Category: Research

First it was hamburger, then municipal water, apple cider, swimming in the lake, the day-care center, the petting zoo .� .� . and now, spinach. Is nothing safe?

Few lawmakers at the state or national level have science backgrounds, yet they make policy decisions based upon scientific discoveries and information. We trust our representatives and senators to make these decisions every day both here in Madison and in Washington, D.C. Where do the legislators find their information to make important decisions on our behalf?

Jim Doyle’s convincing victory Tuesday night also was a win for dynamic and promising embryonic stem-cell research at UW-Madison – the signature issue of the Democratic governor’s campaign.

With the finish line in sight, Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and Republican challenger Mark Green took a final lap of the state Monday – and jostled again over stem cell research.

Madison, Wis. – On a visit to the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, former U.S. Senator Birch Bayh said the landmark patent law that bears his name is under attack from critics who don’t understand the context in which it was passed.

A Medical College of Wisconsin physiologist started wondering 15 years ago why blood vessels in the kidneys of people with high blood pressure are constricted.

Also quotes Andy Cohn, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. The foundation, known as WARF, is the patenting and licensing arm for the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the oldest and largest tech transfer offices in the country.

Q: Why do people have only two sets of teeth – baby and permanent?

A: Unlike reptiles and fish, which grow replacement teeth continuously to replace the ones that fall out (think of shark teeth), most mammals have but two sets of choppers. That’s largely a reflection of their complexity, says UW-Madison anthropologist John Hawks.

An independent estimate by two economics professors at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Rodolfo E. Manuelli and Ananth Seshadri, (ââ?¬Å?Human Capital and the Wealth of Nations,ââ?¬Â (http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~manuelli/research/humcapwealthnation5_05.pdf) suggests that if variations in the quality of labor across nations are taken into account, other productivity factors need differ by only 27 percent to explain differences in per capita income.

How depressing, how utterly unjust, to be the one in your social circle who is aging least gracefully.

In a laboratory at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, Matthias is learning about time�s caprice the hard way. At 28, getting on for a rhesus monkey, Matthias is losing his hair, lugging a paunch and getting a face full of wrinkles.

A University of Wisconsin study of 14 students found that two energy drink ingredients, caffeine and taurine, didn’t improve short-term memory but led to slower heart rates and higher blood pressure. Since some energy drink ingredients generally speed up heart rates, the researchers could only speculate on the cause.

In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecast an above-normal Atlantic hurricane season, with up to 16 named storms and 10 full-blown hurricanes, six of them Category 3 or greater.

But with the August-through-October peak nearly over and only nine named storms to date – five of which reached hurricane status – this year’s season, which ends Nov. 30, looks pretty low-key.

When one of China’s top-ranked research institutions decided to compile a list of the world’s top 100 universities – to identify China’s main rivals in an emerging research-driven economy- it often landed in the American Midwest.

The Shanghai Jiao Tong University found that nearly one in five of the world’s leading universities – 19 of the top 100 – were in the Great Lakes region. The report listed the University of Chicago at No. 9; University of Wisconsin-Madison, No. 16; and University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, No. 21.

Is there life after death? And if so, do the dead come back? Can we communicate?
Faith attempts to answer these questions. Periodically science has, too. Never mind that science would rather forget the whole thing.

The last major embrace of ghosts by sober-minded scientists is the provocative subject of a new book, “Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death” (Penguin Press) by Deborah Blum, professor of journalism at UW-Madison. She’s an award-winning science writer and author of the widely praised “Love at Goon Park.”

The unique program started about 10 years ago as a collaboration between a group of Wisconsin potato growers, UW- Madison and the World Wildlife Fund.

Can the “fossil genes” found in DNA be used to prove evolution? Sean B. Carroll, author of The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution, argues that the DNA evidence can be used to convince people, beyond a reasonable doubt, that evolution is real.

