Fifty years ago, Charles Bentley and five other young men chugged across the ice of Antarctica in three tracked vehicles, exploring the mysterious white continent.
In those days when frontiers existed on the planet, Bentley — a UW-Madison emeritus professor — and his comrades saw a mountain range ahead of them that had Rocky-Mountain-size peaks with no names.
David Pooley has been drawn to the mysteries of black holes and stars since he was a boy enthralled by science fiction.
But it is unlikely that the young Pooley, growing up in New Orleans, would have believed it if someone had told him that in 2008 he would be part of a team of astronomers that would for the first time witness the explosion of a star.
Q. Are there years when dandelions are more plentiful?
A. Mark Renz, UW-Extension weed scientist at UW-Madison’s department of agronomy, said varying environmental conditions ensure that virtually all plants, including dandelions, have some good years and some poor ones.
But he said dandelions seem perfectly suited to conditions in this area.
In another obesity-related study presented at the conference, Erica Roberson, a postgraduate researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reported that fecal incontinence and urinary incontinence are little talked about but real problems for patients both before and after bariatric surgery.
A new study headed by a University of Wisconsin researcher indicates that while most teenagers don’t label themselves solely by ethnicity, about 30-percent are labeled as such by their peers. Psychologist Brad Brown of says teens have always labeled themselves and their friends to get a grasp on their own identity. He says findings show that only about 15-percent of minority students said race defined what “crowd” they belonged to at school. Roughly 70-percent chose more social categories such as “jock”, “nerd”, “popular”, or “punk”.
After Madison West girls soccer coach Donal Kaehler has coached his final game of the 2008 season, the Regents’ coach will retire and move to Boise, Idaho this summer to be closer to his three grandchildren.
MADISON, Wis. — An increasing financial squeeze is prompting many researchers to spend more time searching for ways to fund their experiments and studies than in actual performing.
Officials said that this situation is essentially slowing the discovery of new developments.
“With us being so close to making major breakthroughs, to pull the plug on it, it’s just devastating. It’s very bad social policy, and it’s being pennywise, and a pound foolish,” said Bob Golden, dean and professor of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
The way architect Bob Sieger sees it, there are a half-dozen residents in the Vilas neighborhood who won’t be happy until the Badgers stop playing football entirely at Camp Randall Stadium.
Sieger has been trying for the past three years to redevelop his property at the corner of Regent and Monroe streets, right across from Wisconsin’s largest sports arena….
Climate skeptics, take 3
Turns out there are two lists of global climate change skeptics being circulated by the Heartland Institute, and both contain people who say their names were wrongly included. (See Business Beat from April 30, May 14.)
In fact, the UW has now written a letter to Chicago-based Heartland on behalf of five scientists who want their names removed, including John Kutzbach, the former head of the UW Center for Climate Research.
MIAMI (Reuters) – A new forecasting tool launched by a U.S. university on Tuesday will track clouds of African dust over the Atlantic Ocean as a possible indicator of the severity of a coming hurricane season.
The technique launched by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison may help weather watchers, energy and commodities traders and anyone else riveted by hurricane predictions to gauge what might be coming in cyclone-prone areas of the Atlantic and Caribbean.
Madison, Wis. – To the casual visitor and even some insiders, the University of Wisconsin-Madison doesn’t seem like an institution under pressure. Construction cranes rise above the 933-acre campus, where a combination of gleaming new buildings and refurbished landmarks leave the impression that all is well within sight of Bascom Hill.
Appearances can be deceiving. Behind the hustle and bustle that characterizes Wisconsin’s largest and oldest public university are signs of strain – not unlike those that also shadow other major research universities, but nonetheless troubling.
Thirty percent of teens are considered by peers to be part of ethnically oriented groups, as opposed to jocks, brains or nerds, U.S. researchers say.
Lead author Bradford Brown of the University of Wisconsin-Madison says ethnic crowds were linked to students doing poorly in school or with discrimination, but also linked to pride in one’s ethnic background.
Two University of Wisconsin scientists have been awarded the 2008 Shaw Scientist awards.
Baron Chanda, an assistant professor in the UW department of physiology, and Wei Xu, an assistant professor in the department of oncology, each received the $200,000 Shaw prize for their ongoing research.
Madison, Wis. – In an earlier column about the recent Stem Cell Symposium held on the Promega Campus, I extolled the exciting frontier of stem cell basic science that was on display; however, it was just as interesting to catch up with local stem cell researchers who attended the Symposium because I caught a glimpse of the current status of stem cell science in the Madison area.
