For UW-Madison transplant researcher Will Burlingham, the distance between the laboratory and real life is not far. All he has to do is take a short stroll and he is among the hospital ‘s transplant patients, the very people he studies and has worked throughout his career to help.
An Iranian scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has found a way to substitute artificial sweeteners with natural ones.
Fariba Asadi has found a new method for the mass production of the sweetest natural material in the world.
Asadi has applied a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to study the structure function relationships in brazzein analogs and their interactions with the sweet receptor.
Q. Why can’t we clone from a strand of DNA?
Submitted by James Welch, seventh grade, Cherokee Middle School
A. “To clone” simply means to make a copy, says Tom Zinnen, who directs outreach for the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. And scientists do routinely clone specific segments of DNA, such as genes, in order to study them.
It takes ice — and lots of it — for Thomas Gaisser to do his job.
And it can’t be just any old ice from a freezer — even one with the most sophisticated filter.
To catch what Gaisser is after, you need the purest ice on Earth.
That’s what has landed Gaisser and a team of University of Delaware researchers in one of the iciest, coldest, most austere places on the planet: the South Pole.
They’re after neutrinos — subatomic particles produced during cosmic explosions a very long time ago that are so small, they can pass through solid objects and never collide with molecules.
While a stressful family environment in childhood has long been blamed for various psychological effects later in life, new research suggests that hostile situations at home may also have big physical implications for young girls.
In a study released Thursday, researchers at the University of Arizona and the University of Wisconsin-Madison looked at families of 227 preschool children, following them as they progressed through middle school. Specifically, the researchers looked for the first hormonal signs of puberty in these children.
Scientists in Oregon have successfully cloned monkey embryos and used them to make two embryonic stem cell lines. It is the first time this has been accomplished in primates and brings the possibility of human stem cell lines one step closer to reality.
This is the heart of the controversy over stem cell research, which researchers hope will provide cures for diabetes, Parkinson’s and spinal cord injuries, among others. Embryonic stem cells are important because they can become almost any cell in the body. But the destruction of embryos to harvest those cells is vehemently opposed by right-to-life groups.
By sifting through global agricultural data and economic indicators, UW-Madison scientists identified countries best positioned to enter the quickly growing biofuel marketplace.
MADISON, Wis., Nov. 12 (UPI) — Chimpanzees living in a harsh African environment and using stick tools offer scientists new insight into early human behavior, U.S. researchers said.
Researchers found evidence of tool use among chimps living in western Tanzania’s Ugalla Forest Reserve to harvest tubers, roots and bulbs, the University of Wisconsin-Madison said in a news release Monday. Their study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Reid Bryson, a US meteorologist and climatologist whose team at the University of Wisconsin has developed its own method of looking at historical climate change.
He said he had had problems getting research published on the extent to which he believes volcanoes drive climate change. But he had not kept his rejection letters, so it was impossible to investigate specifically.
Computer-security analysts have long since learned to hate â??botnetsâ?: clusters of computers, infected with worms or Trojan-horse programs, that are taken over by outside users. After all, botnets can do plenty of awful things: They trawl for passwords and credit-card numbers, fire off spam, and propagate automatically.
But now Paul Barford, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says he may soon be able to stop botnets in their tracks.
When veterinarian Ken Nordlund visits a dairy farm, he checks cows for more than disease.
He measures how much room they have when they eat. He scrutinizes their milking schedules for rest time. He watches them lie down and stand up in their stalls. He tracks how often they move from pen to pen.
Professor Susan Hagness from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has turned to graphics cards to quickly analyse breast scans to spot cancer in its early stages.
Dr Hagness said official figures suggest x-rays missed 20% of the cancers that were present when a woman underwent screening.
“There’s clearly impetus to develop complementary technologies that can provide better and more robust tools to look for cancer,” she said.
By sifting through global agricultural data and economic indicators, UW-Madison scientists identified countries best positioned to enter the quickly growing biofuel marketplace.
UW-Madison ranked second in a list of top national research universities for the 2006 fiscal year, improving from third in 2005, according to statistics released Thursday by the National Science Foundation.