When scientists pooled dozens of studies of sex differences last year, they found that while we’re quite different on the playground and somewhat different in the bedroom, we’re surprisingly similar in the classroom and the boardroom.

Those results showed men, on average, can throw a baseball farther, are more open to one-night stands, and masturbate more often, says University of Wisconsin psychologist Janet Hyde, who led the project.

For two years, the Southwest Florida air crackled with hurricanes.

Their names still ring with familiarity: Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne, Dennis, Katrina, Rita, Wilma. It was a kind of family reunion here, and everyone was invited.

The top executive at WiCell Research Institute – the hub for Wisconsin’s embryonic stem cell efforts – has left the organization.

Elizabeth L.R. Donley left her job as WiCell’s executive director last week to “pursue opportunities in the growing high-tech and biotech industries in the Madison area,” according to a news release issued by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, or WARF.

Q: What causes waves?
A: The energy in waves comes from wind, which gets its power from the sun, says James Kitchell, professor of limnology at UW-Madison. Higher wind speed and a longer “fetch” (distance that the wind blows across the water) increase the energy transfer from air to water.

News Hits pretty much gave up watching local TV news long ago. With so much emphasis on mayhem and fluff, tuning in to the nightly broadcasts seemed increasingly pointless.

Turns out we weren�t missing much. Or, put another way, viewers who do rely on the nightly news programs from local stations are missing out on way too much political coverage.

That�s the lesson to be gleaned from a study just conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison�s NewsLab, which looked at the nightly news broadcasts of stations located in nine leading Midwestern markets, including Detroit.

It’s simple strategy for candidates running the upcoming elections on November 7. For instance, in the Wisconsin governor’s race, Mark Green introduced himself with positive advertisements, showing him playing basketball and cutting his lawn.

Then in the past two weeks, Green and incumbent Jim Doyle began trading barbs at other on issues like immigration.

Some call them attack ads, or negative ads. Joel Rivlin with the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project said whatever you call them, these types of ads benefit democracy. “Negative ads, or those that we say talk about your opponent, are more likely to talk about policy issues,” said Rivlin.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 16 (UPI) — A new study suggests that a sweet-tasting compound called 2DG has great potential as a treatment for epilepsy.

2DG (2-deoxy-glucose) has long been used in radio labeling, medical scanning and cancer imaging studies in humans. But now researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found the substance also blocks the onset of epileptic seizures in laboratory rats.

An August ribbon cutting ceremony highlighted a year-long Wisconsin project to design, build, operate and study a biodiesel reactor. A collaborative effort between the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM) and the Madison Area Technical College (MATC), the project is part of a comprehensive renewable energy technology program at MATC, called the Consortium for Education in Renewable Energy Technologies (CERET).

All aboard! The Badger Trolley Bus is leaving the station for tours of fall color in the prairie and woodlands of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.

Naturalist Kathy Miner narrated one of Sunday’s free, 45-minute tours and said guides see a smorgasbord of participants.

As part of its ongoing effort to improve math and science education, the National Science Foundation awarded the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire a $500,000 grant last month.

MADISON � Wisconsin broadcasters took issue last week with a study that spotlighted election coverage by Midwest television stations, suggesting newscasters are shirking their responsibilities to serve the public interest.

After many years of studying links between hurricanes and warming ocean currents, scientists at the University of Wisconsin in Madison have come up with a surprising new correlation.

We take very seriously the discussion of stem cell research in this fall’s election campaigns. Candidates in a number of races have seized on the issue as a way to distinguish themselves and in some cases the debates can be quite substantive. But in every instance there is the threat of substantial harm to some of the most promising science of our time. And too often it is the result of a confusion of politics with policy.

A University of Wisconsin survey of election coverage on local television news in nine Midwest markets found that stations in Springfield-Decatur-Champaign devoted an average of 21 seconds for each 30-minute newscast to election coverage.

An Illinois government watchdog group says that’s not enough.