For instance, I ran into Tim Kamp, an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine’s Department of Physiology. Kamp, who along with Professor Jamie Thomson, recently developed a reliable way to derive human heart cells from embryonic stem cells (ESCs).
A UW Madison researcher played a role in the this week’s decision by a federal agency, to list polar bears as a threatened species. UW Climatologist Eric DeWeaver used climate models to predict how global changes in coming decades will likely affect the Arctic, particularly with regard to summertime sea ice, a critical component of polar bear habitat.
How is the Iron Man suit made? We admire the result in the movie (still number one this week at the box office); the comic book version states that the Iron Man suit circuits were created using a process called biological circuit fabrication:
“Micro-Scale suit tiles fabricated by genetically engineered metal affinity bacteria which assemble themselves in specific orderly arrays, then expire, leaving behind various metallic deposits which form all the metal shapes and microscopic circuits.”
Now, a group of scientists led by Michael Sussman, director of University of Wisconsin, Madison’s Biotechnology Center, and oceanography professor Virginia Armbrust of the University of Washington, are seeing if diatoms will help make even smaller integrated circuit chips by a similar process of biological fabrication.
Instead of donning a white lab coat after today’s graduation ceremony for UW-Madison’s Master of Science in Biotechnology program, one student will be writing a business plan. Abdalla Saad hopes to start a company in Madison that would market a better drug delivery system.
The system would be
MADISON, Wis. — A leveling off in federal funding to major research universities like the University of Wisconsin-Madison has experts in the research field worried that a crisis is looming.
Privately and publicly funded research is a billion-dollar business in Madison, and it affects the area residents’ health and pocketbooks.
“I think this is a serious crisis for our country. It’s going to have an impact on long-term health of not only research but the health of the people in the country,” UW School of Medicine and Public Health Dean Robert Golden said.
Questions remain on ethanol. There has been an impact on food prices, even if that impact is less than the impact of the rise in oil prices. There is an argument that ethanol is not as efficient as gasoline. Ethanol production is not environmentally benign; in addition to other issues, a report co-authored by a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher predicts that the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico will grow, thanks to ethanol production’s impact on the Mississippi watershed.
Q. Does the amount of carbon dioxide in the air go up during the winter because trees lose their leaves and grass is covered by snow?
A. Seasonal changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide are well documented, says UW-Madison geography professor Jack Williams, with long-term records showing peaks every winter and troughs every summer.
The sun is constantly shining, the expanse of ice and snow stretching for miles in all directions is amazing — but the walk to work through minus 30 degree temperatures at an altitude of nearly 10,000 feet is no picnic.
In other words, it’s just another summer day at the South Pole.
For two Park Ridge natives, the icy, barren terrain of Antarctica doubled as home and office this past January during what is the Southern Hemisphere’s summer season.
Michelangelo D’Agostino, a physics Ph.D. student at the University of California at Berkeley, and Paul McGuire, an information technology specialist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, spent five weeks at the South Pole working on a scientific experiment called the IceCube Project. The project involves the construction of a telescope at the South Pole that will detect invisible subatomic particles from space called neutrinos. The data that is collected will be useful for astronomers in understanding more about the galaxy, D’Agostino said.
The countryâ??s biggest potential water problem â??is what we donâ??t knowâ? about water and climate change, the University of Arizonaâ??s Nobel Prize-winning climate scientist testified in Congress today.
â??We donâ??t know what lies underground . . . We donâ??t know how climate change will affect water resources,â? said Prof. Jonathan Overpeck, director of the University of Arizonaâ??s Institute for the Study of Planet Earth, in pushing hard for more federal support of research on the effects of climate change on water supplies and on possible solutions.
He testified as his own future at the UA remains unclear. He has been one of two finalists for the position of director of the larger Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin and Madison. He has been interviewed for the job and is weighing a decision on whether to stay or leave UA. His decision is expected this week, said his wife, Julia Cole, a UA associate professor of geosciences.
The U.S. Department of the Interior has listed the polar bear as a threatened species, the first major listing based largely on the effects of climate change.
The decision announced Wednesday by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne was based in large part on research by University of Wisconsin-Madison climatologist Eric DeWeaver.
DeWeaver used climate models to predict how global changes in coming decades will likely affect the Arctic, particularly with regard to summertime sea ice, a critical part of polar bear habitat.
