Category: Research

Duct tape patched on windows keeps out water and mold. Clear plastic sealed over an air vent provides more insulation.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara face a minefield of physical, financial and political barriers as they work to understand how stem cells from embryos can be used to fight disease. In this lab badly in need of upgrades, they focus on turning stem cells into a cavalry of replacement cells that can battle the eye disease of macular degeneration. Elsewhere on a campus striving to establish itself as a research nexus, scientists use stem cells from embryos, brains and even testicles in research linked to everything from Parkinson’s disease to alcoholism.

Richard J. Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, has been looking at patterns of brain activity associated with emotional regulation in a small group of older people who have participated in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. In a paper published last year, the Wisconsin team reported that older adults (the average age was 64) who regulated their emotions well showed a distinctly different pattern of brain activity than those who didnâ??t. These people apparently used their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that exerts â??executive controlâ? over certain brain functions, to tamp down activity in the amygdala, a small region deep in the brain that processes emotional content, especially fear and anxiety. In people who are poor regulators of emotion, activity in the amygdala is higher, and daily measurements of the stress hormone cortisol follow a pattern that has been associated with poor health outcomes.

Boston, Mass. – At last year’s Biotechnology Industry Organization convention in Chicago, it wasn’t intimidating for Wisconsin to be strutting its high-tech stuff. While Chicago is a business leader in almost every sense of the word, it’s not well known for its biotech. Pharmaceutical companies, yes; biotech firms, not really.

A pioneering UW researcher whose work has led to insights into a host of diseases, and a UW geneticist who has authored two books on animal evolution, have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Laura Kiessling, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Sean Carroll, professor of molecular biology and genetics, are among 72 new inductees to the prestigious academy.

MADISON, Wis. — In what could be a blow to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s effort to land a high-security national animal disease research lab, the Dane County Board on Thursday night debated a resolution opposing the university’s proposed 40-acre lab site in the Town of Dunn.

Earlier this week, the federal Department of Homeland Security was greeted by a handful of protesters as it toured the site. It’s one of 18 sites vying for the Bio and Agro Defense Facility.

The Town of Dunn is against the proposal, saying it flies in the face of its land-use farm preservation plan, WISC-TV reported. County board officials agree, and they criticized the university for relying on only one site.

An electrical device that zaps the brain to induce deep sleep may some day give a whole new meaning to the term “power nap.”

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered they can artificially stimulate the production of slow brain waves that characterize the deepest form of sleep.

For the study, the researchers used a transcranial magnetic stimulation device on a group of sleeping volunteers. When placed on top of the head, the instrument sends a painless and apparently harmless magnetic signal through the skull and into the brain.

Gas prices shot up another dime today at stations on University Avenue, now hitting $3.15 a gallon for regular. But, just a little further up the road, the University of Wisconsin thinks it just might have the answer to lower prices.

“It may save us money, it may stabilize prices, and it certainly may reduce the risk,” said Molly Jahn, dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.

Cow waste, soybeans, prairie grasses, or corn might hold the answer to new fuel sources. The UW is one of a handful of universities being considered for a national $125 million grant over five years to study the development of these fuels made from BioMass. The U.S. Dept. of Energy will make a final decision this summer.

Madison, Wis. – Has the United States Supreme Court strengthened the case against stem cell patents held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation?

The answer is yes, according to the California consumer watchdog organization that is challenging the patents, but that’s not necessarily a consensus opinion.

When BIO 2006 was held in Chicago last April, it was no great surprise that Wisconsinâ??s commercial and academic biotech community wanted to have a major presence at the international conference. It was, in a global sense, just down the road.

And while there will be some drop in attendance at this year’s BIO gathering in Boston, the Badger State again will be putting on a good show, officials say. The conference starts Sunday and will run through Thursday.

Last year, Wisconsin spent more than $270,000 — triple its investment from the 2005 conference in Philadelphia — to tout its research and business prowess. This time around, the total budget is around $250,000, officials said. But the state did not have the cost of a building a new pavilion this year.

Madison, Wis. – The University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who has been called the â??father of stem cell researchâ? has reportedly agreed to operate a research lab as an adjunct professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

The Santa Barbara Independent is reporting that Thomson, who remains a tenured faculty member at UW-Madison, will be in Santa Barbara about one month out of the year and lead an interdisciplinary team of four postdoctoral researchers.

Jamie Thomson, the reputed â??father of stem-cell research,â? will soon be operating a research lab in Santa Barbara as an adjunct professor at UCSB. Thomson will be in Santa Barbara about one month per year, leading an interdisciplinary team of about four postdoctoral researchers. The bulk of his work will remain centered at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he remains a tenured senior faculty member.

A Supreme Court ruling this week could make it more difficult for a Wisconsin foundation to defend key embryonic stem cell patents against challenges by two groups, some patent experts and representatives of those groups said Tuesday.

The groups have argued that three fundamental patents the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation holds are based on research that would have been obvious to anyone familiar with literature in the field. University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist James Thomson in 1998 was the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells.

A good night’s sleep may be as simple as flipping a switch, say scientists.

By sending magnetic pulses through the skulls of sleeping volunteers, US researchers were able to stimulate the slow brain waves seen in deep sleep.

Such a machine-generated “power nap” could one day be an insomnia treatment, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study suggests.

It would seem there are few connections between the glow of a computer screen and the rough-and-tumble flow of a river down its course.
But The Nature Conservancy and business giant IBM are collaborating on a computer-driven project — using science from UW-Madison — that may help protect the world’s great rivers.

TOWN OF DUNN, Wis. — Officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security were in Dane County on Monday to scout out a home for a new $400 million human and animal disease research lab.

