Category: Research

Sometimes the inspiration for scientific research comes from the most unexpected places.

Consider Jeff Kaufman’s bedroom.

For much of the past 18 years, he has resided there, gradually losing the ability to move, speak or breathe on his own, as nearly all of his nerve cells that control movement have died off as the result of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

For some CIOs, it’s been a struggle to comply with new e-discovery provisions in federal law. Thus far, there is very little established case law to use for guidance, and the need to manage and organize e-mail documents may not be the top information technology priority for most business organizations.

They’ve seen it all, from the “happy days” of the 1950s to the war on terror. Along the way, they launched their own careers, married, raised children, dealt with prosperity and heartbreak, with growing older and death.

Their story is the story of millions of Americans, but there’s something different here.

When Jennifer Jackowski thinks about Madison’s lakes, she sees both a problem and an opportunity.

The problem — algae — is not new.

“I grew up in rural Wisconsin, and swimming was one my favorite things about summer,” said Jackowski, a UW-Madison botany student from Green Lake. “Then I came to Madison, where you are surrounded by water, and half the time you can’t swim.”

“Mom, would you really have shipped me off to Denver?” I asked my mother recently.

“Absolutely,” she said.

“But imagine,” I said, “what it would have been like for a 5-year-old living in an institution, surrounded by doctors and a bunch of asthmatic kids?”

“You were very, very sick,” she explained. “Nothing helped.”

As interest in interdisciplinary research continues to increase, colleges still donâ??t have answers to critical questions about the best ways to support and encourage collaboration across the disciplines. How can a department fairly evaluate interdisciplinary research in promotion and tenure decisions, for example? How can an institution raise money for interdisciplinary endeavors within a system designed to fund raise for individual schools and colleges? â??We donâ??t yet have the solutions,â? said Gail Dubrow, vice provost and dean of the graduate school at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. â??But we know what the problems are.â?

A few phone conversations with a counselor might help patients, who abuse or who are dependent on alcohol, cut back on their drinking, at least in the short term, a new University of Wisconsin-Madison study suggests.

Researchers found that after just six telephone sessions with a counselor, men and women with alcohol problems were able to reduce their drinking.

“The study shows that we shouldn’t just give up on those alcohol-dependent patients who cannot or choose not to get treatment,” lead study author Dr. Richard L. Brown said in a statement.

Mentions that Karen Dion and Ellen Berschied, from the University of Wisconsin, published a paper showing that children aged 4 to 6 asked to judge classmatesâ?? desirability assessed it on appearance.

They’ve seen it all, from the “happy days” of the 1950s to the war on terror. Along the way, they launched their own careers, married, raised children, dealt with prosperity and heartbreak, with growing older and death.

Their story is the story of millions of Americans, but there’s something different here.

For half a century now, they have been followed by scientists at the University of Wisconsin, who have compiled a unique record of the lives of about 10,000 people who graduated from that state’s high schools in 1957.

Two of the scientists questioning the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation’s key embryonic stem cell patents tried to patent similar discoveries themselves, the foundation said Wednesday.

Their patent applications were made after the foundation filed patent applications on the work of James Thomson, the first person to isolate human embryonic stem cells.

Neither of the scientists disclosed their patent applications when they filed declarations in April in support of two foundations on the coasts that are trying to have the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office overturn WARF’s patents, the Madison-based foundation said.

James Thomson has added a part-time position at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to his current position at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The new post is raising eyebrows because of recent strains between his home institution and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) in San Francisco.

Fears that teenagers using the social networking website MySpace are exposing themselves to sexual predators by disclosing too many personal details are probably overblown, researchers say.

Criminologist Assistant Professor Sameer Hinduja of Florida Atlantic University and Justin Patchin, a political science researcher at the University of Wisconsin, randomly selected 9282 profiles out of the 100 million purportedly available on MySpace.

The energy-efficient nano computer is inspired by ideas about computing first put forward nearly 200 years ago.

Writing in the New Journal of Physics, the scientists say the machine would be built from nanometre sized components, just billionths of a metre across.

Chips based on the design could be used in places, such as car engines, where silicon can be too delicate, they said.

“What we are proposing is a new type of computing architecture that is only based on nano mechanical elements,” said Professor Robert Blick of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the authors of the paper.

Many researchers use software such as RasMol to visualize three-dimensional structures of proteins. But what if a researcher is blind? What’s the best way to navigate those same proteins?

Timothy Cordes, a blind medical scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, faces this challenge every day in his X-ray crystallography research. In the past, he had to go through several steps to figure out the spatial relationships of atoms and amino acid residues in a protein. “For everything I wanted to look at, I’d have to go into one program and write a file and then read it in another,” he says. “I realized I needed a tool to help me streamline the process.”

The more exposure middle school students have to anti-smoking ads, the more likely they are to smoke, according to a new University of Georgia study.

Hye-Jin Paek, an assistant professor at UGA, found that many anti-smoking ad campaigns have the opposite effect on teenagers, backfiring because they actually encourage the rebellious nature of youth.

