The University of Wisconsin-Madison has won one of the largest federal grants in its history to create a center that will explore how to convert cornstalks, wood chips, grass and other plant material into fuel for cars and power plants.
Gowtham Karri looks young for a city planner. He wears tennis shoes and shorts on the job and can’t be much more than four and a half feet tall.
But he brings a professional intensity to the task of redesigning Madison’s neighborhoods.
UW-Madison will build a $100 million facility to support a new federal research center for developing alternative fuel sources, with half of the money coming from state taxpayers, officials said Tuesday.
The school will also spend another $4 million to hire eight faculty members affiliated with the center.
WASHINGTON — Michigan will get at least 100 new jobs — with the potential for thousands more — as a result of $50 million in federal ethanol research money Michigan State University was awarded Tuesday.
The money puts MSU at the center of a major federal effort to turn common plants into ethanol that could replace gasoline in the nation’s cars and trucks — an effort whose “Holy Grail,” one MSU official said, is a Michigan economy fed by fuel from plants.
Corn is king of biofuel — for now.
But a $50-million federal grant to Michigan State University aims to dethrone the kernel and turn tall grasses, trees and other growing things into cheap fuel to power vehicles, possibly within a decade.
Elated MSU officials and Gov. Jennifer Granholm predict the research will spawn thousands of Michigan jobs and put the university at the center of a national effort to wean the country from foreign oil, and oil in general.
“Maybe tomorrow we don’t lower the price of gas, but, over the long haul, you better believe it will,” said Granholm at a news conference at MSU’s grass research center. “And it will make us less dependent on oil in the Middle East.”
WASHINGTON â?? New research centers in Wisconsin, Tennessee and California will try to develop new ways of turning switchgrass, poplar trees and other plants into fuel under a $375 million plan.
The three centers, partnering with universities, national laboratories and private companies, will each receive $125 million to research new biofuel technologies over five years. The centers will be located in Madison, plus Oak Ridge, Tenn., and near Berkeley, Calif., the Energy Department said Tuesday.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison will receive one of its largest grants ever to fund renewable energy research.
The $125 million grant will be used to open the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center. Governor Jim Doyle helped unveil the plan on Tuesday, which he says will help the nation meet its growing need for alternative energy sources.
Madison, Wis. – The United States. Department of Energy will invest up to $375 million over five years in three new Bioenergy Research Centers, including $125 million for a center led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to promote the development of cellulosic ethanol.
The Madison bioenergy research facility, which will be called the DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, will operate in collaboration with Michigan State University and be directed by Timothy Donohue, professor of bacteriology at UW-Madison.
UW-Madison has won a major federal Department of Energy grant worth $125 million to build a Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center to develop cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels. The five-year grant is the largest single research award the university has ever received.
Gov. Jim Doyle yesterday said he’ll ask the Legislature to chip in another $50 million for the project, plus another $4 million for new faculty and staff at the center. In addition, he said the university will seek to raise $50 million from private sources for the project.
Molly Jahn, dean of the UW-Madison College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, said the center will be built at one of three sites the Madison campus. She said it will focus on developing energy resources from non-food resources such as cornstalks, wood chips, paper waste and perennial native grasses.
A local company sees energy potential in our backyard.
Millions in federal funding will bring a center for biofuel research to UW Madison.
Supporters of a bioenergy research facility coming to Madison say a safer, more environmentally friendly source of fuel is in our future.
That source of fuel is, of course, plants. We already use corn to make ethanol, but the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center will take biofuels a step further.
“This basically what we’re looking at converting to alcohol,” Phil Brumm says.
It’s being called a big win for UW-Madison. It is one of three universities chosen to spearhead bioenergy research. The U.S. Department of Energy awarded the Madison campus $125 million over five years for research.
The goal of the center is to find ways to convert plant biomass, from things like cornstalks and woodchips, to sources of energy to power anything from cars to electrical power plants.
MADISON, Wis. — Madison will be home to a major new bioenergy research center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
The department announced Tuesday it had awarded University of Wisconsin-Madison and a partnership of other universities and labs a $125 million grant to start the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center.
The federal facility will be built in Madison as part of a new alternate fuel initiative being organized by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Michigan State University. Both universities will help run the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center.