If the University of Wisconsin gets its way, the national lab will be located at its Kegonsa Research Campus just off Highway 51 in the Town of Dunn.

However, some nearby residents said that is no place for such an enormous and high-security facility. They continued their effort on Monday to take the UW site out of contention. Some critics of what would be the largest facility of its kind in the U.S. staged a small protest at the site near Stoughton on Monday, WISC-TV reported.

The protestors said that they hope the show of community concern will mean the UW site won’t make the federal government’s final list of three to seven sites, which is due out next month.

A California group that is challenging three key stem cell patents held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation wants the director of the University of Wisconsin patent licensing arm to resign from a U.S Patent Office board while the patents are being reconsidered.

The flip of a switch could become all it takes to get a good night’s sleep, according to a study released on Monday.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found a way to stimulate the slow waves typical of deep sleep by sending a harmless magnetic signal through the skulls of sleeping volunteers.

Scientists may have discovered a way of triggering deep sleep in people suffering from chronic insomnia.

A study has found a way of stimulating the brain so that sleep-deprived people can feel the full restorative powers of an eight-hour period of slumber.

The researchers have developed an electronic device that stimulates the brain with harmless magnetic pulses which cross into the nerves that control a type of deep sleep called “slow-wave activity”.

Dear Editor: I find it abhorrent that during an era of stressed budgets at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it is felt that it is worthwhile to spend $1 million to stifle free speech.

Researchers reported Friday they have found four promising antibiotics in chemical families never used before against germs through a novel testing tool that can screen dozens of compounds at once.

The four compounds appear to kill bacteria, at least in a lab dish. Because they probably attack bacteria in different ways, germs should take some time to develop resistant strains.

“These represent whole new classes of antibiotic agents,” said Helen Blackwell, lead author of a University of Wisconsin-Madison report on the discoveries published in the journal Chemistry and Biology.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials will visit the town of Dunn today to look at a possible site for a federal animal disease research facility. Some town of Dunn residents and officials will post protest signs on their vehicles and park them along Schneider Drive and Dyreson Road during the visit.

A disturbing trend that could affect health care for farm animals in the state.

There’s a shortage of veterinarians to care for cows and horses. Dr. Gary Oetzel with the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine says they’re having a difficult time recruiting students for the field.

Q: How do fish gills work?

Matthew Burns

Grade 7

Sennett Middle School

A: Gills are the equivalent of a mammal’s lungs, says Jeffrey Malison, director of the aquaculture program at UW-Madison. “Their primary purpose is to exchange gases, take oxygen in and release carbon dioxide out of the fish.”

A Dane County Board of Supervisors committee voted Tuesday against a University of Wisconsin proposal to build a Department of Homeland Security animal disease research facility just south of Madison in the town of Dunn.

Madison, Wis. – If manufacturers are interested in new products and markets in the biomedical device field, there is a conference that provides a learning and technology transfer opportunity.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Biomedical Engineering Center already puts on an annual design event at the end of each spring semester, but this year it has expanded the program with the intention of opening doors to business and industry. Those doors will be opened on Friday, May 5 at the annual BME Translational Research and Design Conference and Expo.

In the late thirteenth century, drought ravaged the American Southwest, withering the corn, squash, and beans upon which ancient inhabitants relied for survival. Across the region people abandoned their homes in a desperate search for arable land. Some were lucky enough to find a moist Arizona valley where they built a settlement now known as Grasshopper Pueblo.

At its peak, the pueblo consisted of 500 rooms housing hundreds of families. Archaeologists were puzzled by the differing architecture, pottery styles, and burial traditions within the pueblo, leading them to speculate that the drought must have been so severe that people from several different cultures were forced to live together in one of the few places where food would still grow. While the pottery strongly hinted at the disparate origins of the population, there was no way to test that idea.

Enter archaeologist T. Douglas Price, geochemist Jim Burton, and their colleagues from the Laboratory of Archaeological Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. In the late 1980s, Price and Burton learned of a new technique that measured the ratio of strontium isotopes in human bone, revealing how an individual had migrated. One of Price’s students, Joseph Ezzo, had worked at Grasshopper Pueblo and was eager to try the new technique there.

Drinking alcoholic beverages at any time during the day would increase the risk of breathing problems during sleep. The effect was seen in men, but not in women, according to a new study.

It has been known that sleep disordered breathing is associated with high blood pressure and blood vessel disease, and drinking alcohol before bedtime increases the odds of abnormally shallow breathing, according to Dr. Paul E. Peppard and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Madison, Wis. – In a criminal trial, as any fan of TV cop-and-court shows knows, the prosecution states its case first and the defense goes second. The accused can appear in deep trouble, at first blush, but the weight of evidence submitted by the defense often carries the day.

Not only does that make for appealing television drama, but it’s pretty much how the legal system works in real life. Those who file the charges speak first, the accused then get a chance to rebut.

Adult stem cell research has produced some dividends, but since many researchers still think embryonic cells offer far more potential, why continue to shackle and shortchange U.S. researchers?

Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his colleagues infected seven close relatives of the rhesus with a reconstructed version of the flu virus that killed more than 50 million people in the infamous 1918 epidemic; three other monkeys were infected with a modern human flu virus.

Q: How many animals have gone extinct due to human causes?
Adikan Wiering

Grade 6

Sennett Middle School

A: Stanley Temple, a professor of wildlife ecology at UW-Madison, says 83 mammals, 151 birds, 22 reptiles, 35 amphibians and 93 fish have definitely gone extinct since 1500.

President Bush is again promising to veto a bipartisan bill easing limits on promising embryonic stem-cell research.

Bush contended this week the bill “crosses a moral line.” But an increasing majority of Americans — including virtually two-thirds of the U.S. Senate — strongly disagrees.