Category: Research

The National Academy of Engineering announced on Friday that it had elected 76 new members and nine new foreign associates, bringing its total membership in the United States to 2,216 and the number of foreign associates to 186.

Among them, Mary Pikul Anderson, professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison. For leadership in the development of groundwater-flow models.

UW geologist Dana Geary says, for the vast majority of scientists, there is no doubt about it, evolution is what brought us to life as we know it today.

“It’s as solid a notion in science as the theory of gravity,” said Geary.

Scientists expressed mixed reactions to criticisms leveled at a University of Pittsburgh researcher who collaborated on an infamously fraudulent stem cell study.

Seven University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty members will speak at the free, public Darwin Day symposium Saturday from 9:15 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in Room B10 of Ingraham Hall.

The symposium is being held in honor of Charles Darwin’s 197th birthday. Darwin’s theory of evolution, of course, has long been the target of advocates of “creationism” or “intelligent design” and the disagreement has blossomed into a national debate.

Thirty-one college presidents and chancellors, including John Wiley, are among the 140 business, political, and educational leaders who have endorsed an advertisement appearing in today’s issues of The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal that urges readers to “help keep America the driving force in innovation.”

Tastebuds alone do not determine what something tastes like. Researchers have demonstrated that expectation, too, plays a role.

Previous research in primates had suggested that expectation had little effect on how taste registers in the brain. Neuroscientist Jack Nitschke and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin lined up 30 college-age volunteers to see whether the same holds true for humans.

A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor is working on a computer model that she says can identify the targets that terrorists are most likely to hit, which would help authorities figure out how to best allocate their limited security resources.

Your wife is pregnant; so why are you gaining weight?

Working with man’s closest relatives, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have shed new light on the centuries-old observation that is part of a phenomenon in people known as the couvade syndrome.

The mysterious “couvades” effect, in which men put on weight during their partner’s pregnancy, has been observed for the first time in monkeys. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin- Madison Primate Centre found that male marmoset and tamarin monkeys added about 10 per cent to their girth while their mates were expecting.

UW-Madison engineers are in the final stages of building the world’s deepest drill for taking ice samples far below Antarctica’s frozen surface.

Scientists funded by the National Science Foundation will use this core barrel cutter head to drill up to 2.5 miles beneath Antarctica’s surface for ice core samples to use in climate change research. The core barrel will take ice pieces 13 feet long and nearly 5 inches in diameter, for the biggest such samples possible so far with an ice drill.

A discussion of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror, by UW history professor Alfred McCoy. His book is not a collection of opinions but a scholarly investigation into CIA tactics and results.

UW-Madison earned another top 10 accolade Wednesday when it ranked No. 1 on People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals list of the top 10 worst offenders for lab animal treatment, according to a PETA statement.

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have rated University of Wisconsin laboratories the worst offender of animal abuse among ââ?¬Å?some of the nationââ?¬â?¢s premier university laboratories.ââ?¬Â However, university representative and UW professor Eric Sandgren said PETA is simply ââ?¬Å?pushing an agendaââ?¬Â and misrepresented information in their ratings.

New evidence keeps emerging that the medical profession has sold its soul in exchange for what can only be described as bribes from the manufacturers of drugs and medical devices. It is long past time for leading medical institutions and professional societies to adopt stronger ground rules to control the noxious influence of industry money on what doctors prescribe for their patients.

Last week two new cases came to light that reveal the lengths to which companies will go to buy influence with doctors, pharmacists and other medical professionals. Reed Abelson reported in The Times on Jan. 24 about a whistle-blower’s lawsuit alleging that Medtronic had paid tens of millions of dollars in recent years to surgeons in a position to use and recommend its medical devices. In one particularly egregious example, a prominent Wisconsin surgeon received $400,000 for just eight days of consulting.

Ground to the bone, the teeth of the famous fossil skeleton, Kennewick Man, look as if they’ve spent a lifetime gnashing rocks.

But it’s from these worn choppers that Thomas Stafford Jr., a research fellow in the department of geology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and president of Stafford Research Laboratories in Boulder, Colo., plans to learn about the origins, movement and lifestyle of this highly controversial, 9,000-year-old North American.