The University of Wisconsin spends nearly $900 million in research annually and has claimed top positions in national research rankings, according to a National Science Foundation report released Thursday.
By John Oncken
Research is front and center at UW-Madison’s new Microbial Sciences Building.
The first floor Microbe Place allows visitors to see exhibits showcasing research in progress. There are dozens of laboratories to serve researchers and students. And there’s an overnight area equipped with cots and showers that provides a home away from home for researchers during lengthy experiments.
The $121 million building on the west end of campus is huge — 330,000 square feet — and is the largest academic building on campus. The only larger building is the Kohl Center.
The building is locked. Most of the windows are dark. But in a small room on the first floor of the Waisman Center, a group of four is gathered around Richard Davidson. It’s 8:30 p.m., and most people are at home letting their own minds unwind, trying to slough off a day’s work. But Davidson has shown up in the night to have his brain scanned, to have his mind read.
Actually, he’s here to read his own mind.
The room is lined with computer screens, and there is a small window that looks into the next room to the giant white MRI machine, which pulls mountains of data out of people’s brains. The four scientists are here to run the programs and sort through that data, mining it for nuggets of scientific gold.
“So,what are we doing?” Davidson asks crisply. He’s dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, as if this were no big deal to be here, peering into his own brain.
For Ken Skog, it came as a pleasant surprise.
“It was kind of a fun thing,” says Skog, an economist with the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, on hearing last month that he’d won â?? sort of â?? the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. “Folks at the lab made a big to-do about it.”
Skog, 58, is one of hundreds of scientists who’ve played a part in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the award with former Vice President Al Gore. He was a lead author of a chapter in an IPCC report, released in 2006, which dealt with carbon storage in harvested wood products.
Several UW-Madison scientists played similar roles on the IPCC. But their achievement has gone locally unrecognized and unheralded. “There was no pick-up,” says UW research spokesperson Terry Devitt, referring to a press release on this topic.
Q. How is a wheelchair joystick powered? If by battery, how long does the battery last?
Desia Xiong, grade 6,
Cherokee Middle School
A. “Electric wheelchairs are powered by lead-acid batteries, similar to what is used to start your car,” said UW-Madison mechanical engineering professor Jay Martin.
UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley likes to describe the zeal with which the university ‘s faculty and staff send off research proposals each year like this: “It would be a stack of paper way higher than the Capitol. ”
The National Science Foundation has another measure.
According to new NSF figures, UW-Madison is the nation ‘s top public university for research expenditures, conducting more than $900 million worth of research last year.
Madison, Wis. – The University of Wisconsin-Madison has claimed the number two spot in university research and now conducts $905 million worth of research annually, according to new statistics released by the National Science Foundation.
With science and engineering research expenditures totaling $832 million included in the overall total for fiscal 2006, UW-Madison has climbed one spot, surpassing the combined campuses of the University of Michigan, which held the number two spot in fiscal 2005. The overall figure of $905 million amounts to an average of $440,000 per UW-Madison faculty member.
If gym class helps children tone the body, what helps them exercise the mind?
Homework and tests are logical answers, if proof of success is a higher GPA. But when the goal is to produce a more emotionally sturdy and thoughtful person, researchers suggest the ability to be still and contemplate is what can make a positive difference.
In 2008, local middle school students will among those who participate in a national pilot project that studies the effects of contemplation in the classroom, says Richard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin researcher/neuroscientist.
Also quoted: Former UW-Madison researcher John Dunne of Atlanta’s Emory University,
The UW-Madison now ranks second among all 600 research universities in the United States for the dollar amount of science and engineering research conducted annually.
With research expenditures in those fields totaling $832 million for the 2006 fiscal year, the University of Wisconsin moved up from third to second, according to statistics published by the National Science Foundation.
UW-Madison was second only to Johns Hopkins University.
A shot that robs smokers of the nicotine buzz from cigarettes showed promise in midstage testing and may someday offer a radically new way to kick a dangerous habit.
Story mentions Douglas Jorenby, a UW-Madison psychologist who heads a study site here.
