Category: Research

A number of research universities and related organizations are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to buck the wishes of the pharmaceutical industry and the federal government in a widely watched patent case to be heard by the court on April 20.

The institutions, which include the University of California system, the foundation that manages patents for the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the American Council on Education, say that if the court rules for the drug industry, many of the patents that universities now hold could lose value or become worthless.

Quoted: Andy Cohn, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation,

Madison, Wis. � University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering students have accepted a challenge: the Future Energy Challenge. A team of 30 engineering students and three professors are developing vehicles and engines that operate on clean and renewable energy, taking their inventions to competitions around the country.

Long ago, Charles Darwin noted similarities between the expressions of primates and humans. Now, some scientists go further, contending that animals laugh, and that those play sounds might be the evolutionary basis for laughter in humans.

Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor Charles Snowden.

A new study paints a grim picture of today’s environment, arguing that the world is living far beyond its means. But as part of the study, a University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist and other experts laid out four scenarios that offer hope that humans can turn things around.

Hidden from public view and even further from public awareness, the UW-Madison is engaged in often-lethal research involving hundreds of dogs each year. Some experiments entail surgery, others the introduction of pathogens. One even involves bleeding dogs to death.

According to Timothy Mulcahy, the UWââ?¬â?¢s associate vice chancellor for research policy, the UW has used an average of about 650 dogs a year over the last three years ââ?¬Å?in research and teaching activities.ââ?¬Â In its annual report to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the year between Oct. 1, 2003 and Sept. 30, 2004, the UW reported using 421 dogs as research subjects. As of last week, relates Mulcahy, there were ââ?¬Å?113 dogs housed in UW facilities.ââ?¬Â

Even one of the committee members was initially locked out. The older man, a citizen appointee to the UW-Madison Graduate School’s Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), waited outside the National Primate Research Center on campus for several minutes last week before an employee opened the building’s locked entrance and let him in, along with a small group of animal-welfare advocates.

BOSTON, March 31 – Legislation authorizing embryonic stem cell research passed in the Massachusetts House of Representatives on Thursday by a margin large enough to override an expected veto by Gov. Mitt Romney.

Madison, Wis. � Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have created an interactive multimedia tool for learning languages, the Multimedia LessonBuilder. The computer program tests foreign language students on several levels, helping them learn with audio and visual components.

Cal DeWitt, a longtime UW-Madison environmental studies professor and founder of the Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies in northern Michigan, will be among six people to receive special achievement awards Thursday from the National Wildlife Federation.

To protest a study that would subject pigs to electric shocks, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor on Tuesday withdrew from a project she planned with the man leading the Taser research.

Terry Young, a professor in the department of population health sciences, told university administrators she would no longer participate in a study with John Webster, a professor emeritus of biomedical engineering.

March 30, 2005 ââ?¬â?Ã? So a guy’s sitting at a bar and a sweet young thing starts flirting. He’s married, and he knows he should watch his step, but even though the conscience says no, the flesh is more than willing.

MADISON, Wis. — To protest a study that would subject pigs to electric shocks, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor on Tuesday withdrew from a project she planned with the man leading the Taser research.

Terry Young, a professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences, told university administrators she would not participate in a study with John Webster, a professor emeritus of biomedical engineering.

(MADISON) A team of scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found a new way use bacteria to build tiny electronic circuits. Eventually, the discovery could lead to the creation of micro sensing devices that could warn of the presence of dangerous biological agents such as anthrax. (Third item)

To protest a study that would subject pigs to electric shocks, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor withdrew Tuesday from a project she planned with the man leading the Taser research. Terry Young told university administrators she would no longer participate in a study with John Webster, a professor emeritus of biomedical engineering. (Third item)

Madison, Wis. � While Easter has come and gone, the University of Wisconsin-Madison still has rabbits around�rabbits that can solve complex equations.

Harmless Fluffy Bunnies, a team of three computer programming students at UW-Madison, will be traveling to Shanghai, China, from April 3 to 7 to compete in the world finals of the Association for Computing Machinery’s International Collegiate Programming Contest. The team entered the finals by taking first place in the North Central regional contest last November.

Springing out of a promising research breakthrough on Alzheimer’s disease, UW-Madison researcher Jeff Johnson has co-founded Mithridion Inc. in hopes of commercializing an Alzheimer’s-inhibiting drug.

Eight years after Dolly the cloned Scottish sheep, the world now has Little Nicky, the first cloned pet cat – the progeny of a rather flippantly named Texas company, Genetic Savings & Clone Inc., which is moving to a Madison-area industrial park. But the nagging moral, ethical, legal and long-term scientific questions raised by cloning remain largely unanswered.

MADISON, Wis. – A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison plans to study whether stun guns alone can kill pigs ââ?¬â? or whether other medical factors must be at play ââ?¬â? as part of an effort to understand why 70 people have died in North America since 2001 after being shocked by Tasers.

The House leadership has agreed to allow a floor vote on a bill that would loosen the restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research imposed by President Bush in 2001, according to members of Congress and others privy to the arrangement.

Although California voters last November approved a proposition that promises to push the state to the forefront of embryonic stem (ES) cell research, legislation introduced in the state senate last week may significantly constrain the way that the new California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) conducts business.

IT’S NOT true that everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. Christopher Burt did something. He wrote a book about it. Not just any weather, either. Wild weather.

….Burt was living in a house on Lake Monona – raised in New Jersey, he came here to study meteorology at UW-Madison – when the Barneveld tornado hit in June 1984.

A number puzzle originating in the work of self-taught maths genius Srinivasa Ramanujan nearly a century ago has been solved. The solution may one day lead to advances in particle physics and computer security.