What makes a good dad?
In some species, it’s a male monkey who gains weight during his mate’s pregnancy, perhaps in preparation for lugging those heavy babies through the treetops.

That’s the conclusion of research at UW-Madison on two species of New World monkeys, common marmosets and cotton-top tamarins. They are squirrel-sized primates known for their monogamous lifestyles and devotion to their offspring.

Bill Clinton told an audience of corporate executives and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland, this weekend that climate change is the world’s biggest problem. But a researcher who studies global warming here said the former president overstates the case.

“I wouldn’t go quite that far,” said Stephen Vavrus, an associate scientist at the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research. “There are so many problems that exist and will exist regardless of climate change.”

….Vavrus, 38, meanwhile, calls global climate change an “overarching environmental issue” of the century. “It ranks among the top few, if not the most important one,” Vavrus said, noting that problems of disease, economic inequality and toxic waste also loom large.

Within just a few years of Christopher Columbus’ journey to the New World, West African slaves appeared in the Western Hemisphere. And researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Autonomous University of the Yucatan, in Merida, Mexico, may have found one of the earliest gravesites of these unwilling travelers.

In a Yucatan church graveyard, dated between 1550 and the late 1600s – around the time of Shakespeare – four bodies of African origin have been discovered. Their racial identity was confirmed by dental chemistry and appearance.

While remodeling the central plaza in Campeche, a Mexican port city that dates back to colonial times, a construction crew stumbled on the ruins of an old church and its burial grounds. Researchers who were called in discovered the skeletal remains of at least 180 people, and four of those studied so far bear telling chemical traces that are in effect birth certificates.

Married women under extreme stress who reach out and hold their husbands’ hands feel immediate relief, neuroscientists have found in what they say is the first study of how human touch affects the neural response to threatening situations.

In the study, to appear in the journal Psychological Science this year, neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Virginia used newspaper advertisements to recruit 16 couples from the Madison, Wis., region.

A historical mystery that began in an ancient and lost cemetery beneath a plaza in Mexico has been solved in a small, unusual laboratory on the UW-Madison campus.

A prominent surgeon in Wisconsin was paid $400,000 a year by Medtronic for a consulting contract requiring him to work just eight days. Another doctor in Virginia received nearly $700,000 in consulting fees from Medtronic for the first nine months of 2005.

John Magnuson worries about winter. Unlike some people, though, he wishes winter were snowier, icier and longer — that it could be a season that offered more sledding, more skiing, more iceboating and ice fishing. In other words, says Magnuson, it is time to be urgent about climate-change data. He is pushing people to look locally and see how a global problem is affecting an upper-Midwestern city that is inextricably linked to winter.

“We can’t wait until climatologists get it correct and highly precise. If so, it’s going to be way past where you want to start intervening.”

Most of us think scientists are people – really smart people – who conduct experiments and then analyze the results. But for Daniel Lee Kleinman, scientists are the experiment.

A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of rural sociology, Kleinman spent months back in the 1990s studying a group of biologists in a plant pathology laboratory. He investigated their motivations and observed their interactions. Eventually, he published a book about his discoveries titled Impure Cultures: University Biology and the World of Commerce (UW Press, 2004). Now Kleinman and the lead subject from that study, UW microbiologist Jo Handelsman, have collaborated to launch a series of books about controversial scientific topics.

Animal rights campaigners are calling on the Journal of Neuroendocrinology to retract a research paper it published in April last year by Ei Terasawa from the University of Wisconsin, saying it violated the journal’s editorial policy against studies that cause unnecessary pain and suffering to experimental animals. Terasawa was temporarily barred from serving as a primary investigator in animal research, but has maintained the research met local and national guidelines.

Rapid population growth and higher per person consumption create a dangerous bottleneck that threatens biodiversity, emeritus Harvard University biologist Edward O. Wilson warned a rapt Madison audience Wednesday night.

The one hope for easing the bottleneck is that as women’s liberation spreads across the globe and women gain control of their reproductive lives, the world’s birth rate will eventually go down, Wilson said during a Distinguished Lecture Series presentation to a nearly full house in the Wisconsin Union Theater.