Several universities will be major partners in three new research centers on bioenergy, the U.S. Department of Energy announced on Tuesday. The centers, which involve researchers from a total of 18 universities, along with seven national laboratories and several corporate partners, will each receive $125-million over five years to study new techniques for producing ethanol and other biofuels.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison will lead one of the centers, with the State of Wisconsin providing an additional $54-million for a new building and new faculty positions. Michigan State University, which will receive about $50-million of the federal grant, will be a major collaborator in the Wisconsin center. Other academic partners will be Illinois State University, Iowa State University, and the University of Florida.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison and its partners have been selected as one of three consortiums nationally that will receive $125 million each in federal funds to find new ways to turn plants into energy.
UW-Madison will be the site of one of three bioenergy research centers designed to find new ways to turn plants into fuel, officials said Monday.
The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center on UW-Madison’s campus, along with centers in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and near Berkeley, Calif., were described by the Department of Energy as three startup companies with $125 million each in capital, said two officials with knowledge of the grants, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official announcement had not yet been made. They will involve numerous universities, national laboratories and private companies as partners.
Science Times this week has a special issue devoted to these advances and Sean B. Carroll, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin, is one of scientists whose work is featured. Watch a video interview with Dr. Carroll.
WASHINGTON, June 25 â?? The Energy Department is creating three bioenergy research centers to find new ways to turn plants into fuel.
The three centers, which the department described as three start-up companies with $125 million each in capital, will be in Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Madison, Wis.; and near Berkeley, Calif. They will involve numerous universities, national laboratories and private companies. The goal of the centers, which are to be announced on Tuesday, is to bring new technologies to market within five years.
The new approach supports President Bushâ??s goal of reducing gasoline consumption by 20 percent in 10 years.
A new generation of Americans like the Morrises, in moving to places perched on the edge of vast, undeveloped government lands in the West, are living out a dangerous experiment, many of them ignorant of the risk.
Their migration â?? more than 8.6 million new homes in the West within 30 miles of a national forest since 1982, according to research at the University of Wisconsin â?? has coincided with profound environmental changes that have worsened the fire hazard, including years of drought, record-setting heat and forest management policies that have allowed brush and dead trees to build up.
â??Itâ??s like a tsunami, this big wave of development thatâ??s rolling toward the public lands,â? said Volker C. Radeloff, a professor of forest ecology and management at the University of Wisconsin. â??And the number of fires keeps going up.â?
WASHINGTON – Michigan State University will receive $50 million in federal grants over five years to conduct basic research on biofuels, officials said Monday.
Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman is expected to announce Tuesday that Michigan State and other universities have been selected to share $375 million in federal funding to develop new bioenergy centers for research on cellulosic ethanol and biomass plants.
The young geographer would tell strangers he was hunting uranium. In 1952, that explanation seemed more understandable than the truth about what he was doing in the desert.
Who would believe the broad, flat rocks called pediments had led this slender man, 98 pounds, into Arizona’s San Pedro River Valleyto map remote country under a blazing sun? At night, he camped out in a beat-up Ford coupe, and read by Coleman lamp until, tired, he pulled down the seats and slept with his head by the steering wheel, his feet stretched back into the trunk.
Peter Jones came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison from the University of Bristol thanks to a scholarship from the Worldwide Universities Network, a global research and graduate education network that develops collaboration among 18 universities here and internationally — and helps individual students.
Dear Editor:
….There are different types of stem cells — embryonic, adult, and umbilical. I have no problem with, and in fact have supported, research efforts utilizing adult and umbilical stem cells. But embryonic stem cell research kills human life.
The successes of adult and umbilical stem cell research are widespread and well known and, as a result, I believe this is where we should focus our research — on proven, successful methods.
Dear Editor: We welcome the attention called by Monday’s Capital Times article (Is Warming our fault?) to Professor Reid Bryson’s lengthy and distinguished career. However, we wish to make it absolutely clear that his opinions on global warming are not shared by other scientists at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Climatic Research and Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
The scientific evidence for human causation of global warming is now very strong, and gets stronger every year.
Q. After rains, why do worms slither out onto the pavement and “commit suicide?”
A. After a strong rain, the corpses of worms strewn across the pavement are a disgusting sight — or a pathetic one, depending on your sympathy for these slithery invertebrates.
But what’s the advantage of suicide? Teri Balser, an associate professor of soil and ecosystem ecology at UW-Madison, says the answer starts with the fact that worms breathe through their skin.
People with type 1 diabetes who smoke are more than twice as likely to have an episode of severe hypoglycemia, or very low blood sugar, as those who have never smoked, according to a new study.
