison Dairy Science Department is now reality. The newest addition to UW-Madisonâ??s dairy facilities dedicated to serving Wisconsinâ??s and the nationâ??s dairy producers, was officially dedicated last week on location in Arlington.
â??It has been a relatively long journey for our department and college,â? noted Ric Grummer, Dairy Science Department chairperson. But the department now has an elite facility for research to prove that it is the premier dairy science department and school in the country.
The new facility is located on Badger Lane outside of Arlington. It includes a parlor and two freestall barns that are all specially geared to foster research projects in an environment that closely resembles a typical dairy operation today.
A state that has experienced historic floods and the announcement of a major plant closing could use some good news. Perhaps it’s found in the steady growth of Wisconsin’s biotechnology industry.
After firebomb attacks last Saturday set the home of a neuroscientist at the University of California at Santa Cruz aflame and destroyed a car parked in the driveway of another university researcher’s home, scientists and academic leaders were shaken.
The attacks are believed to be the work of animal-rights protesters.
The state’s wolf population has grown to more than 500, expanding their habitat beyond a limited area of northern Wisconsin.
David Mladenhoff of UW-Madison’s forest ecology department has researched wolf habitat for more than 16 years.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison climatologist has found that increased year-to-year climate fluctuations are expected to have drastic effects on the worldâ??s ecosystems.
â??Climate variability reduces total vegetation cover,â? said Michael Notaro, an assistant scientist at the UW Center for Climatic Research. Notaro presented his findings Tuesday at the Ecological Society of Americaâ??s annual meeting in Milwaukee.
With more than 500 grey wolves now in Wisconsin, a researcher has looked into where they’re living and likely to live. Some of the animals may wander to central and southern Wisconsin, but David Mladenhoff of the UW Madisonâ??s Forest Ecology department says the wolves will continue to prefer the northern region. (2nd item.)
Milk was featured in a toast by some of the key players in the construction of the University of Wisconsin System Arlington Agricultural Research Station’s new dairy facilities. The toast was made July 30 during dedication festivities at the research station.
he emerald ash borer, an invasive insect that has destroyed millions of ash trees in Michigan and other states in the Upper Midwest, has been discovered for the first time in Wisconsin.
A team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been awarded an $8.9 million federal grant to investigate the fundamental power of embryonic stem cells and cells that have been reprogrammed to an embryonic state: their ability to become any cell in the human body.
The University of Wisconsin has been awarded a prestigious $8.9 million grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to continue its pioneering work with human embryonic stem cell research. An interdisciplinary team of researchers will use the grant to fund several projects aimed at exploring the unique ability of stem cells to transform themselves into all of the different types of cells that make up the human body.
The grant will also help efforts to build and refine techniques for growing large amounts of embryonic stem cells.
UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley and Mayor Dave Cieslewicz meet for lunch from time to time to keep each other informed about all that’s going on around town.
It was about a year ago during one of these get-togethers that Wiley talked about his hopes of developing an urban research park — targeting high-technology entrepreneurs — on East Washington Avenue.
“And I dropped my dessert fork,” Cieslewicz recalled Monday. “And I said, ‘Chancellor, if there is anything we can do to make that happen, we want to make that happen.’ ”
On Monday, University Research Park Director Mark Bugher announced plans to open a new urban campus in 6,000 square feet of space leased in the former Marquip Building at 1245 E. Washington Ave., which is just more than a mile from the Capitol Square.
MADISON — The University of Wisconsin Research Park is looking to expand, and officials are eyeing a historic property on Madison’s East Side.
The new urban research park would be housed inside the Marquip Building, a Madison landmark that has been vacant for more than five years.
“Some would say, ‘Why here in this location?'” said Mark Bugher, director of the research park. “First and foremost, it’s close to the UW campus, close to the (Madison Area Technical College) campus. It’s a vibrant edgy neighborhood.”
