Category: Research

Scientists right here in Wisconsin play a large role in helping predict exactly where Wilma will hit.

A group trying to open a primate cruelty exhibit near UW-Madison’s primate research labs filed a lawsuit this week demanding that it be allowed to buy property that it says was promised.

But Roger Charly, owner of Budget Bicycles, also promised to sell the property to UW-Madison, which has taken action to accept an option on the land, according to the lawsuit.

According to the lawsuit, filed in Dane County Circuit Court on Tuesday, former California middle school teacher Rick Bogle of the Primate Freedom Project and retired Los Angeles physician Richard McLellan said they signed a 180-day option to purchase the property at 26 N. Charter St. in May for $675,000 after a series of discussions with Charly.

(10/21/05 Wisconsin State Journal)

Ten years ago Minnesota attracted national attention when severely deformed leopard frogs with oddly shaped and missing limbs were discovered in a Twin Cities wetland.

MENASHA � An exchange between two women in a lecture hall Thursday captured the essence of the national debate over embryonic stem cell research.

“I value the existing patient more than anything else,” University of Wisconsin law professor R. Alta Charo, a world-renowned medical ethicist, told Lori Skrober, a mother of four from Hortonville. “You shake your head because you believe something else. That’s the debate we have to have.”

Madison, Wis. – Radio frequency identification technology is often touted as a way to improve supply chain management. But in the health care world, the technology is bringing other, perhaps more important benefits: safety and security.

A gift of nearly $3 million is being used to boost teacher training at the UW-Madison in a special, reading program.

But that program, Reading Recovery, has critics, who say it’s not worth the necessary investment.

South Korean researchers are proposing to develop new embryonic stem cell lines that would be offered to other researchers. A consortium led by Seoul National University’s Hwang Woo Suk would establish labs in Seoul, San Francisco and England to ââ?¬Å?cloneââ?¬Â embryos needed to generate stem cells with patients’ genetic characteristics, reports The New England Journal of Medicine.

Normally, the embryo is destroyed when the cells are retrieved, a result which prompts many proââ?¬â??life groups to oppose stem cell research.

Officials said backlash against the university has been minimal in the wake of a report ABC News aired Thursday night that said the nuclear reactor on the campus was not safe or sufficiently protected from terrorist attack.

The report will likely not disrupt the flow of research funding involving the reactor, said Jacques Gansler, vice president for research.

Here is the statement that UW-Madison officials should have issued last week after an ABC News undercover investigation of security at the university’s nuclear reactor:

“ABC’s investigation exposed a lapse in security at the nuclear reactor used for teaching and research on our campus. Two ABC undercover investigators, posing as visiting students, were permitted to step through a door to the reactor building and take photographs without undergoing security clearance.

Two teams of researchers have reported that they obtained embryonic stem cells from mice using new techniques that, if proved in human cells, might overcome the ethical objections that influenced President Bush’s decision to limit federal financing for research on the human cells. But other scientists say the new techniques present ethical questions of their own and may not resolve Congressional debate over the financing.

Scientists are pursuing two different ways to create embryonic stem cells without destroying an embryo. The techniques are in early stages of research and have been tested only in mice. But they ââ?¬Å?raise promising possibilitiesââ?¬Â and will open up a new dialogue in the national debate over stem cell research, says William Hurlbut, a professor at the Neuroscience Institute at Stanford University and member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.

To derive embryonic stem cells, scientists must destroy an embryo. But new research might change that.

The Madison City Council approved the continuation of a program that provides funding for graduate research in the UW-Madison Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Tuesday in return for information on the city’s water quality.

Oct. 12, 2005 ââ?¬â? – A four-month ABC News investigation found gaping security holes at many of the little-known nuclear research reactors operating on 25 college campuses across the country. Among the findings: unmanned guard booths, a guard who appeared to be asleep, unlocked building doors and, in a number of cases, guided tours that provided easy access to control rooms and reactor pools that hold radio

Ten students, working for ABC News, visited nuclear reactors on 25 college campuses and found many gaping security holes, prompting a federal investigation. Here’s what the team found at the University of Wisconsin.

UW-Madison representatives met the press Thursday to respond to allegations of a security breach at the nuclear reactor laboratory in the Engineering Research Building this summer by two interns posing as prospective students.

UW-Madison officials punched back at ABC News Thursday while seeking to assure the public that the school’s nuclear reactor is impervious to terrorists.
A report on ABC’s “Primetime” Thursday night purported to find “gaping security holes” at many college research reactors, including the one operating at UW-Madison.

The University of Wisconsin released a statement Thursday insisting its Nuclear Reactor Laboratory is operated and maintained in a safe and secure manner.

Madison, Wis. – Trying to find a vaccine for AIDS is tricky enough, but when your scientists are scattered in five different places on a sprawling university campus, it’s downright daunting.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison defended the security of its nuclear research reactor on Thursday, calling an ABC News report that found “gaping holes” at it and other university reactors sensational.

“Overblown and sensational.” That’s how one UW professor describes a recent report regarding security concerns at the school’s nuclear research reactor.

Nuclear reactors used for research and education on 25 college campuses have poor security, leaving them vulnerable to truck-bomb attacks by terrorists that could contaminate surrounding communities with radiation, ABC News reported on Thursday night. Officials at several of the universities and at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission disagreed and called security adequate.

A reactor has uranium rods, surrounded by water, encased in cement. When a reactor is turned on, the uranium rods heat up.

British soldiers seeking ways to identify friendly aircraft in World War II were given a newly developed radar transponder system called IFF – Identification Friend or Foe. It was a crude system, but it was a way to tap into technology to identify something at a distance. Fast forward 65 years, and you’ll find researchers working on today’s version of remote identification: RFID – radio frequency identification.

A four-month ABC News investigation found gaping security holes at many of the nation’s college nuclear reactors. There were unmanned guard booths, unlocked buildings, and again and again, easy access with no background checks and no metal detectors.

A four-month ABC News investigation to air tonight will report the discovery of “gaping security holes” at many of the nuclear research reactors on 25 college campuses across the country, including the one operating at UW-Madison.

Among other things, the report says that students working undercover for ABC were able to gain access to high-security areas with no background checks, while carrying large tote bags that were not inspected. Those alleged security breaches were documented at the University of Florida, UW-Madison, Purdue University and Ohio State University, according to the report. Different problems involving security were identified at Texas A&M University and MIT.

She probes black holes to fathom the early days of our universe.

If you can see a star with your naked eye, Amy Barger probably isn’t interested in it. What gets her going are the faraway objects invisible to anything but the most powerful instruments. I’m just really fascinated by what’s going on at the edge,” she says. The farther out, the better.”

A 34-year-old astronomer who works part of the year at the University of Hawaii-Manoa has been named as one of Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10” young researchers.

Amy Barger, who studies black holes and other phenomena with data from telescopes in space and on Mauna Kea, was named as one of “the most dynamic, promising young researchers at institutions around North America.”

Barger divides her time now between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UH-Manoa, where she works from January through the summer.

MADISON, Wis. � Thomas Sutula wants to discover drugs that would treat epilepsy and a host of other brain diseases, except the University of Wisconsin-Madison neurologist says an arcane state law has stood in his way.

Sutula, chairman of UW’s neurology department, is a founder of NeuroGenomeX, which hopes to develop research pioneered at UW. But a state law barring public employees who start private companies from signing contracts worth more than $15,000 with the university has slowed the company’s development, he said.