Hypoglycemia can cause mental confusion, or even coma or seizures in severe instances. “Smoking, through its effect on hormone regulation and insulin clearance, has been hypothesized to result in severe hypoglycemia,” Dr. Ronald Klein, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and colleagues write in the journal Diabetes Care.
President Bush vetoed a bill that would allow new federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Alta Charo, professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin Law School, talks about what the federal ban means to researchers. Charo spoke with Steve Inskeep.
A biofuel that outperforms ethanol could be easily made from fructose and, in future, glucose derived from the woody parts of plants, researchers claim.
Ethanol has been the biofuel of choice for many years and can be made from corn and other crops. Enzymes are used to break down the plant material to sugar, which is fermented to a boozy fuel. But ethanol has a number of problems, not least its low energy density, its volatility and its water-absorbing nature.
A recipe for fuel: take the carbohydrates like starch and cellulose that make up the majority of plants.
“It should be a great fuel,” says James Dumesic, a chemical engineer at the University of Wisconsinâ??Madison, who, along with his colleagues, discovered the new process, “DMF has the energy density of petroleum.”
The sugar found in fruit such as apples and oranges can be converted into a new type of low carbon fuel for cars, US scientists have said.
The fuel, made from fructose, contains far more energy than ethanol, the scientists write in the journal Nature.
A way of turning simple plant sugar into a fuel as powerful as petrol has been discovered by scientists.
Researchers in the United States have developed a way of converting fructose, the sugar that gives apples and oranges their sweet taste, into a fuel that can be burned to generate energy.
For years, chemists have been searching for a way to sidestep the use of crude oil as the root source of chemicals for fuels, aiming to replace it with inexpensive, non-polluting plant matter that is more environmentally friendly.
University of Michigan stem cell scientist Sean Morrison recently got a telephone call from a woman offering to donate her leftover embryos from a fertilization procedure for his studies on Parkinsonâ??s disease. What she didnâ??t know was that Michigan law prohibits research on human embryos. Morrison suggested that the woman contact a lab in another state.
Next door in Illinois, Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) is promoting embryonic stem cell research in an effort to lure scientists and investors, in some cases from neighboring states. In 2005, Blagojevich sent a letter urging Missouriâ??s top scientists to move to Illinois rather than work under a cloud created by Missouri legislatorsâ?? ultimately unsuccessful efforts to ban research on human embryos.
Wisconsin reaction, to President Bush’s latest stem cell research veto. “It’s a bad day for researchers, and it’s a bad day for patients across the country,” says John Rogers, president of Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek Government Affairs in Milwaukee.
WASHINGTON, June 20 â?? President Bush on Wednesday issued his second veto of a measure lifting his restrictions on human embryonic stem cell experiments. The move effectively pushed the contentious scientific and ethical debate surrounding the research into the 2008 presidential campaign.
â??Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical,â? Mr. Bush said in a brief ceremony in the East Room of the White House. He called the United States â??a nation founded on the principle that all human life is sacred.â?
At the same time, Mr. Bush issued an executive order intended to encourage scientists to pursue other forms of stem cell research that he does not deem unethical. But that research is already going on, and the plan provides no new money.
As President Bush vetoed a bill on Wednesday that would have loosened his restrictions on stem-cell research, he offered an alternative policy that he said would strengthen the field in an ethical way, but that critics called nothing but spin.
The alternative policy, expressed in an executive order, calls for expanding certain types of stem-cell research that do not require the destruction of human embryos. But it proposed no new money for that research, which is already eligible for, and has received, federal financing.
“This was a political fig leaf and a redundant policy designed to give the president political cover” as he vetoed the bill, said Sean B. Tipton, a spokesman for the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, which supported the bill. “He’s not going to fool American scientists.”
By DEB RIECHMANN
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — Vetoing a stem cell bill for the second time, President Bush on Wednesday sought to placate those who disagree with him by signing an executive order urging scientists toward what he termed “ethically responsible” research in the field.
Bush announced no new federal dollars for stem cell research, which supporters say holds the promise of disease cures, and his order would not allow researchers to do anything they couldn’t do under existing restrictions.
Announcing his veto to a roomful of supporters, Bush said, “If this legislation became law, it would compel American taxpayers for the first time in our history to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos. I made it clear to Congress and to the American people that I will not allow our nation to cross this moral line.”
NimbleGen Systems has hit its home run.
