Category: Research

An impromptu network of federal and state agencies, and teams of veterinary pathologists â?? from the University of Connecticut, Cornell and the University of Wisconsin â?? have been meeting all winter via teleconferences to share information and the results of necropsies of affected bats. But so far they have not been able to determine the cause of the syndrome. The scientists mostly agree, however, that the fungus found on the bodies of infected bats is probably a symptom and not a cause of the condition.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Patients with heart failure are especially vulnerable to influenza and most doctors recommend they get flu shots, but a study suggests these annual jabs may not offer them full protection, U.S. researchers said on Saturday.

“What we theorize is that heart failure as a condition leads to impaired immune function, which renders these patients less able to respond to the vaccine,” said Orly Vardeny of the University of Wisconsin, who presented the study at the American College of Cardiology meeting in Chicago.

Parents might be surprised to hear this, but babies analyze language and their environment like miniature mathematicians, says researcher Jenny Saffran.

Newborns are already at work deciphering sounds that make up language, how sounds combine into words, how words combine into sentences and then what words mean, Saffron maintains. “They have to figure it out. They don’t come with English factory installed.”

Saffran, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of UW’s Waisman Center infant learning lab, is the second brain investigator to speak on early brain development as part of the “Brain to Five” community education series sponsored by the Appleton Education Foundation.

The Great Lakes region is deeply involved in research aimed at clearing technology bottlenecks associated with biofuels, partly because of the interest from agribusinesses and automakers. In 2007, the University of Wisconsin-Madison received a $125 million grant to establish the U.S. Department of Energy’s Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center in Madison.

A handful of companies are using different approaches to designing synthetic versions of gasoline and other fuels. The work at Virent includes creating a system that converts plant sugars into hydrogen fuel.

“There won’t be one solution. Instead, there will be a suite of technologies customized for different needs, from heating a home to fueling a vehicle,” said Margaret Broeren, a spokeswoman for the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center.

Most people probably have never made an economic or social justice connection to the food they eat, but University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Jack Kloppenburg suggests trying it.

It may affect where you decide to purchase your food.

“What you put in your mouth not only builds your own body â?¦ but you’re also building landscapes or you build connections,” Kloppenburg told a crowd of about 150 people at UW-Green Bay on Thursday evening.

Seymour, a rare white camel, is much better after being treated at the UW Vet Hospital.

His owners brought him to the center, because he was very weak.

He was given llama plasma and supportive care.

A new report says too many Wisconsin children are being exposed to second hand smoke on a daily basis.

Smoking is banned in more homes than ever, but a report from the UW Center for Tobacco Research and Prevention and the UW Comprehensive Cancer Center estimates that nearly 25-percent of Wisconsin families still allow it. As a result, nearly 211,000 children are being exposed to second hand smoke at home.

The scientist who has worked most closely with the Dalai Lama is Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Davidson first met the Dalai Lama in 1992, and since about 2000 has been investigating a question dear to the heart of the leader of Tibetan Buddhism: can mental training such as meditations change the brain in an enduring way?

UNC’s Nobel Prize-winning professor has decided to give part of his award back to the institutions where he worked and studied.

Oliver Smithies, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at UNC, and his colleagues, Mario Capecchi of the University of Utah and Sir Martin Evans of Cardiff University, were awarded a prize of about $1.6 million. The award was given in Swedish krona.

The universities that received money were Oxford University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Toronto and UNC.

Can organic cropping systems be as productive as conventional systems? The answer is an unqualified, “Yes” for alfalfa or wheat and a qualified “Yes most of the time” for corn and soybeans according to research reported by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and agricultural consulting firm AGSTAT in the March-April 2008 issue of Agronomy Journal.

Mention the discipline of computer modeling to most people and they’ll think of math and graphs and technical detail complicated enough to cause a migraine.

But talk with Eric DeWeaver, a climatologist with UW-Madison, about the computer climate models that are his specialty and soon you will be imagining polar bears on the blinding ice of the Arctic oceans. Bears plunging off the edges of ice floes in search of seals. Bears embarked on epic journeys of thousands of miles across jumbled pack ice and through frigid northern waters. Bears raising their young in snowy dens.

University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists have developed a chemical catalyst that could help pave the way for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

With fuel cells, a small chemical reactor converts hydrogen and oxygen into electricity, water and heat. When used to run a car, the only exhaust coming from the vehicle’s tailpipe is water.

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Science/2008/03/24/method_detects_predicts_structural_strain/2046/
MADISON, Wis., March 24 (UPI) — U.S. scientists have created a software program that can predict stress fractures that occur in statues that have been in place for hundreds of years.

Vadim Shapiro of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Igor Tsukanov of Florida International University applied their technology to Michelangelo’s David in an analysis that they said proved simpler, faster and more accurate than previous methods.

UW-Madison is noted in 25 of the area’s savviest, smartest, boldest, well-intentioned and hardest-working stewards of justice, humanity and the environment.

–The Nelson Institute

The UW–Madison epicenter of environmental and sustainability research, the Nelson Institute, was founded in 1970 and renamed in 2002 after Gaylord Nelson, former U.S. Senator and lifelong environmentalist who, among other things, created Earth Day.

–Jonathan Patz

Thanks to the research of Dr. Jonathan Patz, we know that global warming is not only an environmental and public health crisis but also an ethical one. The UW professor is a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the organization that shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore).

–Dan Anderson and Tom Eggert

Dan Anderson and Tom Eggert are advocates for a Center for Business, Environment and Social Responsibility under consideration at UW–Madison. For more than a decade they have been working to incorporate environmentalism, sustainability and social justice into the Business School curriculum.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Florida International University have developed a technique that enables them to identify the weak spots in a structure from afar.