A team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison will use nearly $9 million in grant money to help fund a five year effort to discover the secrets of stem cells’ ability to morph into all of the cell types that make up the body.
It’s a big boost for a Madison neighborhood. Mayor Dave Cieslewicz couldn’t be more pleased, as the University Research Park announces a new urban campus just east of the city’s downtown. “This could be the spark, that really makes the East Rail Corridor take off,” says Mayor Dave.
MADISON (WKOW) — With the successful growth of the University Research Park on Madison’s West Side, the UW wants to expand into downtown.
They will renovate the former Marquip building on East Washington into a 6,000 square feet Urban Research Park.
MADISON â?? Most of the 115 businesses in the University Research Park on the Capital Cityâ??s west side are biotech companies that require wet labs for their ongoing experiments and product development.
But in the researchâ??s park urban expansion in the former Marquip Building at 1245 E. Washington Ave., the targets for the 10 new incubator suites in the former manufacturing site will be high-tech entrepreneurs working in the areas of information technology, engineering, medical devices and computer sciences.
The effort is starting out small, with a lease of 6,000-square feet. But it has the potential to â??explodeâ? within a few years as faculty members and students start their own businesses, said UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley.
It’s a big boost for a Madison neighborhood. Mayor Dave Cieslewicz couldn’t be more pleased, as the University Research Park announces a new urban campus just east of the city’s downtown. “This could be the spark, that really makes the East Rail Corridor take off,” says Mayor Dave.
The “urban research park,” announced Monday by Chancellor John Wiley and Research Park Director Mark Bugher, will make six thousand square feet of space will into ten incubator sites and two conference rooms ready for occupancy by early next year. Unlike the existing research park which is geared to faculty startups, this urban park will be aimed at attracting recent graduates.
Nearly one-quarter of the human stem cell lines approved for federal funding by the Bush administration may have serious ethical problems, according to a report by University of Wisconsin-Madison bioethicist Robert Streiffer.
For more than a century, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been the stateâ??s academic research powerhouse.
From embryonic stem cells to vitamin D-related technologies, anti-coagulant drugs like Coumadin and TomoTherapy, UW has churned out discoveries that have helped make the world a better place, created jobs and generated revenue for the state.
Ethan Brodsky packed up $50,000 worth of scientific equipment on the back of his snowmobile and headed out to the middle of a snowy white expanse on the Greenland ice sheet.
â??Wow, this is just like a real snowmobile,â? Brodsky thought to himself.
Once a few miles out, he peered back toward camp to see a thin line in the snow. He smiled, knowing that the trail behind him was his only impact on the landscape.
Brodskyâ??s snowmobile was a pollution-free electric vehicle built by engineering students from the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s Clean Snowmobile Team.
The University Research Park, a 260-acre suburban oasis for start-ups on Madison’s West Side, will be trying to attract young student and faculty entrepreneurs with an edgy new urban incubator in an abandoned industrial building on the near East Side.
The home of a molecular biologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a car parked in the driveway at the home of another of the university’s researchers were damaged by intentionally set fires early Saturday in separate incidents that the university said appeared to be “criminal acts of anti-science violence.”
Using coal at state-owned heating plants is not an option that should be considered as a fuel source, according to a directive issued Friday by Gov. Jim Doyle.
The directive to move away from coal is in line with recommendations made by the governor’s task force on global warming.
“The state should lead by example and move away from our dependence on coal at the state-owned heating plants in Madison,” Doyle said. “Global warming demands leadership, and as we plan for the future of the Madison heating facilities, we must chart a course that lowers greenhouse gas emissions and encourages new alternative energy sources.”
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Gov. Jim Doyle says the state should lead by example and move away from using coal at state-owned power plants in Madison.
Doyle said Friday the state must lower greenhouse gas emissions and encourage new alternative energy sources. The governor’s comments come after a global warming task force he created called for dramatically cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
A study released Friday looked at 13 options for the three existing state-owned heating plants in Madison. State and University of Wisconsin officials are examining the options to determine which are the best for heating and cooling buildings.