Spun out of UW-Madison research, it was announced Tuesday that the DNA microarray company will be purchased by Roche, of Basel, Switzerland, one of the world’s giant drug and diagnostics companies, for $272.5 million.
MADISON, Wisconsin: Gene-chip maker NimbleGen Systems Inc. said Tuesday it will be bought out by pharmaceutical giant Roche in a deal worth $272.5 million (â?¬203.3 million).
Madison, Wis.-based NimbleGen announced in March it would file for public offering and had hoped to raise $75 million (â?¬56 million). But the company remained private and will be sold in its entirety to Roche, it announced in a news release.
Madison-based gene chip maker NimbleGen Systems, which in March filed for an initial public offering of stock, instead has been acquired by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding AG in a $272.5 million deal announced today.
NimbleGen, a UW-Madison spin-off founded in 1999, had filed for a proposed IPO of up to $75 million in common stock.
Reid Bryson, known as the father of scientific climatology, considers global warming a bunch of hooey.
The UW-Madison professor emeritus, who stands against the scientific consensus on this issue, is referred to as a global warming skeptic. But he is not skeptical that global warming exists, he is just doubtful that humans are the cause of it.
Q. Why do flowers smell, and why do plants smell, too?
A. The luscious aroma of flowers attracts lovers, and the biological role of that smell is similar: to attract pollinators.
Stem cell research holds out so much promise for addressing devastating diseases and conditions that support for it extends beyond lines of party and ideology.
Indeed, it can safely be said that opposition to federal research for embryonic stem cell research is now limited to an extremist fringe and the politically cynical.
Quoted: Stephen Snow, a professor of dermatology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
….More than 50 million Americans suffer from allergies, and the numbers continue to grow despite advances in antihistamines and other drugs. So why have we failed to reverse this trend?
“It’s time to look at the underlying causes of asthma and hay fever instead of only treating the symptoms,” says Gregg Mitman, a professor of medical history and history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Following his own advice, Mitman wrote the book “Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes.” In it, he traces the impact allergic disease has had on American life, culture and landscape since the 19th century.
It sounds like the setup for a dull economist’s joke. Who gets the better deal: the cautious economist who sells his house through a real estate agent, or his risk-taking colleague who finds a buyer on his own?
Two Northwestern University economists used Madison’s real estate market to find the answer.
Q Are the North Star and the Southern Cross the same?
A The North Star – real name, Polaris – and the Southern Cross, also known as the constellation Crux, both serve as navigational beacons but in different hemispheres.
Phil Pellitteri says they can sound like “lots and lots of tree frogs,” capable of long periods of “constant shrills” as they emerge after 17 years of slumber and spend the next month or more concerned mostly with perpetuating their species.
For the second time in less than a year, Congress has approved a bill expanding federal support for stem-cell research despite President Bush’s promised veto. The House of Representatives sent the bill to Mr. Bush on Thursday by a vote of 247 to 176, well short of the two-thirds majority required to override a veto.
The bill (S 5) was approved by the Senate in April by a tally, 63 to 34, that came closer to the two-thirds majority in that chamber. Mr. Bush confirmed in a statement after the House vote that he would veto the bill.
The Greater Milwaukee Foundation has awarded its annual Shaw Scientist prizes of $200,000 each to two young Wisconsin scientists whose work has shown promise for groundbreaking research.
Scott Kennedy, 38, an assistant professor of pharmacology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is using worms to study RNA interference, a mechanism that can turn off any gene in the genome. His research could lead to technology that could allow better treatment of human diseases.
Dazhong “Dave” Zhao, 38, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is researching the male reproductive cells in mustard weed plants, work that eventually could help create more robust crops.
The new experiments reveal the remarkable degree of control that scientists have recently gained over the highly complex inner workings of living cells.
Stem cell research is a big endeavor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where James Thomson first isolated human embryonic stem cells.
Thomson’s work fueled a research effort on the UW campus that cuts across a wide range of departments and spurred the creation of WiCell Research Institute, which has trained scientists from around the world to work with the cells. Thomson’s work also led the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation to secure three basic patents – the type that can be the underpinnings of whole new industries.
Scientists in the United States and Japan announced yesterday that they have developed artificial stem cells from adult mouse cells. If the approach can be retooled for humans, they say, it would avoid the ethical quicksand that surrounds the use of stem cells drawn from nascent human embryos.
“The real challenge is translating this to human cells, which seem far more resistant” to the kind of manipulation scientists used, notes Clive Svendsen, a stem-cell researcher at the University of Wisconsin’s Waisman Center in Madison, Wis. Still, he adds, “it is truly amazing that they can produce cells that look like embryonic stem cells.”