On the maps, a countryâ??s dimensions bloat or shrivel based on its contribution to the greenhouse effect and its vulnerability to climate-related health threats. Almost all of Africa deflates to insignificance in the emissions map, and balloons enormously in the map of risk.
This situation makes the climate challenge fundamentally an ethical one, with the public-health costs of global warming greatest in the parts of the world that have contributed the least emissions, said Jonathan Patz, the lead author of the study.
Dr. Patz is a professor in the medical school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
WASHINGTON, Nov 6 (Reuters) – Climate change should be treated as a public health issue, especially by the United States, the world’s biggest long-term emitter of greenhouse gases, health and ecology experts said on Tuesday.
An Earth transformed by climate change could lead to more climate-related diseases, especially those transmitted by insects and those borne by water supplies, the experts said at a meeting of the American Public Health Association.
The United States and other rich countries bear special responsibility because their climate-warming emissions will have a disproportionate impact on poor countries that emit the least and have the fewest resources to deal with public health problems, said Jonathan Patz of the University of Wisconsin.
Santa Monica, Calif. – Amended stem cell patent claims submitted by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation should not be enough to overcome the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office examiner’s rejections of those patents, according to consumer groups who have challenged the patents.
In formal comments filed last week, the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights and the Public Patent Foundation asked that the rejections first issued by the PTO be made final.
10-year-old Cecil Ross was excited to learn more about penguins.
“Animals in general are interesting just to learn more about,” Ross says.
Ross and his mom Bird joined an audience this morning for a film presentation called From Frozen Toes To Happy Feet: The Truth About Penguins.
Film maker and penguin expert Lloyd Spencer Davis showed the audience clips of movies such as Happy Feet and March Of The Penguins.
At 11 this morning, the 39-year-old orthopedic surgeon — one of two physicians who travel with the University of Wisconsin-Madison football team — will be on the sidelines at Ohio Stadium for the Badgers’ much-anticipated showdown with unbeaten Ohio State.
And Sunday morning, he will be among some 38,000 runners competing in the New York City Marathon.
….He’s also using the race to raise money for the UW’s Carbone Comprehensive Cancer Center and had already exceeded his goal of $26,200 — or $1,000 per mile — by last week.
UW-Madison chemist Helen Blackwell is fascinated by conversation, but not the sort that most people are familiar with, the sort with nouns and verbs.
The kind of conversation Blackwell is interested in takes place between bacteria.
A comprehensive national survey found that the UW-Madison and other top research universities had extremely small numbers of under-represented minority faculty members in 2007.
Under-represented faculty were defined as blacks, Hispanics and American Indians, who made up 28.7 percent of the United States in 2006 and are gaining an increasing number of Ph.D. degrees. Asians, who made up an estimated 4 percent of the population, are not categorized as under-represented.
Like the other top 100 research universities studied, the University of Wisconsin-Madison had very few black or Hispanic faculty, and just one American Indian faculty member was listed among UW faculty in the 15 science and engineering disciplines studied.
The UW-Madison chemistry department is now providing a paid maternity leave for research assistants as a way of ensuring that more women advance to faculty status.
The policy was proposed last year when the 40-member faculty — which includes four women — voted to approve the idea of a 12-week maternity leave with pay, but the proposal became snagged in the legal department.
The Tales From Planet Earth Film Festival starts today at the Orpheum Theatre and runs through Sunday at several locations in downtown Madison, including the UW-Cinematheque screening room and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.
All films are free and open to the public, and most will feature a post-show question-and-answer session.
After telling the University of Wisconsin to halt research on the deadly Ebola virus because the university’s lab didn’t meet safety standards, the federal government has continued its own research on the virus in a lab with an even lower safety standard.
….”It’s an uneven playing field,” said Janet Klein, UW’s biological safety officer. She said the university is considering appealing the NIH decision.
Q. On a really hot day, why do you see heat waves coming off things like roads?
Submitted by Justin Woodworth, 7th grade, Cherokee Middle School
A. The waves are caused by light bending as it travels through different air layers created by the hot surface.
This weekend, Madison will host the cityâ??s first environmental film festival to explore and celebrate the power of film as a force of environmental change.