The study was part of a deal reached in a settlement last year in a lawsuit that uncovered pollution violations at a university power plant.
The Wisconsin Sleep Cohort is led by Terry Young of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
A new study conducted by a team of University of Wisconsin researchers shows that people suffering from severe sleep apnea have three times the risk of dying due to any cause compared to people without the disorder.
Sleep apnea is a condition with repeated episodes of breathing pauses during sleep despite an ongoing effort to breathe. Apnea often occurs when muscles in the back of throat relax, causing soft tissue to collapse and temporarily block the air passage.
The study, published in the Aug. 1 issue of Sleep, was led by Dr. Terry Young, professor of epidemiology at UW-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health.
NEW YORK – Life-saving surgery to prevent repeated severe bleeding from ruptured veins in the esophagus or upper stomach may not induce some patients with alcoholic liver disease to stop drinking alcohol, researchers report.
Such a surgical procedure may be necessary to reduce the pressure in the veins of the esophagus and upper stomach among patients with cirrhosis, a scarring of the liver frequently caused by alcohol abuse.
The study group consisted of 132 patients with cirrhosis, including 78 with alcoholic liver disease, lead author Dr. Michael R. Lucey, of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and colleagues report.
MADISON, Wis., Aug. 1 (UPI) — Married social fathers exhibited equal or better quality parenting behaviors than married and cohabiting biological fathers, a U.S. study found.
The study, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, found that married and cohabiting biological fathers displayed relatively similar quality parenting and the parenting practices of married social fathers were of higher quality than those of cohabiting social fathers.
Study leader Lawrence M. Berger of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said married social fathers were more engaged with children, took on more shared responsibility in parenting and were more trusted by mothers to take care of children.
People with the severe form of apnea, which interferes with sleep, are several times more likely to die from any cause than are folks without the disorder, researchers report in Friday’s edition of the journal Sleep.
In the new report, the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort followed 1,522 men and women, ages 30 to 60. The annual death rate was 2.85 per 1,000 people per year for people without sleep apnea.
People with mild and moderate apnea had death rates of 5.54 and 5.42 per 1,000, respectively, and people with severe apnea had a rate of 14.6, researchers said.
Cardiovascular mortality accounted for 26 percent of all deaths among people without apnea and 42 percent of the deaths among people with severe apnea, according to the researchers led by Terry Young of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Researchers are one step closer to reprogramming skin cells into tailor-made, healthy replacements for diseased cells.
Applying the technique first developed by James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, scientists at Harvard and Columbia universities reported online today in the journal Science that they had turned skin cells from two elderly patients with the neurodegenerative disorder amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) into motor neurons, the nerve cells that become damaged in ALS.
There has been plenty of excitement on the local biotechnology scene, with three local start-ups acquired in the past 13 months.
The most recent deal has the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche Holdings paying $125 million for Madison-based Mirus Corp. Established in 1995 based on the gene therapy work of UW-Madison scientists, Mirus has about 60 total employees here who are expected to keep their jobs.
Last June, Roche also purchased NimbleGen, a privately held Madison-based genomics company, for $272.5 million. NimbleGen has about 90 employees here. And earlier this summer, Boston-based Hologic Inc. announced a $580 million acquisition of Madison-based Third Wave Technologies that was just recently completed.
The deals have been widely cheered by the local biotech industry, and why not? It sure beats the drumbeat of job cuts and plant closings, the latest from Synergy Web Graphics in Mazomanie and Stoughton
ARLINGTON — Several hundred guests gathered at the UW-Madison Arlington Agricultural Research Station to get their first peek at the newly opened dairy barn and milking facility.
The $5.1 million dairy complex includes two freestall dairy barns, a Double 16 WestfaliaSurge milking parlor, a sand bedding recycling system and 350 dairy cows that are milked twice a day. Soon 450 cows will make their home there.