Three scientific teams published separate studies on Wednesday showing that embryonic stem cells can be made by reprogramming some of the genes in adult skin cells, without having to create an embryo â?? at least in mice.
â??Thereâ??s still a ways to go but at first blush, the results are very encouraging and itâ??s certainly a boost for the stem cell research business,â? said Terry Devitt, a director at the University of Wisconsinâ??s stem cell research programme. â??But we still have a bottleneck in the federal government. Weâ??re hamstrung because the research is inadequately funded.â?
While intriguing, a new approach for producing embryonic stem cells faces considerable hurdles before it can be used to develop medical treatments, executives from stem cell and other biotechnology companies said yesterday.
In particular, they said, the technique involves genetically altering cells, which could introduce new safety risks and make it harder to obtain regulatory approval.
Noted: Not only does it eliminate the ethical issues, he said, but it also might provide a way around stem cell patents held by the University of Wisconsin that some scientists and corporate executives say have hindered work in the field.
Significant steps toward producing embryonic stem cells without using human eggs, and in some cases without creating embryos, were published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, a development that could ease ethical concerns about such research.
The prospect of creating embryonic stem cells containing a patient’s own genetic information has provoked great excitement and research investment, as it has raised the possibility of using the cells to understand disease or transplanting them to treat diseases. But most methods developed for making the multitalented stem cells have required using unfertilized egg cells, which can be painful and risky for women to donate, and creating embryos, which must be destroyed to remove the stem cells. Both steps have raised ethical red flags.
By MALCOLM RITTER
AP Science Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — In a leap forward for stem cell research, three independent teams of scientists reported Wednesday that they have produced the equivalent of embryonic stem cells in mice without the controversial destruction of embryos.
They got ordinary skin cells to behave like stem cells. If the same could be done with human cells – a big if – the procedure could lead to breakthrough medical treatments without the contentious ethical and political debates surrounding the use of embryos.
Experts were impressed by the achievement.
Quoted (in 6/6/07 Capital Times): UW-Madison stem cell researcher Clive Svendsen)
Jared Campbell, 2, flailed his little arms at the iridescent soap bubbles floating around his head in the hall outside a University of Wisconsin research lab in Madison.
“Pow! Pow!” he said as he swiped them out of the air. Then his mom called his name, and he did something extraordinary. For a split-second, he turned his head and looked at her.
If the circumstances were different, it might be easy to side with some folks in the Town of Dunn in Dane County concerned about a proposed development. They fear that the development – a 520,000-foot facility employing up to 300 people – will interfere with the quiet rural nature of their community.
But the development isn’t a mall or some run-of-the-mill big-box store. On the contrary, it would be a high-security world-class federal laboratory to study animal illnesses, such as foot-and-mouth disease and bird flu. And the University of Wisconsin officials pushing for it didn’t settle on the site by tossing a dart at a map.
Summer time for kids means school is out, it’s time to play. Under the sun. In the heat. Running and jumping.
Or, at least it used to.
A new study out of the UW, published in the newly-released June issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, found that overweight middle school kids who’d seen progress in school-based curriculum for physical education, actually got less healthy over the summer.
â??We expected that summer vacation would actually promote more physical activity for kids, and that on their own, cardiovascular levels would actually increase. And what we found was cardiovascular went down,â? says Dr. Aaron Carrel, one of the five local researchers.
The UW-Madison is hosting about 100 talented minority and low-income undergraduate students from around the nation this summer to do graduate-level research with faculty members — in the hope they will decide to continue their education in Madison.
The Summer Research Opportunity Program, partially funded by the National Science Foundation, includes programs in 10 fields, ranging from neurology and biology to engineering and education.
This week, UW-Madison employees are marking the 100th anniversary of the campus experiment that started a century of vitamin research. On May 31, 1907, agriculture chemist Stephen Babcock launched an investigation on dairy cows called the Single Grain Feeding Study, a bland title that belies its revolutionary impact.
DODGEVILLE — Within minutes of starting her workday, Dr. Amy Robinson plunges her left arm into a cow’s rectum to determine on which side of the bovine’s uterus she will place a frozen embryo.
As a large animal veterinarian in rural Wisconsin, this task is not unusual, and Robinson, 32, goes about it with the matter-of-factness of an accountant creating a spreadsheet.