….You can discover a lot of the backstory of “Seven Days In May” on a Web site — www.wcftr.commarts.wisc.edu — that debuted this week. It’s the new site of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, and they have rolled it out with a bang, unveiling the “Kirk Douglas Collection,” an astonishing online array of letters, photos and other documents from Douglas’s historic show business career.
Scare tactics, Gregg Mitman says, are not the best way to get people to care about the environment.
But funny films? Maybe.
Mitman, director of the Center for Culture, History and Environment at UW-Madison, helped design “Tales from Planet Earth, ” a free, environmental film festival running this Friday through Sunday in Downtown Madison.
Two UW-Madison scientists will be at the White House today to receive Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, considered the nation ‘s highest honor for researchers at the outset of their careers.
UW-Madison genetics professor Ahna Skop and professor of medicine Sterling Johnson are among 57 scientists nationwide to receive the award.
Breast-feeding seems to protect children from asthma later in life, but only when the mother does not have the respiratory disorder herself, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
Dr. Theresa Guilbert of the University of Wisconsin-Madison wanted to see if longer breast-feeding — lasting four months or more — improved lung function in children.
A group of U.S. researchers have found that wildfires â?? fuelled by climate change â?? may be turning boreal forests into sources of carbon dioxide.
The boreal forests â?? found in northern Canada, Alaska, Siberia, China, Scandinavia and elsewhere â?? make up the second largest type of forest in the world behind the tropical rainforest.
Scientists have historically believed that the boreal forests act as a carbon sink, as trees absorb carbon emissions and reduce them in the atmosphere.
But new research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published in the Nov. 1 issue of the journal Nature, has found that the forests may be emitting more carbon than they are absorbing.
By now, you may have already had your fill of Halloween candy. Now you’re ready to see how it’s made. Many of us just see candy in the store and buy it. But science actually plays a huge part in the process of making candy, and all foods.
Instead of trick or treating, Wednesday night on the UW campus, food scientist Rich Hartel, is showing audience members how science is a part of sweets.
“Candy starts with science, all food starts with science. Understanding the science behind how things are made allows us to control the candy and make good candy.” says Hartel.
Malaysia, Thailand, Colombia, Uruguay and Ghana are poised to become the world leaders in biodiesel production, according to a new study.
That’s surprising, since the United States is the world’s leading producer and exporter of soybeans, a major source for biofuel — a promising short-term alternative to fossil fuels. The U.S. harvested 3.1 billion bushels of soybeans last year.
But when Matt Johnson and Tracey Holloway of the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment studied which countries are best positioned to enter the burgeoning market for biodiesel, they came up with a list of developing countries with a strong agricultural base, stable governments and low debt.
Ten-inch walls made with crack-resistant concrete. Outlets sealed with silicone.Sensors for broken windows. Infrared surveillance beams. Redundant air handling systems. A back-up generator.
UW-Madison’s $12.5 million Institute for Influenza Viral Research, nearing completion at University Research Park, will have a collection of safety and security features the university hasn’t seen before.
How refreshing.
Tea, something that people around the world enjoy consuming, might actually be good for you.
“The most fascinating thing is, to my knowledge, there is no other natural product known that has such diversified effects,” says Hasan Mukhtar, vice chair of dermatology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Consortium for Educational Change and Prairie State College recently hosted a day-long workshop for PSC faculty and teachers and administrators from local school districts. The workshop was presented by Gloria Ladson-Billings, one of the leading researchers focusing on the education of black children.
Ladson-Billings shared her expertise and insights about the historical, social and economic causes of the achievement gap. She emphasized the importance of the power of culture for supporting the education of all children.
Q. On the periodic table of the elements, will there be any other man-made elements added?
— Submitted by Alan Canacasco, 7th grade, Sennett Middle School
A. Since starting his career, physicist Ralf Wehlitz of the UW-Madison Synchrotron Radiation Center has seen the periodic table grow by 13 elements, from dubnium at position 105 to the newest, heaviest element: number 118. And scientists are certain to create more, he says.
