Category: Research

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.

I used to think that there were two things you never discussed in mixed company — politics and religion.

It appears now that there’s a third taboo subject — science. I had always been under the impression that science was not open for debate, that facts are facts. Right?

Well, not so fast. The Republicans have decided that facts are only facts if they help the GOP political cause. And if they go against those tendencies, either political or religious, then those facts can be disregarded as “junk science.”

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chancellor Carlos Santiago on Thursday will launch an uphill effort to win new state taxpayer funds for a $300 million effort to transform the school into a major 21st century research institution.

The Dalai Lama is here to give a speech titled “The Neuroscience of Meditation.” Over the past few years, he has supplied about a dozen Tibetan Buddhist monks to Richard Davidson, a prominent neuroscience professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Davidson’s research created a stir among brain scientists when his results suggested that, in the course of meditating for tens of thousands of hours, the monks had actually altered the structure and function of their brains.

MADISON ââ?¬â?? Growing up in the Brazilian state of Goiana, Gabriela Cezar was deep in cattle country. And as far back as she can remember, she wanted to be a veterinarian.

ââ?¬Å?My father was head of the national beef cattle research center in Brazil, so I was always exposed to animals,ââ?¬Â said Cezar, who earned her veterinary medicine degree in her native country and has additional graduate degrees from Scotlandââ?¬â?¢s University of Edinburgh and UW-Madison.

But Cezarââ?¬â?¢s career path took a turn toward stem cell research early on. She has since worked on three continents ââ?¬â?? including a stint with the giant Pfizer pharmaceutical company. She also worked at the Roslin Institute in Scotland with the cloning team that produced ââ?¬Å?Dolly the Sheep,ââ?¬Â an early attempt at cloning a mammal.

ââ?¬Å?Stem cells are incredibly interesting territory,ââ?¬Â said Cezar, who joined the faculty of the animal sciences department at UW-Madison late last year. Her specialty is developmental biology.

An animal rights group says leaked government reports detail experimental procedures on animals, at UW-Madison.

Michael Budkie with Stop Animal Explotation Now (SAEN) says documentation details primates being confined in restraint chairs, paralytic agents being used in cats, and both primates and cats being deprived of water. Budkie says such practices are not illegal, but are sanctioned by the federal government, and he claims the UW could halt animal experimentation, if it wished.

UW’s Dr. Eric Sandgren says that assertion is unrealistic.Sandgren says the document cited by Budkie is not hidden or covert, but simply a form the university sends to the federal Food and Drug Adminstration each year.

Among the many temptations of the digital age, photo-manipulation has proved particularly troublesome for science, and scientific journals are beginning to respond.

Glaciers

A glacier last covered Madison more than 10,000 years ago, according to soil samples from the pit dug on the site of the future Microbial Sciences building.

The first of a weekly series called “Curiosities,” in which UW-Madison experts answer public questions about everyday science. The feature will appear every Thursday and is produced by University Communications.

Research policies in Wisconsin probably will not be affected by fraud on the other side of the world, UW-Madison researchers said. Yet, the actions of Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk, a South Korean stem cell researcher who was found Dec. 23 to have faked results of several of his experiments on human embryos, may give the field a black eye in the short term.

Now that a South Korean scientist’s work has been exposed as a fraud, U.S. institutions say they have new momentum for efforts to clone human embryos to produce stem cells, an achievement that could cure debilitating diseases.

Only a few laboratories worldwide have the ability or desire to do the highly technical and controversial work of creating patient-specific cloned human stem cell.

In the culmination of more than four years of study, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-affiliated WiCell Research Institute reported a major breakthrough in the way stem cells are derived and cultured.

South Korean prosecutors Monday began questioning junior researchers who were part of a team led by disgraced cloning scientist Hwang Woo Suk over possible crimes linked to science fraud.

A UW-Madison researcher has developed a program to provide developing countries with quality dairy cows resistant to harsh tropical conditions.

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is overhauling the way it allocates state funding for research, with the goal of creating more accountability and entrepreneurship within its ranks.

UWM Chancellor Carlos Santiago said the new Research Growth Initiative is the university’s main strategy to boost its annual research budget from $39 million now to more than $100 million within 10 years.

On Cambodia’s Tonle Sap River, conservationist Zeb Hogan is hoping to save the giant catfish, the largest freshwater fish in the world, one fish at a time.

If fishers here catch the critically endangered species, which can grow up to 10 feet (3 meters) long and weigh 650 pounds (295 kilograms), they now must turn it over to Hogan, who heads the Mekong Fish Conservation Project.

Research by Richard Weindruch at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and others, for example, suggests that an extremely low-calorie diet, one right on the edge of starvation, pushes the life span of mice and other animals to an extreme.