Category: Research

Most people require about 8 hours of sleep a night, but some lucky oddballs function well on 4 hours or even less. A new study in fruit flies provides evidence that genetics plays a strong role in determining who can get by with little rest. A single mutation in a gene that’s also found in people can reduce the insects’ sleep needs by about two-thirds.

Common ground for ethical research on human embryonic stem cells may have been laid by the National Academy of Sciences in the well-received guidelines it proposed last week. But if research on human embryonic stem cells ever gets going, people will be hearing a lot more about chimeras, creatures composed of more than one kind of cell. The world of chimeras holds weirdnesses that may require some getting used to.

Retired professor Ed Schantz, the grandfather of what are now known as Botox treatments and an expert in growing the world’s deadliest poisons, has died at age 96.

Schantz died Thursday, said Joe Donovan, a spokesman for Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction Elizabeth Burmaster, one of Schantz’s four daughters.

MADISON � Robin Rider�s search for the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker led not through the swamps of Arkansas but among the rare natural history books at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The result? Several startling images of the bird whose rediscovery in Arkansas has electrified the birding world because it was believed to have gone extinct decades ago.

The researchers who rediscovered the ivory-billed woodpecker slogged through a swamp in Arkansas to find the legendary bird, last glimpsed deep in a Louisiana bottomland forest in 1944.

Thursday morning, Robin Rider stalked the woodpecker on the UW-Madison campus and, to her delight, found several. And she didn’t even get her feet wet.

A group of local residents Thursday presented state legislators with a report calling for caution in the development of nanotechnology.

The emerging field of nanotechnology is based on the manipulation of materials that can be as small as atoms, and is expected to have a profound impact on the nation’s economy in the years to come.

The report, which was sponsored by UW-Madison with help from the Center for Democratic Action in McFarland, sought to give ordinary citizens a chance to consider the promises and perils of technologies that will have a major effect on their lives.

By their very nature, science and technology are always in the fast lane while ethics usually runs a distant third. But that hardly means ethical considerations should be given short shrift. Without some value system in place, there is a very real danger that science can quite literally run amok, reined in only by practical and, worse, mercenary considerations.

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is expected to announce today that it is making a $1 million seed grant for a biomedical research institute that will bring together 65 researchers from the university and the Medical College of Wisconsin.

The National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine this week called for the creation of a new layer of oversight at institutions where research on human embryonic stem (ES) cells is conducted.

Madison, Wis. � The University of Wisconsin-Madison is introducing two new stem-cell programs to lay the groundwork for future research and keep the university in a leading position.

While most of us can’t seem to function with less than seven hours of sleep, some people seem just fine with three or four. The difference, say researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is genetic.

Scientists who research embryonic stem cells may face increased regulations under new guidelines announced Tuesday by the National Academy of Sciences.

Citing a lack of leadership by the federal government, the National Academy of Sciences proposed ethical guidelines yesterday for research with human embryonic stem cells.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is establishing two new stem cell programs – a regenerative medicine program, which will draw on faculty from the Medical School and the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, and an interdisciplinary postdoctoral training program funded by a $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

A National Academy of Sciences panel Tuesday called for national oversight of human embryonic stem cell research.

Concerned about inadequate regulation of privately funded human embryonic stem cell research, a panel at the National Academies issued guidelines Tuesday for American scientists, universities and private institutions. “We know this research is going to occur,” said Norm Fost, a medical ethicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a member of the academies’ advisory panel, so, “how do we make sure it gets done ethically?”

Mark Twain defined work as that which a person is obliged to do, and play as that which a person is not obliged to do. But two UW-Madison researchers suggest that with job-specific video games, work and play don’t have to be at odds.

Jim Gee, a professor of education, and Kurt Squire, an assistant professor of education, argue that video games can teach players an array of important skills, such as how to think strategically, make quick decisions, cooperate and learn from their mistakes – all skills that employers demand.

Like Rudyard Kipling, only in a lab coat, Sean Carroll has for years been telling us how creatures such as butterflies get their spots.

Carroll, a molecular biologist with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute on the UW-Madison campus, has published a steady stream of journal articles detailing the invisible workings of genes that power the adaptation and evolution of all animals — the genes, for example, that help a butterfly camouflage itself from predators with different colors or colorful eyespots.

What’s an eager Wisconsin gardener to do in late April when it’s too cold to plant tomatoes?

Consult the experts Saturday at the first Family Horticulture Day at UW-Madison’s West Madison Agricultural Research Station.

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee decisively advanced its aspirations to become a nationally recognized research school with the announcement Thursday that it hired a technology entrepreneur with a broad international background for a newly created vice chancellor post. The school hired Abbas Ourmazd, an Iranian-born U.S. citizen who worked for Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs in the U.S. before taking on a leadership position with the German national technology labs, as UWM’s first-ever vice chancellor for research.

Despite the medical promised of human embryonic stem cells, the U.S. is falling behind other countries in such research because of government restrictions on the use of the controversial cells, according to speakers Thiursday at the fourth annual International Bioethics Forum.

WASHINGTON – Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a bipartisan group of colleagues renewed efforts Thursday to expand embryonic stem cell research, introducing legislation that would allow federal support for such research to be used in treating disease.

MADISON, Wis. — A University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher said he would ask federal regulators Friday to approve the first clinical trial injecting special stem cells into the spinal cords of people with the degenerative nerve ailment called Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Madison, Wis. ââ?¬â? Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have sucessfully injected stem cells into rats’ spines in a way that could lead to treatments for degenerative diseases ââ?¬â?? but they did not use the controversial embryonic stem cells.

(MADISON) University of Wisconsin researchers have created a new kind of stem cell that may eventually be used as a drug delivery device to treat Lou Gehrig�s Diseas. (Third item.)

Madison: UW stem cell researchers have announced a major breakthrough in the treatment of ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. ALS causes motor neurons to die and slowly paralyzes its victims.

SAN DIEGO — Several scientists have used embryonic or fetal stem cells to help rodents with spinal cord injuries walk again. The researchers travel the country showing videos of rats dragging their hind legs, followed by clips of them miraculously hopping around following stem-cell injections