Category: Research

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 – Nearly half the states are doing a poor job of setting high academic standards for science in public schools, according to a new report that examined science in anticipation of 2007, when states will be required to administer tests in the subject under President Bush’s signature education law.

New questions have arisen over a human stem cell experiment that was hailed as a tremendous advance when it was announced in May.

Hwang Woo Suk, the South Korean researcher whose laboratory performed the experiment, told the journal Science yesterday that he was correcting some of the photographs that appeared as an online supplement to an article reporting a highly efficient recipe for producing human embryos through cloning, and then extracting their stem cells.

MADISON, Wis. – The Bush administration’s plan for a bank of federally approved stem cells unveiled here two months ago is being met with apathy, confusion and derision.

By military standards, $300 million a year is small change. This amount, the U.S. military budget for nanotechnology research, pales in comparison to its total budget for war or peacekeeping�both of which are possible applications for the minute technology.

Early childhood neglect has been associated with a host of behavioral maladies: Emotional and social abnormalities that researchers have investigated and observed since Harry Harlow first conducted his primate isolation experiments at the University of Wisconsin.

The Engineering Centers Building on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus was the site of an early morning flood today, the university reported.

…an estimated 30,000 gallons of water cascaded down the building from the top floor at about 5 a.m.

(12/2/05 Capital Times print edition)

While Wisconsin�s position in stem-cell research is strong, there are pitfalls and competitors to reckon with if the state wishes to hold its leading position, according to UW-Madison stem cell researcher Prof. Gabriela Cezar.

Cezar, who recently joined UW to assist with its stem-cell work, spoke this week at a luncheon sponsored by the Wisconsin Innovation Network, a division of the Wisconsin Technology Council, about the current state of stem-cell technology and where the field can go in Wisconsin and worldwide.

(MADISON) Kidney disease is sharply increasing in Wisconsin. One reason may be the increasing lifespan of residents. It was the focus of a study done by the Population Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A top UW-Madison researcher who has worked for the Pfizer drug company said Tuesday that firms using stem cells to test and create new drugs could generate more than $3.6 billion in revenues by 2020.

And Wisconsin could be home to new companies doing doing that work, thanks to a wealth of scientific experts here, said Dr. Gabriela Cezar, who spoke at a Wisconsin Innovation Network luncheon.

University of Wisconsin Chancellor John Wiley spent most of November in South Africa helping launch one of the world�s biggest telescopes into operation.

In a move that could light up the future of agriculture, UW-Madison scientists have mapped the three-dimensional structure of a protein in plants that detects light.

Now that the structure of the protein, called phytochrome, has been detailed, researchers might be able to manipulate it to make crops more or less sensitive to light or make plants flower at different times of the year.

Embryonic stem cell researchers are worried about the future of international cooperation in their field after a prominent scientist’s surprise resignation from a fledgling stem-cell-sharing effort.

(MONTREAL, QUEBEC) A major international meeting on climate change begins today in Montreal. A Wisconsin professor will be there, highlighting a recent report on the damage global warming may cause. (6th item.)

Children adopted from abroad often have difficulties adjusting to their new families and to life in this country, exhibiting poor social skills, problems bonding with new family members and reticence in dealing with strangers.

Those difficulties are generally traced back to emotional deprivation in large orphanages, where infants often outnumber staff by 40 to 1, and caregivers do little more than feed and change the infants.

One of the world’s most prominent stem-cell scientists resigned last week from his position as director of a major new international research consortium, acknowledging that his laboratory had used ethically questionable means of acquiring human egg cells.

A University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist has figured out what appears to be an economical way to solve the scarcity of milk in developing tropical countries. But it is more complicated than shipping a truckload of dairy cows south.

The lack of emotional care given to infants in some Romanian and Russian orphanages has provided researchers an opportunity to study the hormonal basis of the mother-child bond.

Researchers led by Seth D. Pollak of the University of Wisconsin have found that these children, even three and a half years after adoption into Wisconsin families, produce two critical hormones in a different pattern from children with traditional upbringings.

Two UW-Madison computer science professors, Paul Barford and Lawrence Landweber, have been named to the National LambdaRail�s Networking Researching Council (NNRC), which will make key policy decisions regarding the high-speed fiber optic network�s research goals.

Scientists have found startling differences in a hormone linked to social bonding in children who spent their first years in foreign orphanages. These changes remain two years after they have gone from an environment of neglect to one of love and attention.

Children who were seriously neglected in infancy can carry a physiological burden for years, even after moving to a loving environment. A study of their hormonal responses shows that their brains are less equipped to trust and form social bonds than other children.

“We don’t want to reach the conclusion that this difference is permanent,” says Seth Pollak, a developmental psychopathologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the study. But he adds that the take-home message is that “children really need to be in families”.

STANFORD, California (AP) — Two government biologists heavily recruited by Stanford University have decided to work in Singapore instead, saying they will face fewer restrictions on stem cell research overseas.

Demonstrators discovered this week that targeting researchers at their homes has potential pitfalls.
A group protested for 45 minutes Tuesday night outside what they thought was the home of UW Medical School assistant professor Michele Basso.

Add one more item to the list of things that can be affected by climate change and global warming: human health.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the World Health Organization have compiled a series of studies showing that people have been adversely affected by regional and global climate change. The WHO suspects 150,000 people per year, for the past 30 years, have died as a result of a gradually warming planet. The WHO says that annually, 5 million cases of illness can be attributed to it, too.

Health and climate scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who conducted one of the most comprehensive efforts yet to measure the impact of global warming on health, said the WHO data also show that rising temperatures disproportionately affect poor countries that have done little to create the problem. They reached their conclusions after entering data on climate-sensitive diseases into mapping software.

LONDON (Reuters) – Global warming poses an enormous ethical challenge because countries that produce the least amount of greenhouse gases will suffer the most from climate change, scientists said on Wednesday.

Whether it is an increase in poor health from diseases such as malaria or shrinking water supplies, nations in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and South America are vulnerable to the consequences of changes in global temperatures.