But the dedication ceremony Wednesday was about more than the technology and details incorporated into the modern dairy facility — there are many other barns similar to this one across the state. It was also about the unusual road taken to get the much-needed facility built.
Q. We keep hearing about alternative fuels. What will be the most likely fuel to replace gasoline?
A. Today, ethanol is a fuel additive used to replace or decrease the need for fossil fuels in trucks, automobiles and other engines. Most of this ethanol comes from the sugars within corn kernels, but the search for other sources of sugar is under way.
It sounds like a child’s fantasy: a school with lessons that flow in sugary hard candies, gooey gums, light-as-air marshmallows and rubbery gummy bears.
Yet for this week, the basement of Babcock Hall becomes Willy Wonka’s factory, an annual ritual in which UW-Madison hosts professionals who learn all about candy in a course confectionately called “candy camp.”
U.S. presidential candidates have spent some $50 million (25.2 million pounds) and aired more than 100,000 TV ads since the start of the general election campaign in early June, far outpacing the rate of the 2004 campaign, a report showed on Wednesday.
Democratic candidate Barack Obama spent $27 million between June 4 and July 26, while Republican candidate John McCain spent just over $21 million, the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project, which monitors political ad spending, said in its report.
MADISON, Wis. — The University of Wisconsin opened a new building meant to spur a major Wisconsin industry.
The facility is about 30 minutes north of Madison near Arlington. It’s a big step forward for dairy research.
Having a dairy facility on the UW agricultural research station is nothing new, but that was the problem. The facilities were built in the 1970s, leaving them out of date.
As of last week, more than 90 percent of the ads aired by Obama did not mention McCain, whereas one-third of McCain’s ads referred to Obama negatively, according to a study of political commercials by the Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin.
MADISON, Wis. — Nearly half the money spent recently on television advertising in the presidential race has been spent in Wisconsin and three other states in the Upper Midwest, according to a report issued Wednesday.
Spending in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin totaled nearly $26 million between June 3, when the primary season ended, and July 26, the Wisconsin Advertising Project found. Ads run in 17 other states totaled about the same amount.
The television campaign is already wearing thin on some voters.
The sign on the front door of the Copps Food Center on Aberg Avenue says it all: “Bug spray is located in Aisle 11.”
Gardeners, walkers, runners and golfers alike are being bugged this summer by swarms of irritating insects. Besides being bitten by mosquitoes, horse flies and black flies, city residents are also contending with an onslaught of Japanese beetles devouring their plants.
Quoted: UW-Madison entomologist Phil Pellitteri
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Nearly one-third of leukemia patients do not respond to chemotherapy, but this is not typically discovered until they have already endured a week-long course of chemotherapy and waited even longer to see if the chemotherapy worked.
A new study shows that positron emission tomography, known as PET scans, may tell doctors how well a leukemia patient is responding after just one day of chemotherapy.
“This has very profound implications for patients,” Dr. Matt Vanderhoek told Reuters Health. “Instead of making the patient go through a week of chemotherapy only to find out after the fact that their chemotherapy wasn’t successful, therapy could be modified and changed on the fly.”
The University of Wisconsin researcher will present the research Thursday at the 50th annual meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, underway in Houston, Texas.
The ethical quagmire surrounding human embryonic stem cell research is getting even stickier.
It seems that some of the cell lines sanctioned for use by the current US administration may have been obtained without proper consent from the women who provided the original embryos. The ethical storm could halt some federally funded stem cell research.
But Robert Streiffer, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has now obtained the original consent documents from the NIH using the federal Freedom of Information Act.
Powerhouse companies are focusing on the Madison area for acquisitions, and not just to steal away their Midwest technology and talent.
A string of local companies purchased over the past two years features buyers with big names, including Roche and Microsoft. (Numerous UW-Madison spinoff companies are cited.)