Paek and co-author Albert Gunther from the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined surveys from 1,700 middle school students about their exposure to anti-smoking ads and their intention to smoke

MADISON, Wis. — A new science camp in Madison is giving some students exposure to careers in stem cell research.

This week some high school seniors, most from rural areas, were granted special access at the world-renowned stem cell research institute WiCell.

Inside some lab rooms at University Research Park on Rosa Road a first-ever program is teaming University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers and WiCell with curious high school students who have a passion for science.

A new study suggests that lawmakersâ?? chosen way of dealing with the issue â?? trying through public embarrassment and other means to stop colleges from raising their tuitions by excessive rates â?? will do little to change the behavior of the most expensive institutions.

In a policy paper released by the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education, researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison analyzed how public and private, non-religious four year colleges and universities would have been affected by a system that imposed sanctions on institutions that raised their tuition by more than twice the rate of inflation over a three-year period, based on their tuition rates from 2004 to 2006.

Most kids go to summer camp for swimming, hiking and crafts. One group of Wisconsin students is in camp for nanotechnology, stem cells and bioethics.

The WiCell Institute on the UW-Madison campus, is holding its first ever science camp. Eighteen high school students took a quiz to get there and are attending along with their teachers.

WiCell’s Director of Operations Sue Carlson says the campers are incoming seniors who have an interest in biology related careers.

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has won approval to go it alone when it comes to patenting, licensing and spinning off companies from campus inventions and discoveries.

Armed with a huge desire to increase its relatively small research effort, and strong support from UW System President Kevin Reilly, the school asked the UW System Board of Regents for permission to break away from a systemwide tech transfer program and manage its own intellectual property.

Richard Gourse, a professor of bacteriology at UW-Madison and an expert on the early stages of gene expression, has received a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health.

Mother-of-pearl, known for its beautiful shine, also has enormous strength, which UW-Madison scientists studied using polarized light.

The oil industry has committed more than $700 million to alternative energy research at three Northern California universities, prompting debate over how commercial interests might shape the direction and results of scientific advances.

Molly Jahn, dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, said the key factor in the push for alternative research sponsors has been the drop in state funding for the university over the last 20 years.

For Clark Johnson, the quest to see if life might exist elsewhere in the universe begins by looking at chemical isotopes – different forms of the same chemical element.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison geology professor hopes to find out if microscopic living organisms produce different ratios of these isotopes compared with isotopes produced in non-biological processes.

Fantasy baseball leagues could bring scientists a better understanding of how people learn.

Erica and Rich Halverson, assistant professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are conducting a study of the organization and rules of play of three different fantasy baseball leagues, as well as participants’ strategies, degree of competitiveness, and what they get out of the game.

Good news! Dane County is out of the running for that new $400 million Homeland Security bio-hazard research center.

UW-Madison officials are shaking their heads in disappointment that its 200-acre site in the town of Dunn was not a finalist for the animal-disease research facility. They had visions of landing 300 to 400 jobs involving research into the deadliest and most contagious diseases.

U.S. federal officials yesterday announced a short list of five possible sites for a new high-security agricultural biodefense lab. One of them will be awarded the $450 million facility, slated to open in 2012, which will study deadly animal diseases such as hoof-and-mouth disease, Nipah virus, and African swine fever.

Four prominent stem cell scientists have filed “declarations” in support of a citizens’ group that is trying to break the University of Wisconsin’s hold on patents for human embryonic stem (ES) cells.

Joining the fray are Harvard researchers Chad Cowan and Douglas Melton, as well as Alan Trounson of Australia’s Monash University. A new statement was also submitted by Jeanne Loring of the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in San Diego, California, who has been advising the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, which filed the initial complaint last July.

If nanoscience is the field of stuff so tiny it can never be seen, does it matter if the scientist can see at all? At the University of Wisconsin’s nanoscience center, Andrew Greenberg is in charge of education and outreachâ??and it occurred to him that blindness, often thought of as a handicap in the sciences, becomes irrelevant when the subject matter is invisible anyway.

Anthrax, bird flu and other deadly biological threats are headed for another state.

That’s a bad thing, according to people involved in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s failed bid to win a $450 million grant for a lab that will study deadly animal illnesses, such as bird flu, and other contagions such as anthrax and smallpox.

The Department of Homeland Security said Wednesday it has whittled down to five the list of 17 finalists for the 520,000-square-foot National Bio- and Agro-Defense Lab. The lab will replace an aging facility at Plum Island, N.Y., that was criticized for security lapses after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

WASHINGTON (AP) – The federal government has selected sites in five states as finalists for a $450 million national lab where killer germs like anthrax, avian flu and foot-and-mouth disease will be studied, members of Congress said Wednesday.

Sites in Texas, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi and North Carolina were chosen as possible hosts for the 520,000-square-foot National Bio- and Agro-Defense Lab, said senators from Texas and Kansas and Texas House members.

Mentor Corp., a California medical products company, will expand its presence in Madison with the construction of a 37,000-square-foot plant at the University Research Park.

Construction of Mentor’s facility began this week and is expected to be completed during the summer of 2008, park officials announced Wednesday. Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Mentor will employ about 40 at the expanded site when it becomes fully operational.