The program they developed, Scan and Solve, uses 3D data of an object to predict where it is most likely to fracture, and how its faulty spots will be affected by outside forces such as gravity or other forms of strain.

Spring may have sprung, but even so, it still is pretty cold outside. Why not warm up with a mug of coffee or hot chocolate? Or, go for some tea, which can provide health benefits — especially green tea.

Green tea seems to have more health cachet than black tea, according to a 2007 article in the journal Life Sciences, perhaps because it has been the focus of more research. Although not as well studied as green tea, black tea probably is at least as beneficial, says Hasan Mukhtar, vice chair of dermatology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who drinks two cups of black tea and two of green a day.

It sounds like a remedy straight out of a witch’s brew: a cocktail of worm eggs, destined to hatch inside the bodies of those who swallow them.

The trial, led by University of Wisconsin Hospital neurologist Dr. John Fleming, will determine if a helminth egg cocktail will be tolerated by these patients, and perhaps relieve some of their symptoms.

New findings indicate yet another drawback to increasing our production of corn-based ethanol. In a word, it’s the fertilzer. Tons of nitrogen and phosphorous end up in lakes and rivers (this is already a big problem in Madison, where the lakes are plagued every summer by a massive phospherous fueled algae bloom), including the Mississippi, which in turn leads to a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. So we might not want to put all our alternative fuel eggs in the ethanol basket: Chris Kucharik at UW Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, one of the researchers, suggests the study “confirms our suspicion that there’s a significant tradeoff to the expanded production of ethanol from corn grain.

Mentions that a few years ago, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that a patient’s emotions could affect the strength of a flu vaccine.

A column by scientist Kathy Sykes notes that she has always been cautious about alternative therapies â?? she would rather put her faith in conventional medicine, which has been put through numerous trials and research, and proven to work through rigorous experiments.

She mentions that at the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Professor Richard Davidson has carried out a study where he has seen significant changes in brain activity when people meditated.

While scientists have determined that humans probably are warming the world, it’s Earth’s microscopic inhabitants that may have even bigger climate clout.

It’s the increased breathing of these innumerable organisms as Earth warms that worries scientists.

These bacteria live in the soil, which stores an enormous amount of carbon, according to Christopher Kucharik, an associate scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment.

It’s called the dead zone. Agricultural fertilizer byproducts like nitrogen are running off farms and into the Mississippi River, which then spills out into the Gulf of Mexico.

MADISON, Wis. — Hundreds of the world’s top players in the field of stem cell research will gather in Madison for a summit in September.

Up to 1,000 researchers, philanthropists and business representatives are expected to attend the World Stem Cell Summit at the Alliant Energy Center on Sept. 22 and 23.

If you thought you saw a lot of television ads for the Democratic presidential primary, you weren’t imagining it.

You did. And most of them were for Barack Obama.

The candidates together spent $1.5 million to air 3,383 ads in Cincinnati from Feb. 1 through March 4, according to a report out Wednesday. That’s more than 102 ads a day.

The report was issued Wednesday by the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project, which analyzed data obtained from the TNS Media Intelligence Campaign Media Analysis Group.

Television advertising for Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama cost about $8 million in Ohio leading up to the hotly contested March 4 primary.

Obama, who lost to Clinton in Ohio for the first time in 11 consecutive contests, outspent Clinton by nearly two to one and also benefited from $1 million in special ads bought by two labor unions.

Data compiled by the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project also suggests that Clinton shifted political strategy for Ohio after Obama defeated her in Wisconsin on Feb. 19.

Just a day after the University of Wisconsin’s patent licensing arm won a government ruling upholding a pair of key stem cell patents, Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle announced Wednesday that Madison will host a world gathering of stem cell researchers, advocates and investors later this year.

The World Stem Cell Summit on Sept. 22-23 willk bring together preeminent researchers, advocates, investors, and other industry leaders to advance human embryonic stem cell research and the resultant technologies.

About 1,000 great minds from around the world will converge in Madison this fall.

“The University of Wisconsin has won the honor of hosting the 2008 World Stem Cell Summit.”

Governor Jim Doyle says he’s honored this big event will take place in Madison — the birth place of stem cell research. The governor says embryonic stem cell research holds the potential to not only save lives, but to create economic opportunity for innovation and job growth.

Wisconsin’s capital city will host an international stem cell research summit this fall, which will bring up to 1,000 of the world’s top researchers, investors and industry representatives to Madison.

The World Stem Cell Summit, to be hosted by WiCell and the University of Wisconsin Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center on Sept. 22 and 23, will mark the 10th anniversary of James Thomson’s isolation of human embryonic stem cells at UW-Madison.

Two embryonic-stem-cell patents controlled by the patenting arm of the University of Wisconsin at Madison â?? and challenged by two public-interest groups â?? have been upheld by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The news comes just two weeks after the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the universityâ??s patenting organization, announced that the first of its three key stem-cell patents had been upheld.

MADISON, Wis. – The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has upheld a second and a third University of Wisconsin-Madison patent covering embryonic stem cell research at the school.

In rulings made public Tuesday, Federal examiners confirmed two patents for scientist James Thomson’s work on isolating embryonic stem cells of primates and humans. The patent office last month upheld another patent stemming from the work, but that ruling can be appealed.

Madison, Wis. – In a decision that cannot be appealed, the United States Patent and Trademark Office has upheld the modified claims of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation on two of the foundation’s most important human embryonic stem cell patents.

The ruling, which affects two patents for primate and human embryonic stem cells known as â??780â? and â??806,â? follows a favorable determination on patent â??913,â? which relates to the discovery and culture of human embryonic stem cells by researcher Jamie Thomson.