But Reed Hopper, a principal attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, issued a statement following the Interior secretary’s announcement threatening a legal challenge to the government’s decision.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Adult women who were breast-fed as infants may have a lower risk of developing breast cancer than those who were not breast-fed, unless they were first-born, study findings suggest.
“As a general group, women who reported they had been breast-fed in infancy had a 17 percent decrease in breast cancer risk,” Hazel B. Nichols, who was involved in the study, told Reuters Health.
“However, we did not observe this reduction when we looked specifically among first-born women,” said Nichols, of the University of Wisconsin, in Madison.
Putting food back in the freezer after it thaws causes ice crystals to grow, imparting the unwelcome crunchy texture and mildew-like taste of freezer burn. Now food chemist Srinivasan Damodaran of the University of Wisconsinâ??Madison has derived an edible antifreeze from papaya enzymes and gelatin. His concoction, which stunts ice-crystal growth, promises always-creamy ice cream and juicier T-bones, even after their third trip between icebox and table.
Ethanol is to blame for some of the increase in the price of corn to $6 a bushel from $2 a bushel two years ago, according to a new study by University of Wisconsin agribusiness professor Randy Fortenberry and graduate student Hwanil Park.
The study looked at the rise in corn prices paid to farmers from September 2006 to December 2007. It found that 31 percent of the total price increase was related to ethanol production. The remainder was linked to a combination of other factors – increased demand for food from developing countries, the shrinking value of the dollar and commodities speculators.
Skin game: First James Thomson created a controversy; then he resolved it. In 1998, Thomson became the first scientist to isolate human stem cells, which can develop into any tissue in the body and thus have tremendous medical potential. Researchers are currently working to figure out how to “instruct” these cells to replace damaged tissues. But the science has been bogged down in controversy, because until recently the cells could be harvested only from embryos.
Last fall, Thomson, 49, announced that he had caused a human skin cell to revert to a stem cell that was virtually identical to those found in embryos. The achievement could open the floodgates of investment. How soon might this bear fruit? “In my lifetime,” Thomson says.
APPLETON â?? A February snowstorm prevented University of Wisconsin-Madison Waisman Center “brain investigator” Richard Davidson from opening Appleton Education Foundation’s speaker series on early brain development.
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Now Davidson, the scientific community’s equivalent of a “rock star” for his groundbreaking research, will wrap up the four-part “Brain to Five” series at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Appleton East High School.
A Wisconsin biotech firm is using home grown technology to produce flu vaccine faster and better. Paul Radspinner, president and CEO of Madison based FluGen, says flu vaccines today are manufactured in embryonated chicken eggs. “It can be time consuming, it can be messy, it’s ripe for contamination, there’s all kinds of issues than can and have arisen,” with that procedure, says Radspinner.
FluGen is built on technology, licensed through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and created UW Madison’s Yoshi Kawaoka and Gabrielle Neumann. “This . . . shows why Wisconsin is a hotbed for biotech right now,” says Radspinner.
Q. After such a tough winter and a rare January tornado, can we expect more thunderstorms and tornadoes than usual this spring and summer?
A. For better or worse, the past winter doesn’t offer many clues to the coming spring and summer, said UW-Madison atmospheric and oceanic sciences professor Jonathan Martin.
A California biotech company that had expressed frustration over Wisconsin’s stem-cell patents has signed a licensing agreement for stem-cell technologies with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
“We were able to work out our differences,” said Joydeep Goswami, vice president for stem cells and regenerative medicine at Invitrogen Corp. of Carlsbad, Calif.
Invitrogen, which announced the agreement Thursday, is one of the largest of 25 companies that have signed 30 licensing agreements for stem cells with WARF, said licensing manager Andy DeTienne.
When television news reports about traffic crashes, fires or other injury-causing events feature interviews with police officers and fire department officials, viewers are more than twice as likely to hear prevention information that could help them and their families, according to a U.S. study.
Researchers at the University of Michigan Health System, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Medical College of Wisconsin analyzed one month’s worth of late-evening TV newscasts from 122 stations in the nation’s top 50 television markets.
(UNDATED) Health and policy experts say Wisconsin could reduce over-consumption of alcohol by raising the liquor tax and making it less available.
Data on Wisconsinâ??s drinking habits show beer is the most popular choice and that availability of alcohol in general is high. Paul Moberg with the UW-Madisonâ??s Population Health Institute says on average, there is a liquor license for every 336 people in Wisconsin. Iron County has the most bars and liquor stores per capita and Waukesha County, the fewest.