Fertilizer runoff may be fostering parasite populations and causing an increase in frog deformities, a University of Colorado study published in September suggested.
Love it or hate it, â??tis the season when zombies and vampires take to the streets, haunted houses pop up around town and horror films dominate cable TV.
The University of Wisconsin ranked 11 among research universities nationwide with 24 students earning the 2007-2008 Fulbright award this week, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
[MONTEVIDEO] Colombia, Ghana, Malaysia, Thailand and Uruguay are the top five developing countries likely to attract biodiesel investment because of their strong agricultural industries, relative stability and low debt, says a US study.
The analysis, ‘A Global Comparison of National Biodiesel Production Potentials’, was published online yesterday (24 October) in Environmental Science and Technology.
MADISON, Wis., Oct. 22 (UPI) — A U.S. study suggested that Thailand, Uruguay and Ghana might become the world’s leading producers of the emerging renewable fuel known as biodiesel.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies said biodiesel can be easily manufactured from vegetable oils and animal fats, making it one of the most promising, near-term alternatives to fossil fuels.
Global warming is undeniable, according to an atmospheric science specialist speaking at the University of Wisconsin on climate change Tuesday.
For most Americans, mosquitoes are just pesky nuisances that interfere with barbecuing, camping and other outdoor activities. But in some parts of the world, mosquitoes can be a serious, even deadly, scourge.
Each year, at least one million people worldwide die due to mosquito-transmitted malaria, according to the World Health Organization. From 350 to 500 million malaria cases are contracted annually. Mosquitoes also carry other diseases like dengue fever, yellow fever, encephalitis, West Nile virus.
“Half of the world population is in a risky area,” said UW-Madison insect physiologist Que Lan. “It is very devastating.”
Last month, a bird known as a bar-tailed godwit took flight from Alaska and headed south. A day later, it was still flapping its way over the Pacific. An airplane pilot would have a hard time staying awake after 24 hours of flight (the Federal Aviation Administration allows pilots to fly just eight hours in a row). But the godwit kept flying for an additional week. After eight days and 7,200 miles, it landed in New Zealand, setting a record for nonstop flight.
â??If they spend so many hours flying,â? said Ruth M. Benca of the University of Wisconsin, â??where do they find the time to sleep?â?
Baltimore, Md. – It’s easy to understand why individual legislators or even the Legislature as a whole would be miffed at the University of Wisconsin. Multi-million-dollar computer system flopsâ?¦ Lecturers who peddle unpopular conspiracy theoriesâ?¦ Administrators accused of bizarre behavior â?¦ and complaints about rising tuition and declining access.
But it’s sometimes hard to understand why those same lawmakers can’t look past their legitimate short-term concerns and take a longer view of the value of the university to the Wisconsin economy.
The way most experts see it, â??ignorance is at the root of conflict over science,â? write two communication scholars, but many â??ignore the possibility that their communication efforts might be part of the problem.â?
The authorsâ??Matthew C. Nisbet, an assistant professor of communication at American University, and Dietram A. Scheufele, a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin at Madisonâ??say that for too long, scientists have clung to the â??popular scienceâ? model, which puts the news media in charge of educating the public about science that is controversial, such as embryonic-stem-cell research.
As a veterinarian that trained at the University of Wisconsin, I found the Frankie Trull’s op-ed column supporting animal research misleading and disingenuous.
For centuries people have opposed the use of animals in scientific research based on ethics. Their argument was that any animal close enough to us to be of value in research was close enough to be valued for itself; an end in and of itself, not a means to an end, to paraphrase Kant.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Research in psychiatrically ill children and adolescents suggests that those with depression, anxiety and other so-called “internalizing” disorders are more likely to have allergies.
“These findings add to the growing body of evidence supporting an association between anxiety, depressive, and allergic disorders,” write Dr. Mauricio Infante and colleagues from University of Wisconsin, Madison in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
Students and energy policy leaders from around the country listened Thursday night as Chancellor John Wiley kicked off the Roosevelt Energy conference, which will address issues about energy conservation and efficiency until Saturday, Oct. 20.
