Category: Research

The London terror attacks rekindled discussion about domestic homeland security. A year-old federal project at the University of Southern California and University of Wisconsin Madison is helping the United States prioritize possible terror targets and develop effective risk-reduction and resource-allocation strategies.

MADISON � The University of Wisconsin-Madison continues to lead state institutions in research spending, according to figures released by the National Science Foundation.

Research spending – the catalyst for creating high-paying knowledge economy jobs – is rising in the state, but the University of Wisconsin continues to be the dominant research school, with 82 cents of every research dollar in the state spent on the Madison campus.

As Hurricane Rita approaches the Texas-Louisiana border, forecasters are relying heavily on research done in Madison.

The United States spends nearly $95 billion a year on medical research, twice what was spent a decade ago, a study finds. Whether the money is being well spent needs much better scrutiny, researchers say.

The University of Wisconsin ranks No. 1 in research, according to the Washington Monthly Magazineââ?¬â?¢s first annual college guide, yet falls short in the ââ?¬Ë?social mobilityââ?¬â?¢ category of the review.

Washington Monthly magazine has ranked the University of Wisconsin-Madison best in the country for research and 12th overall nationwide. The magazine computed its research score by looking at each university’s research spending as well as the number of doctorates awarded in the sciences and engineering.

Other factors in the overall score were “social mobility” (commitment to admitting and graduating lower-income students) and “community service” (measured by numbers of students in ROTC, the Peace Corps and use of work-study grants for community service projects).

See www.washingtonmonthly.com for the full report.

Mars and Venus might be closer together than psychologists thought. Popular culture represents men and women as being so different as to hail from separate planets, but a new analysis of research challenges that view. There are more ways in which men and women are similar than they are different, says a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who cautions that believing otherwise could lead to unnecessary conflicts at school, work and home.

Madison, Wis. – Undeterred by a small group of anti-abortion protestors, a crowd of more than 450 people packed the Madison Overture Center Monday night to hear a speech by University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor James Thomson, who used the forum to outline UW’s stem cell research efforts.

Craig Atwood thinks he knows why most of us will get old and die. And it’s all about sex. The maverick University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher is convinced that’s the secret of why cancer cells might spread through our organs, why our hearts someday might fail and why our brains might be short-circuited by Alzheimer’s disease.

Shyira, Rwanda – At the age of 15, Good News weighed 50 pounds. Just four months ago, his bones were held together only by the thin envelope of his bruised and fungus-infected brown skin.

He was dying of a disease that many Rwandans consider their new genocide: AIDS.

Muramba, Rwanda – As a steady flow of women and children carrying empty straw satchels and jerrycans made their way down the mountain road to the market below, a smaller, more determined stream worked its way up against the current. Carrying hoes, picks, shovels and machetes, these women – many with infants swaddled to their backs – were headed toward a potato field where Peter Bosscher, a civil engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was waiting.

IN the battle of the sexes it may be time for a truce. A study has found that the differences between men and women have been vastly overestimated.

As people from around the country come together to support Hurricane Katrina victims, researchers at the University of Wisconsin�s little-known Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies are already busy tracking the next threatening tropical storms, just as they have for decades.

UW-Madison is the top research university in the United States, according to the September issue of Washington Monthly.

The campus was 12th overall among national universities in the magazineââ?¬â?¢s annual college guide. But UW-Madison’s research ranking topped the likes of MIT, Stanford and UCLA, Michigan.

Have you ever heard of “Fast Plants”? Probably not.

Neither had I until recently. How I missed hearing about this most fascinating subject I’ll never know. However, I do know that many teachers and schoolchildren have learned basic biological principles from studying plants that take only 40 days to grow from seed to maturity, i.e. “Fast Plants.”

My guess is that (Paul) Williams is one of the true innovators of the agricultural world. He searches for fast growing plants to aid disease research in vegetable crops, and then works it into both advanced research and education of young people.

Just one or two drinks a day during pregnancy can cause not only developmental defects in babies but also addiction, sensory disorders and other problems when exposed children become adults, suggests a new study in monkeys by UW- Madison researchers.

The findings provide even more reason for pregnant women or women who may become pregnant not to consume alcohol, the researchers say. That warning carries special significance in Wisconsin, where the binge drinking rate among women is nearly twice the national average.

In the third presentation in a series of talks on primate research Tuesday, members of the Alliance for Animals Primate Freedom Project and the Madison Coalition for Animal Rights asserted that UW-Madison primate research is unnecessary.

Examining ancient trees, probing black holes and observing cannibalistic spiders are all part of the job for young researchers honored in Popular Science’s fourth annual “Brilliant 10” feature.

Amy Barger used data from multiple telescopes to study black holes, becoming a pioneer in studies of light wavelength. A cosmologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she is now studying how the activity of black holes relates to star formation and possible origins of the universe.

Ellen Breeden is dedicating the next year of her life to making sure that Schools of Hope works in Sun Prairie. As a Volunteers in Service to America volunteer coordinator, she’ll make a modest stipend – 30 percent above the federal poverty level – and will split her time between C.H. Bird and a Madison school.

A native of Oakland, Calif., and a May graduate of UW- Madison with a degree in psychology and women’s studies, she’ll recruit volunteers and match them with teachers.

Paper, that most essential of office staples, also seems the most timeless — an implement impervious to the high-tech changes that bring copy machines and laser printers through the front door and hustle typewriters out the back.

But local USDA researchers now want to change office paper. By revising the federal government’s standards for buying paper, scientists at the USDA’s Forest Products Laboratory in Madison think they can save taxpayers millions of dollars and even help the environment.

MILWAUKEE – (KRT) – Maytee Aspuro’s mother was a Milwaukee high school teacher who, at age 59, began showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

Madison, Wis. – When you don’t use or refrigerate your dairy products, they spoil beyond use – and now it looks like stem cells may have the same problem. Except instead of food poisoning, this problem could lead to cancer.

A new study in the magazine Nature Genetics claims that human embryonic stem cells, one of the few cell types that self-renew, show deviations in their genetic structure when left to replicate. Published in an advance online issue Sunday, the article highlights risk to the use of embryonic stem cells in human treatment, and calls the existing supply lines into question.

Quoted: Gabriela Cezar, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Animal Sciences.

One of the central tenets of stem cell biology has been shaken.

An international team of researchers has discovered that human embryonic stem cells do not indefinitely self-renew without modification. Instead, they appear to accumulate changes in their genetic material over time.

An animal rights activist accused of freeing thousands of mink around the Midwest pleaded guilty Friday and faces two years in prison.
Peter Daniel Young, 28, admitted his role in the raids of fur farms. He was convicted of two counts of animal enterprise terrorism as part of a plea deal with prosecutors.

For astronomers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and around the world, the stars just got a lot brighter. The first stunning images from the world’s largest optical telescope, which UW scientists played a major role in building were released Thursday.

Madison, Wis. – The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has reached an out-of-court settlement with the information technology firm IBM over charges of patent infringement, it reported on Tuesday.

Biological pollution problems in Lake Mendota and Monona can be difficult to avoid with a bustling city nearby, but one potential health hazard to lake-goers, blue-green algae, has not been a significant problem this summer.

As people around the world watched Hurricane Katrina unfold, many turned to computer-driven storm images designed by University of Wisconsin-Madison meteorologists.

Tim Olander, a researcher who studies hurricanes, opened CNN.com on his computer. There, on its front page, was an infrared box showing the storm in bright red, white, green and blue.

“That little image there, that’s ours,” Olander said.

Scientists at the University of Minnesota are ready to take the next step in the controversial field of embryonic stem cell research, studying new cell lines through the destruction of human embryos.