The newest stem cell researchers on campus arenâ??t world-renowned. They havenâ??t spent the past decade trying to figure out how stem cells work. In fact, most of them havenâ??t even graduated from high school yet. But, thanks to UW-Madisonâ??s new Stem Cell Learning Lab, the most recent scientists to tinker with stem cells on campus are young science enthusiasts from across Wisconsin.
Women who stop smoking dramatically reduce their risk of heart disease and stroke by 20% within five years, and have a lung cancer risk similar to that of a non-smoker after 30 years, a new study shows.
The findings support previous research that removing tobacco from the body is beneficial to health.
Meanwhile, a U.S. panel headed by a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher is releasing updated guidelines today on the best way to quit.
In a new study, University of Wisconsin-Madison agricultural economist Randy Fortenberry says it’s clear that the increasing use of corn to produce fuel has played a role in rising corn prices – but he cautions that the magnitude of the increase has been overstated.
How to combat Wisconsin’s drinking problem is the topic of a Capitol forum on Tuesday. Wisconsin leads the nation in binge drinking, alcohol abuse and drunk driving. So, what to do? “There’s good evidence that alcohol taxes can reduce the use, particularly among young people,” says Paul Moberg with UW Madison’s Population Health Institute.
TIME magazine recognized UW-Madison biologist James Thomson as one of 2008â??s â??Worldâ??s Most Influential Peopleâ? in its May 12 issue, which hit stands Friday. The fifth annual TIME 100 lists Thomson, along with Shinya Yamanaka of Japanâ??s Kyoto University, for their separate yet similar discoveries in November 2007.
Construction officially began Friday on the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, the public-private partnership that will house much of UW-Madisonâ??s future interdisciplinary research.
Gov. Jim Doyle, members of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and UW-Madison Alumni John and Tashia Morgridge welcomed community members during a groundbreaking ceremony Friday at the building site on the 1300 block of University Avenue.
Corporate and public sector representatives broke ground Friday for the new Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery on University Avenue.
MADISON, Wis., May 1, 2008 (UPI via COMTEX) — Since scientists learned to make nanowires, the tiny wires have taken many forms, and now U.S. researchers have accidentally learned how to grow nanotrees.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Song Jin and graduate student Matthew Bierman accidentally made some pine tree shapes one day and, in doing so, opened a new chapter in nanotechnology.
The UW formally broke ground on the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
The key word is institutes-plural, because it’s made up of the public Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and the private Morgridge Institute for Research.
It’s hard to officially break ground on a project when most of the hole has already been excavated, but a who’s who of UW Madison was on hand Friday.
Built in the middle of campus, it will be the center of research in the fields of nanotechnology, biotechnology, engineering and information technology.
MADISON, Wis. — Gov. Jim Doyle broke ground Friday on a new multimillion dollar research complex in Madison.
The Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery is a $150 million public-private research complex that will help develop stem cell technology and other scientific research.
When it’s completed in 2010, the facility on the 1300 block of University Avenue will bring together the brightest researchers in the country.
State officials and major donors break ground on the new Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
The facility on the UW-Madison campus will focus on the fields of biotechnology, health sciences, and stem cell research. Governor Jim Doyle says it will help make Wisconsin a leader in those areas, which he expects to become vital to the US economy in the coming years. Doyle wants to capture 10-percent of those markets by the year 2015.
Bernie Siegel was a Miami lawyer in 2002 when a cult-like organization known as the Raellians claimed to have cloned a human baby.
Siegel filed a motion in a Broward County court on behalf of the “baby,” suspecting all along it didn’t exist, and helped to expose a dangerous hoax.
He soon founded the Genetics Policy Institute and became a global advocate for stem-cell research based on science versus science fiction.
Few people doubt that embryonic stem cells may offer extraordinary opportunities to treat or prevent disease, but few deny either that the politics surrounding the idea has often seemed as complex as the science. All that may have changed last year with the announcement that it was possible to give adult human cells many of the characteristics of embryonic stem cells, avoiding entirely the issue of whether embryos would be destroyed in the process. The new cells, known as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, are expected to live for a very long time while retaining the ability to form all of the different tissues found in a human body.
UW researcher and stem cell pioneer James Thomson has been named one of the 100 people in Time magazine’s “World’s Most Influential People” in this week’s issue.
Thomson falls in the Scientists and Thinkers category, and appears on the page with Shinya Yamanaka of Japan’s Kyoto University, who also is a leading-edge scientist on stem cell technology.
