Category: Research

NEW YORK — The dollar is at risk of being surpassed by the euro as the world’s leading reserve currency in the next seven years, according to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Realized and forecast increases in the number of countries using the euro, and the growth in the economies that have adopted it since 1999, make the 15-nation currency a stronger competitor than the German deutsche mark and Japanese yen were in the 1980s, economists Menzie Chinn, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Jeffrey Frankel wrote in a working paper for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based NBER.

Neglectful mouse mothers are the product of both nature and nurture, a study from the United States suggests.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, writing in the journal PLoS ONE on Wednesday, report that poor parenting seems to be influenced by environment, being neglected themselves, and genetics, with an imbalance in the brain-signalling chemical dopamine.

In mice, child neglect is a product of both nature and nurture, according to a new study.

Writing in the journal PLoS ONE on April 9, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison describe a strain of mice that exhibit unusually high rates of maternal neglect, with approximately one out of every five females failing to care for her offspring. By comparing the good mothers to their less attentive relatives, the group has found that negligent parenting seems to have both genetic and non-genetic influences, and may be linked to dysregulation of the brain signaling chemical dopamine.

Today, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee will hold a hearing on the implications of climate change for human health. Malaria will top the menu, but so will ignorance and disinformation.

The lead witness will be Dr. Jonathan Patz of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has suggested that U.S. energy policy may be “indirectly exporting diseases to other parts of the world.” Dr. Patz, the World Health Organization (WHO) and others claim that global warming is now spreading disease and may be the cause of some 160,000 deaths a year.

Madison, Wis. – The WiCell Research Institute, which operates the National Stem Cell Bank, has named Wisconsin executive Erik Forsberg to the newly created position of executive director.

Forsberg, who most recently served as the senior director of scientific development at Pharming Group, will direct all operations of WiCell.

What do we talk about when we talk about global warming? It’ll get hotter, that’s a safe bet, polar ice caps will be melting and wildlife that can’t adapt to warmer temperatures could be on the way out. But what does it really mean for the health of us, the human race?

It’s a question that remains surprisingly difficult to answer â?? research into climate change’s impacts on human health have lagged behind other areas of climate science. But what we do know has scientists and doctors increasingly worried â?? a rising risk of death from heat waves, the spread of tropical diseases like malaria into previously untouched areas, worsened water-borne diseases.

“When we think about climate change, we think about ice caps and biodiversity, but we forget about human health,” says Dr. Jonathan Patz, a professor of environmental studies and population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There are a huge number of health outcomes that are climate sensitive.”

When the University of Minnesota needed a new vice president of research in 2005, the school searched the country for someone who could breathe much-needed life into its sleepy technology transfer office.

As it turned out, the U didn’t have to look far. As associate vice chancellor for research policy at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Tim Mulcahy already was intimately familiar with his cross-border rival.

Ever had a boss berate you for showing up late to work on the day your dog died? How about a brother who refused to attend your aunt’s funeral because it was the same day as a Steelers game?

We all know a few people who could use some intensive training when it comes to compassion – but instead of sending them off to expensive psychotherapy, your best bet might be to buy them some meditation mats and books on Buddhist mantras: According to a recent study, the act of meditation may help people learn how to be kinder and more compassionate to their fellow human beings.

In the study, researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Waisman Center for Brain Imaging scanned the brain waves of a group of Tibetan monks and other people who practiced meditation, as well as a group who were not experienced in meditation practices. While reading each subject’s brain waves, the researchers played a variety of recorded noises, including a woman’s scream and a baby’s laughter. A region of the brain called the insula, which is associated with the sensation of emotion, was far more active in the meditators’ brain scans than the non-meditators. The meditation experts’ brains also showed more activity in the right temporal-parietal juncture, which is associated with empathy.

At the University of Washington, researchers are testing whether toddlers will imitate them when they push buttons and pull open drawers.

At The Gottman Institute in Seattle, a psychologist has put together a program for parents of newborns to help them create stronger relationships with each other and their baby.

And halfway across the country, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a neuroscientist studies changes in the brain when people meditate on compassion.

Madison, Wis. – Susan Carlson, who has served as director of operations for the WiCell Research Institute, has left the institute to pursue other opportunities.

In the embryonic stem-cell wars, the microscopic building blocks of human life have been fodder for presidential politics, pro- and anti-evolutionists, multibillion-dollar state ballot initiatives, and squabbles among Hollywood celebritiesâ??and even members of Ronald Reagan’s family.

Now it appears that embryonic stem cells may be nearly ready for something altogether different: treating patients.

Daedalus used feathers and wax â?? and we all know what happened to his son when he flew too close to the sun. Instead, you could try surgery, says Samuel Poore, a reconstructive surgeon at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who has now described the steps that would be needed to transform human arms into wings.

MADISON, Wis., March 31 (UPI) — U.S. agricultural scientists said they’ve discovered organically grown wheat or alfalfa can be as productive as conventional crops.

University of Wisconsin researchers investigated yield differences between organic and conventional cash grain and forage crops in the Upper Midwest.

MADISON â?? No one has to tell Jim Leonhart that Wisconsin is the stem cell state.

As head of the Wisconsin Biomedical and Medical Device Association, heâ??s watched â?? with keen interest – scientific breakthroughs by UW researchers and the launching of five stem cell companies.

â??The commercialization of that research is just starting to have an impact now,â? argues Leonhart, who says his sentiment was reinforced when Gov. Jim Doyle announced in March that Madison would host the 2008 World Stem Cell Summit.

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.