Category: Research

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.

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.

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.

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.

Weighing in at a maximum of about 20 pounds, with black circles rimming its eyes and fur encircling its face, the northern muriqui of the thick forests of southeastern Brazil is one of the world’s most endangered species.

And since 1982, Karen Strier, a University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist, has been working with colleagues in Brazil to preserve this, the largest of primates found in the New World.

Two UW-Madison engineers are working with industrial and government partners on the development of a microgrid power system at the fifth-largest incarceration facility in the country.

Thomas Jahns, the Grainger professor of power electronics, and Robert Lasseter, professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering, are involved in the $14 million project at the Santa Rita Jail in Alameda County, California, to allow the jail to be powered almost immediately from its own backup energy sources in case of a utility grid disturbance in the utility grid.

Lasseter developed the microgrid concept, which could be used in other facilities to allow for seamless switching from the power grid to backup systems and back again.

Madison, Wis. – Microsoft’s Bill Gates must have been very impressed with Madison and the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a 2005 visit here.

In the interim, not only has the Seattle-based software giant acquired a local company, Jellyfish.com, it now plans to open an advanced computer lab in downtown Madison to take advantage of the database expertise at UW-Madison.

Eric Sandgren, Director of the UW Animal Care and Use Program, responds to accusations that their labs torture animals. He notes all labs and records are subject to federal oversight.

“Everyone of our facilities are inspected once at least once a year by veterinary medical officers from the United States Department of Agriculture.”

The Ohio-based Stop Animal Exploitation Now has alleged primates at UW Primate Research Center suffer pain because of bolts being implanted in their skulls. Sandgren says all procedures are only done if necessary.

Computer giant Microsoft is setting up a new, advanced development lab at the UW Madison. University officials say it will greatly benefit the school, and attract prospective, talented computer students to the campus. Brian Bull reports. (Audio.)

Stop Animal Exploitation Now believes primates at UW-Madison are being tortured unnecessarily. Michael Budkie, Executive Director of SAEN, says that includes water deprivation for as much as 16 hours a day, 5 days a week.

“Various devices including restraining bars and recording cylinders are literally bolted to their skulls.”

Budkie claims from 2002-06, both UW-Madison and a private lab experimented on nearly 24,000 primates. The USDA claims not one of these tens of thousands of primates experienced any pain or distress, according to Budkie.

Aiming to tap into the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s database research talent, Microsoft Corp. will announce this morning it is opening an advanced development lab in downtown Madison.

The Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab will be run by David DeWitt, a world leader in database research and former chairman and recently retired professor in the university’s computer science department.

The reasons not to believe in extra-terrestrial life are steadily dwindling.

That is the view of US astronomer Professor Eric Wilcots, who is one of the speakers at SciFest Africa 2008, the annual event which began in Grahamstown on Wednesday last week.

Wilcots chairs the astronomy department at the University of Wisconsin, a key member of the international team behind the Southern African Large Telescope (Salt) in Sutherland, in the Northern Cape Karoo.

The argument over embryonic stem cell research has produced some strange bedfellows, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of law and bioethics said Tuesday at a panel discussion in Wausau.

Some within the feminist movement have made common cause with the pro-life movement, said R. Alta Charo, who previously served as a member of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission during the Clinton administration. This is because some types of embryonic stem cell research could involve taking eggs directly from women’s bodies, Charo said, an invasive process that they believe would exploit women.

MADISON, Wis. — On Earth Day, an important Wisconsin conservationist being remembered for a legacy that reminds us of the challenges to come.

The historic work of Aldo Leopold, and those who’ve followed him, is now telling people more about the world we live in today and showing us how climate change might be happening in our own backyard.

Leopold spent a great deal of time at a farm in Sauk County. Readers of his book, “A Sand County Almanac,” might know the place that he wrote from as “the Shack.” But beyond his essays, Leopold kept meticulous notes on the dates and times of when he observed things happening in nature, like the blooming of wildflowers and the return of birds. That work was continued by his daughter after his death in 1948. She kept records from 1975 to 2004, WISC-TV reported.

Now, Stanley Temple, a University of Wisconsin professor emeritus and senior fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation, is looking at the numbers, and he said that they give a greater glimpse at climate change.

APPLETON â?? Societal pressure, marketers and the media make today’s parents of young children “very nervous people,” says brain researcher Seth David Pollak, who offers some reassuring words of advice.
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“Relax and be natural,” said Pollak, a professor of psychology, psychiatry and pediatrics, and director of the child emotion research lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Waisman Center.

“It’s pretty hard to mess up. Trust your judgment and go with the flow.”

Last week a crowd of 350 people at the third annual Wisconsin Stem Cell Symposium heard Richard Young, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discuss work under way to understand the molecular controls that keep embryonic stem cells from developing into specific kinds of cells.

The media should consider offering an alternative version of its news products that wouldn’t contain as much violence, a panelist suggested Thursday at Missouri State University’s Public Affairs Conference.

“There would be a good audience for a different kind of news broadcast. Not the biggest audience but a good audience,” said Joanne Cantor, director of the Center for Communication Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

PLATTEVILLE, Wis. — Allison Ebert, an assistant scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Waisman Center’s stem- cell research program, thinks scientists might need to do a better job marketing themselves.

Ebert presented “Stem Cells 101,” a free public event Wednesday at the UW-Platteville’s Pioneer Student Center.

Particles of invisible “dark matter” have been detected deep inside a mountain in Italy, a collaboration of Italian and Chinese physicists claims. But others remain sceptical of the result, because other experiments have failed to detect any dark matter at all.

On Wednesday 16 April, at a workshop in Venice, Italy, the Dark Matter (DAMA) collaboration announced the results of the 4-year second phase of its experiment. DAMA scientists claimed to see dark matter back in 2003, but some scientists believed the result was a quirk of statistics. Now the evidence is stronger.

“We are pretty sure now that this [signal] is not a statistical fluke. What it means is another matter,” says Francis Halzen, an astroparticle physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US. He spoke to New Scientist after attending the announcement by DAMA project leader Rita Bernabei of the University of Rome, Italy.

Michelangelos’s David may look relaxed, but he is actually rather stressed, especially around his left thigh, right shin and ankles. A new software analysis of the masterpiece predicts where it is most under strain, based solely on its shape. The method may also be able to help treat people’s physical problems as well as those of statues.

The computer conclusions match the real cracks, which have begun to appear in the 5.17-metre marble sculpture.

The crack damage, detailed in a 2006 study published in the Journal Of Cultural Heritage, indicates that the new scanning method could help archivists predict what areas of an ancient artefact may need to be bolstered to prevent damage, even if the statue has not yet shown signs of fatigue.

“Understanding structural properties of historical and cultural artefacts through computer simulations is often crucial to their preservation,” says Professor Vadim Shapiro of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The fragile and worn diaries and journals of conservationist Aldo Leopold can now be widely viewed, without leaving an imprint.

They are available on the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Web site, the first installment of an effort to digitize his full collection of work. The materials consist of early diaries, notebooks, journals and loose drawings from 1899 to 1933, hunting journals spanning 1917 to 1945 and Portage-area journals covering 1935 to 1948.

Is inequality making us sick? The answer to this key question set the stage for discussion March 26 at a public presentation held at the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s Health Sciences Learning Center.

WiCell Research Institute, a private, non-profit supporting organization of UW-Madison stem-cell researchers, named its executive director Wednesday.