Thomson and Yamanaka each discovered it was “possible to give adult human cells many of the characteristics of embryonic stem cells, avoiding entirely the issue of whether embryos would be destroyed in the process,” according to the magazine report.
Tissue Regeneration Systems Inc., a medical device company developing bioactive implants for bone and soft tissue regeneration, on Thursday announced the close of a $2 million round of financing led by Madison-based Venture Investors and joined by the founders of TRS.
The company is a spin-out of the universities of Michigan and Wisconsin, where TRS’ core proprietary technologies were developed over the past decade, and from which TRS has an exclusive option to commercialize.
Retractable walls. No corridors. A restaurant for brain-storming.
Those are some of the quasi-futuristic features of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, the $150 million, public-private research complex. The official ground-breaking is today.
Q. How can you have a forecast with both snow showers and thunderstorms on the same day?
A. The weather conditions that lead to thunderstorms can occur any time of year. When updrafts draw warm, moist air a mile or more above the ground, the moisture condenses and falls as precipitation. Whether that precipitation falls as rain or snow depends on the air temperature nearer the surface.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chancellor Carlos Santiago’s plan to build a new engineering campus and research park drew one step closer Wednesday when the school named Michael R. Lovell dean of the engineering school.
Members from the National Academy of Sciences elected UW-Madison stem-cell researchers, WARF member and anatomy professor James Thomson into the society Tuesday.
STEVENS POINT — Randy Udall gave a presentation on energy consumption on the local University of Wisconsin campus here during Earth Week activities. It was billed as an upbeat look at the future, but the scenario he described was overwhelmingly depressing.
Were it not for the fact that about 150 college students showed up in an auditorium on a sunny spring day, the whole hour might have been too much darkness. Udall, a Coloradan and son of former U.S. Rep. Morris Udall, has given his life to the study of energy, which he believes is the real world currency.
Eric Apfelbach is happy to talk about the promise of using plant sugars to produce synthetic gasoline. But anyone wanting to take a tour of Virent Energy Systems, his Madison-based company, must first sign a confidentiality agreement pledging not to reveal any trade secrets.
The request is not necessarily unusual in the world of biotechnology, but rather reflects the fierce competition among companies working to find an alternative to carbon-based coal and oil that also avoids the downsides of corn-based ethanol.
….The search for a new biofuel is in its third iteration, says Timothy Donohue, a professor of bacteriology and the lead scientist at the UW-Madison-based Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center.
Madison, Wis. – If you Google the office addresses for Google, the world’s largest search engine, a listing for Madison, Wis., might soon pop up on your computer screen.
For the second time in a week, a major information technology company has planted a flag in Wisconsin, a state reputed for being a biotech preserve. It was formally announced April 23 that Microsoft had set up an advanced development lab in Madison. On Monday, word finally got out that Google has set up an engineering office, also in downtown Madison.
A pioneering UW-Madison stem cell scientist has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 1998, Dr. Jamie Thomson became the first scientist to isolate and culture human embryonic stem cells.
UW-Madison stem cell scientist James Thomson has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
The announcement of Thomson’s election was made Tuesday by the university.
Thomson is among 72 new fellows going into the 145-year-old academy this year, considered one of the most prestigious honors in American science.
New technology in Weeks Hall, home to UW-Madisonâ??s geology and geophysics department, allows students to see 3-D images of the earth.
Imagine a nutrient that could help prevent cancer, heart disease and tuberculosis, preserve bones, and thwart autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and juvenile diabetes.
Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?
But that’s the potential now being attributed to Vitamin D, whose usefulness was once thought to be limited to prevention of rickets in children and severe bone loss in adults. Known as the sunshine vitamin because it is produced when the skin is exposed to ultraviolet light, Vitamin D has been garnering increasing attention recently, because of what it may be able to do and because many people appear to be getting too little of it.
“There are a lot of benefits to Vitamin D that have surfaced in the last 20 years,” notes Hector DeLuca, a University of Wisconsin biochemist who has been a pioneer in Vitamin D research.
Madison, Wis. – With the stated goal of capturing 10 percent of the stem cell technology market by 2015, Gov. Jim Doyle used a 2006 visit to the Medical College of Wisconsin to announce an important executive order. It directed the state Department of Commerce to spend at least $5 million to recruit new stem cell companies to Wisconsin.
Q. Do perennial plants ever wear out? Why or why not?
A. “Perennials are flowering plants that come back year after year, but some come back year after year much longer than others,” said Eileen Nelson, an herbaceous plant specialist with UW-Madison and UW-Extension.
